Academic literature on the topic 'Authors, American ; World War, 1914-1918'

World War I consumed much of Roosevelt’s attention in his final years. An advocate of American preparedness, Roosevelt used both the Old Testament and New Testament extensively to justify his wartime views. He also continued to defend the separation of church and state and endured another libel trial. Denied a chance to command a division at the front, Roosevelt sent all four of his sons to fight in his stead. The death of the youngest, Quentin, in 1918 preceded his own demise by only a few months. After Roosevelt’s death, Methodist minister Christian Reisner wrote a 400-page book attempting to demonstrate the late president’s Christianity. Historians have since debated the extent to which Roosevelt should be characterized as a Christian. The book concludes by weighing in on that debate.

In the previous chapter, we looked at the main trends in morbidity and mortality in civil populations since 1850. In this chapter our focus shifts to the military. An invaluable recent source of information on this topic is Lancaster (1990: 314–40) who gives a disease-by-disease account of morbidity and mortality among soldiers from the seventeenth century. Until the twentieth century, soldiers were lucky to survive military medicine. Basic treatments included the cauterizing of wounds and the removal of limbs to prevent gangrene. The biggest early advances in military medicine came when doctors started to wash their hands. The role of Florence Nightingale in transforming the military hospitals during the Crimean War (1853–6), and her broader role in improving the welfare of the British Army, is legendary. Yet, notwithstanding the gigantic losses directly attributable to battle, up to World War I, most deaths in war among soldiers were caused by epidemic diseases like dysentery, enteric fever, cholera, typhus, plague, and simple infections like measles—the traditional killers encountered in civil populations. And, as with civil populations, the real advances in controlling these infections came with the development of antibiotics and vaccination after 1945. In this chapter, we begin by looking at mortality trends in a number of theatres of war between 1859 and 1914 using data from Curtin (1989). As a specific illustration of the role of one simple infectious disease, measles, as a cause of mortality in military camps during this period, we take the American Civil War (1861–5). By the end of World War I in 1918, the role of many infectious diseases as causes of military mortality and morbidity had changed from lethal to nuisance value. This shift is shown through an examination of the role of measles in World War I. After 1945, the use of antibiotics and the generalized availability of vaccination against most of the common infectious diseases ensured that the historic infectious diseases waned in their impact on military populations just as they did in civil populations. Again we use measles and the American army as examples to show these declining effects.

Throughout the 20^th century, cartoons relentlessly appeared in all sorts of newspapers, evidence of the immense cultural impact of illustrative satire long before the era of television. Many events were recorded in print, such as the Great War, the 1916 Easter Rising, women’s suffrage, the Second World War, and the Cold War. This chapter uses Gombrich’s ‘6 point filter’ for cartoon analysis to present both case studies and longer- term trends. Case studies include pioneering Irish satire in The Lepracaun, and British football cartoons used to present the perspectives of the working - class British soldier from 1914 to 1918. The authors analyse several trends over time, including increased ‘creative acerbity’, for instance during ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, through to a greater personalisation of issues and use of a celebrity approach, often as propaganda during the Cold War and Vietnam. Findings from the analysis of over a thousand images point to an increase in derivative amateur cartoons, which is construed as a democratic tool for expression.