Letters from the Front, 1898-1945
Voices of the Wisconsin Past
Edited by Michael E. Stevens
1992 187 pp. 45 b/w photographs
6" x 9" ISBN 0-87020-268-5
Paperback $12.95
Letters from the Front, 1898-1945, the first volume in the Voices of the Wisconsin Past series, tells the stories of men and women from Wisconsin who served in the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. Voices of the Wisconsin Past presents episodes in the state's history in the words of the participants. Drawn from letters, diaries, oral histories, newspapers, and contemporary accounts, these volumes have an immediacy not always found in conventional histories.
Letters from the Front, 1898-1945 is a vivid social history of wartime as told by sixty-two men and women from Wisconsin who took part in three conflicts as the United States attained the status of a great world power. Most of them are "ordinary" people, uprooted from farms, factories, and offices, who took part in extraordinary events. The volume explores how war changed their lives and reveals the emotions they felt in uniform, in remote outposts, in combat, and in prison camps. For these citizen-soldiers, military service often represented their first real venture away from home, and the military itself constituted a foreign culture. Their letters provide a history of adaption to military life; they also reflect the changes that occurred over the half-century encompassing these conflicts, an era of great technological innovation – and one in which America's vision of itself also changed.
[Read an excerpt from the book.]
The Office of School Services has created a supplemental Teacher's Companion to Letters from the Front, 1898-1945, containing lesson plans and a bibliography.
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