| Abstract | ""As the centennial of the First World War approaches, Steven Trout provides an invaluable and timely reassessment of that conflict's place in America's national memory. His arguments are judicious, compelling, and elegantly presented."--Edward G. Lengel Author of to Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918" ""This impressive book will change forever the way we think about World War I and its place in American memory. It shows how deeply contested and controversial American understandings about this war have been since its conclusion. [On the Battlefield of Memory] should be required reading for anyone interested in the role of this critical event in American history."--Michael S. Neiberg Author of Fighting the Great War: A Global History and The Second Battle of the Marne" ""A superb book that should be on the bookshelf of anyone seeking to understand the complex political, military, and cultural legacy of World War I on American society. Trout's work ably demonstrates the malleability of memory even when cast in stone or set in print. On the Battlefield of Memory is especially attentive to understanding the mix of nostalgia, comradeship, and political activism that marked the American Legion during the interwar years. World War I divided American society, and Trout is especially careful to delineate the stark divisions in how black and white Americans remembered World War I."--G. Kurt Piehler Author of Remembering War the American Way" "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, film-makers, and painters." "Trout studies a wide range of cultural products for their implications concerning the legacy of the war: John Dos Passos's novels Three Soldiers and 1919, Willa Cather's One of Ours, William March's Company K, and Laurence Stallings's Plumes; paintings by Harvey Dunn, Horace Pippin, and John Steuart Curry; portrayals of the war in the American Legion Weekly and the American Legion Monthly; war memorials and public monuments like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; and commemorative products such as the twelve-inch tall Spirit of the American Doughboy statue." "Trout argues that American memory of World War I was not only confused and contradictory during the '20s and '30s, but confused and contradictory in ways that accommodated affirmative interpretations of modern warfare and military service. Somewhat in the face of conventional wisdom, Trout shows that World War I did not destroy the glamour of war for all, or even most, Americans and in fact enhanced it for many."--BOOK JACKET.
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