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On the Battlefield of Memory : The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919-1941

By: Trout, Steven.
Material type: materialTypeLabelBookSeries: eBooks on Demand.Publisher: Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, 2010Description: 1 online resource (342 p.).ISBN: 9780817383497.Genre/Form: Electronic books.Additional physical formats: Print version:: On the Battlefield of Memory : The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941DDC classification: 940.3/1 | 940.31 Online resources: Click here to view this ebook.
Contents:
Contents; List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Prologue: ""Guide-Book Ike""; Introduction: Memory, History, and America's First World War; 1. Custodians of Memory: The American Legion and Interwar Culture; 2. Soldiers Well-Known and Unknown: Monuments to the American Doughboy, 1920-1941; 3. Painters of Memory: Harvey Dunn, Horace Pippin, and John Steuart Curry; 4. Memory's End?: Quentin Roosevelt, World War II, and America's Last Doughboy; Notes; Bibliography; Index
Summary: This work is a detailed study of how Americans in the 1920s and 1930s interpreted and remembered the First World War. Steven Trout asserts that from the beginning American memory of the war was fractured and unsettled, more a matter of competing sets of collective memories-each set with its own spokespeople- than a unified body of myth. The members of the American Legion remembered the war as a time of assimilation and national harmony. However, African Americans and radicalized whites recalled a very different war. And so did many of the nation's writers, filmmakers, and painters. Trout
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Item type Current location Call number URL Status Date due Barcode
Electronic Book UT Tyler Online
Online 		D524.7.U6 T768 2010 (Browse shelf) http://uttyler.eblib.com/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=835645 Available EBL835645

Contents; List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Prologue: ""Guide-Book Ike""; Introduction: Memory, History, and America's First World War; 1. Custodians of Memory: The American Legion and Interwar Culture; 2. Soldiers Well-Known and Unknown: Monuments to the American Doughboy, 1920-1941; 3. Painters of Memory: Harvey Dunn, Horace Pippin, and John Steuart Curry; 4. Memory's End?: Quentin Roosevelt, World War II, and America's Last Doughboy; Notes; Bibliography; Index

This work is a detailed study of how Americans in the 1920s and 1930s interpreted and remembered the First World War. Steven Trout asserts that from the beginning American memory of the war was fractured and unsettled, more a matter of competing sets of collective memories-each set with its own spokespeople- than a unified body of myth. The members of the American Legion remembered the war as a time of assimilation and national harmony. However, African Americans and radicalized whites recalled a very different war. And so did many of the nation's writers, filmmakers, and painters. Trout

Description based upon print version of record.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

According to Trout (English, Fort Hays State Univ.), WW I, "the forgotten war," occupied a disordered position in US national memory in the decades after the war ended. Public remembrance ranged broadly: one interpretation was that the US had intervened nobly and heroically in a foreign war, performing splendidly and proving itself as a world power; another was that the experience was sordid, hellish, demoralizing, and tragic. The author argues that variations on these themes were as numerous as the "constituencies"--an assessment he bases on meticulous analysis of art, literature, periodicals, and war memorials. For example, individual works of commemoration--such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and E. M. Viquesney's sculpture Spirit of the American Doughboy--often portray more than one point of view, placing heroism in close juxtaposition with brutality. The deaths and burial sagas of Private First Class William L. Davis of Kansas and Quentin Roosevelt, son of Theodore Roosevelt, demonstrate the perplexing responsibilities of the nation to the thousands who had fallen in combat. Trout concludes that the "forgotten" war is part of the mythology of a narrative that was never able to achieve consistency. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers. E. J. Jenkins Arkansas Tech University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

<br> Steven Trout is a professor of English andcChair of the English Department at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. He is author/editor of several books, including Memorial Fictions:Willa Cather and the First World War and American Prose Writers of World War I: A Documentary Volume .

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