America's Rise in the 20th Century

Excellent article on the rise of America in the 20th Century told via story of WW1 vet...

'One of the last': WWI vet recalls Great War
27 Mar. 2007 — When the guns fell silent on Nov. 11, 1918, exactly 4,734,991 Americans had served in World War I. Four are known to be alive.

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April 6 will mark the 90th anniversary of the United States' entry into World War I. The soldiers who went Over There thought they were fighting the "war to end all wars." It did not live up to its title. The United States has fought five major conflicts since then, including the current war in Iraq.

Type "World War I American casualties" into the Google search engine and it asks, "Did you mean World War II?" Yet this largely forgotten war has never been more relevant. The days of trench warfare and biplane dogfights are long gone, but the first industrialized war set the stage for all that came after. It marked the emergence of the United States as a superpower. The war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ethnic cleansing, weapons of mass destruction, globalization, U.S. foreign policy and even women's rights and controversy over the treatment of returning veterans — all have roots in World War I. "If you want to understand the world of today, don't start at 9/11/2001," Harvard historian Niall Ferguson says. "You need to go all the way back to August 1914," when the war began.

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A global entanglement

In 1914, the world was ruled by empires: British, German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman. They were tied to each other through military alliances and secret pledges, but tensions were rising amid industrialization, global competition for resources and growing nationalism among ethnic minorities. When a Bosnian Serb assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo, that triggered a chain reaction of war declarations that engulfed all of Europe, and eventually countries as far as Japan.

FULL

[DansDarkSide]

Nice find, good artical.

Thanks.

I'm always surprised at the lack of historical understanding of why America has its place in the world and how it achieved it.

I had known about WW2 being a reaction to the Treaty of Versailles but didn't see the two wars as being one with an interlude in between.

Now it makes sense and explains how Hitler was able to rise to power.