Recommended Reading

For background to American policy in these years, see Michael Pearlman, To Make Democracy Safe for America (1984) and Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, 1913–1923 (1984).

On Taft and Wilson, see Ralph E. Minger, William Howard Taft and United States Foreign Policy (1975); Frederick S. Calhoun, Power and Principle: Armed Intervention in Wilsonian Foreign Policy (1986); Lloyd C. Gardner, Wilson and Revolutions, 1913–1921 (1976); Robert David Johnson, The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations (1995); and Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (1992).

Historians have long debated the reasons for America’s entry into the war; see, for example, Patrick Devlin, Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality (1974); John W. Coogan, The End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain, and Maritime Rights, 1899–1915 (1981); and Jeffrey J. Safford, Wilsonian Maritime Diplomacy (1978).

The war at home is followed in Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the Welfare State (1991); Valerie Jean Conner, The National War Labor Board (1983); Neil A. Wynn, From Progressivism to Prosperity: World War I and American Society (1986); John Whiteclay Chambers II, To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (1987); and Stephen Vaughn, Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information (1980). James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1989), and Carole Marks, Farewell—We’re Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration (1989), trace the movement of African Americans to the North. Susan Zeiger, In Uncle Sam’s Service: Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Force, 1917–1919 (1999) is an interesting recent study.

The Treaty of Versailles and the struggle for ratification are covered in Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (1987); Herbert F. Margulies, The Mild Reservationists and the League of Nations Controversy in the Senate (1989); and Arthur Walworth, Wilson and His Peacemakers: American Diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 (1986).