Wars Civil and Great: The American Experience in the Civil War and World War I (MHS)

Although the Civil War and the Great War were fought only fifty years apart, the perceived time between these two cataclysmic events seems far longer in popular American memory. Wars Civil and Great breaks down these barriers of time and memory and shows how close and how similar these two conflicts really were in the American experience. President Wilson looked to Lincoln during the Great War for guidance on national leadership at wartime; General John J. Pershing remembered the Civil War of his childhood and sought to learn lessons from Grant and McClellan; and the doughboys on European battlefields held firm to the culture of honor and duty that had inspired their forefathers to take up arms. Wars Civil and Great questions what legacy the Civil War left, how the World War I generation interpreted the lessons of the Civil War, and how both wars contributed to the modernization of the United States.