"Everything is arranged. It is arranged that men should be broken and that they should be mended."
Mary Borden, military hospital director, describing her experience at Bray-sur-Somme in 1916
"We could not escape it. Whichever way we looked, there were the dead."
James Norman Hall, an American serving in the British Army in France in 1915
"The world must be made safe for democracy.... We have no selfish ends to serve."
President Woodrow Wilson, on U.S. entry into WWI
"Democracy can never be imposed upon a country by a foreign power by force of arms."
Majority Report of the St. Louis Convention of the Socialist Party of America, opposing U.S. entry into WWI
"Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and ... we will save it in the United States, or know the reason why."
W.E.B. Du Bois in 1919, exhorting returning black soldiers to claim their civil rights
"She searched his features, trying to find his old face, the one she knew."
Mary Borden, from the story "The Beach"
"At first Krebs ... did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it."
Ernest Hemingway, from the story "Soldier's Home"
Beginning Fall 2016, stipends of $1200–$1800 are available to all public, academic, and community college libraries, museums and historical societies, and nonprofit community organizations for public programming exploring the First World War and its resonances today. Presented by Library of America with support from the NEH, World War I and America is a two-year initiative that aims to bring veterans and their families together with the general public to explore the continuing relevance of the war by reading, discussing, and sharing insights into the writings of Americans who experienced it firsthand.
Historians and Veterans Speak