Collages of Redefinition and Resistance: Scrapbooks, Memorial, and American Society during World War I
Date
2016
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Producer
Director
Performer
Choreographer
Costume Designer
Music
Videographer
Lighting Designer
Set Designer
Crew Member
Funder
Rehearsal Director
Concert Coordinator
Advisor
Moderator
Panelist
Alternative Title
Department
Haverford College. Department of History
Type
Thesis
Original Format
Running Time
File Format
Place of Publication
Date Span
Copyright Date
Award
Language
eng
Note
Table of Contents
Terms of Use
Rights Holder
Access Restrictions
Tri-College users only until 2021-01-01, afterwards Open Access.
Terms of Use
Tripod URL
Identifier
Abstract
The entry of the United States into World War I signaled a new internationalism for the American state. While the idealism of the Wilsonian era was not uniform throughout American society, the vision for which he advocated was influential, especially because of Wilson’s direct appeals to the American public. Meanwhile, the fighting of the war in faraway Europe was destroying a generation of men. Many Americans, including influential political and military figures, thought that the war would be an opportunity for heroic soldiers to fight a noble, glorious crusade, a perception that had long since given way to war-weariness and cynicism in Europe, but the American Expeditionary Force soon confronted the harsh realities of modern war on the western front. This thesis is concerned with the memorialization of the war in the United States within the scope of both American perceptions of the war and its brutal physicality on the front. It analyzes a series of World War I scrapbooks created by Americans with different relationships to the war: soldier, Red Cross worker, widow, town archivist. Each of these scrapbooks functioned as personal war memorials that commemorated certain aspects of the war, each supporting, challenging, and modifying social understandings of what it meant to be an American during World War I. This thesis argues that these scrapbooks constituted an act of resistance against the bodily anonymity the war wrought and represented a way in which Americans made sense of their place in both the United States and the world as the United States changed during the World War I period.