World War I

Tuesday, November 13, 2012
7:00–8:30 p.m. (EST) Enter Classroom Enter Forum

Leader

Ernest Freeberg
Distinguished Professor of the Humanities
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

About the Seminar

What were the causes and consequences of America's involvement in World War I? This seminar will seek to address that question by tracing the nation's movement from the neutrality of 1914 to the declaration of war in 1917. What forces moved us to war? What forces resisted that movement? And what impact did the War have on the homefront? The seminar will focus on the Espionage and Sedition Acts and the Supreme Court cases that tested them and inspired a new interest in civil liberties. In addition to analyzing documents, the seminar will examine the War's powerful propaganda posters to see how they inflamed emotion then and how they may be used to teach now.

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Assigned Readings

  1. Woodrow Wilson’s Address to Congress U.S. Declaration of Neutrality, 19 August 1914.
  2. Woodrow Wilson, Third U.S. Protest Over the Sinking of the Lusitania, 21 July 1915.
  3. Woodrow Wilson’s Address to Congress, 19 April 1916.
  4. Woodrow Wilson, Address to the Senate, “Peace without Victory,” January 22, 1917.
  5. The Zimmerman Telegram.
  6. President Woodrow Wilson Asks Congress to Declare War, 2 April 1917.
  7. Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette Votes Against a Declaration of War, 4 August 1917.
  8. “Moral Flabbiness in Peace Talk,” Bishop William Quayle, Literary Digest 19 (October 1918). (excerpt)
  9. “For Freedom and Democracy,” North American Review 206, (March 30, 1917).
  10. “The War and the Intellectuals,” Randolph Bourne, Seven Arts 2 (1917).
  11. Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points Speech" to Congress, 8 January 1918.
  12. Sedition Act, 1918. (excerpt)
  13. Eugene V. Debs, Speech in Canton, OH, June 1918.
  14. “The Case Against the ‘Reds,’”A. Mitchell Palmer, Forum (1920).