Marian Elizabeth Strobel has reviewed The War at Home: Perspectives on the Arkansas Experience during World War I, edited by Mark Christ, in the Journal of Southern History.
“While many retrospectives highlight the diplomatic and military aspects of the ‘War to End All Wars,’ this one wisely focuses on the home front, in a state that was 80 percent rural in 1918. The War at Home is inclusive in its content, paying special attention not only to military enlistments and industrial mobilization but also to women, common laborers, and African Americans during a time of rapid social, economic, and racial transformation. The authors, all of whom are prominent historians of Arkansas’s past, present a cohesive and compelling story that links the World War I experience to the present.”
The War at Home brings together some of the state’s leading historians to examine the connections between Arkansas and World War I. These essays explore how historical entities and important events such as Camp Pike, the Little Rock Picric Acid Plant, and the Elaine Race Massacre were related to the conflict as they investigate the issues of gender, race, and public health. This collection sheds new light on the ways that Arkansas participated in the war as well as the ways the war affected Arkansas then and still does today.
Contents:
Shawn Fisher – Arkansas and the Great War: Southern Soldiers Fight for a National Victory
Elizabeth Griffin Hill – Arkansas’s Women and the Great War
Carl G. Drexler – Gearing Up Over Here for “Over There”: Manufacturing in Arkansas during World War I
Cherisse Jones-Branch – “Fighting, Protesting, and Organizing”: African Americans in World War I Arkansas
Raymond D. Screws – “To Carry Forward the Training Program”: Camp Pike in the Great War and the Legacy of the Post
Brian K. Mitchell – Soldiers and Veterans at the Elaine Race Massacre
Thomas A. DeBlack – Epidemic!: The Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918 and Its Legacy for Arkansas
Jeannie M. Whayne – World War I and Woman’s Suffrage in Arkansas
Roger Pauly – Paris to Pearl in Print: Arkansas’s Experience of the March from the Armistice to the Second World War through the Newspaper Media