cover image America and the Great War: A Library of Congress Illustrated History

America and the Great War: A Library of Congress Illustrated History

Margaret E. Wagner. Bloomsbury, $45 (384p) ISBN 978-1-62040-982-4

Wagner (The Library of Congress Illustrated Timeline of the Civil War), a senior editor and writer at the Library of Congress, uses the library’s visual and documentary resources to good effect in a work that combines an entertaining coffee-table format with an intellectually rewarding text. America’s participation in WWI remains underreported, and most of what’s been written on the topic is aimed at specialists. Wagner effectively analyzes and explains how America absentmindedly arrived upon the world’s center stage. In 1914, the U.S. was adapting, “for the most part enthusiastically,” to an unprecedented spectrum of social, economic, and political change. Europe’s squabbles seemed impossibly remote. Wagner outlines the symbiotic entwining of America’s domestic transformations, the processes that led millions of Americans to become enthusiastic war hawks, and President Woodrow Wilson’s use of progressive principles and executive power to lay the foundation for an administrative democracy. The linking of state authority with popular support would shape the U.S. for a century. Meanwhile, there was a war to be won, and America’s contribution was decisive, though Wilson provided less operational support during wartime than influence in the war’s aftermath. Wagner thoughtfully lays out Americans’ struggles to coherently process “nineteen months of patriotic endeavors and furious upheaval”—a disconnect that ultimately frustrated Wilson’s attempt to cast himself as “an arbiter of peace.” Illus. (June)