Trout, Steven, 1963-
Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, ©2010.
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Notes:

• Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Introduction : memory, history, and America’s First World War — Custodians of memory : the American legion and interwar culture — Soldiers well-known and unknown : monuments to the American doughboy, 1920-1941 — Painters of memory : Harvey Dunn, Horace Pippin, and John Steuart Curry — Memory’s end? : Quentin Roosevelt, World War II, and America’s last doughboy.
• 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 painte

Subjects:

• World War, 1914-1918 — Social aspects — United States.
• Collective memory — United States.
• Memory — Social aspects — United States.
• World War, 1914-1918 — Influence.

Requested by Wittenbreer, B