America’s Great War Romance: Love and Death, 1917-1919

Lecture by Andrew J. Huebner

Followed by a book signing

Thursday, October 18, 2018 • 6 – 8 p.m.

Center for American War Letters Archives (B03)

Leatherby Libraries, Lower Level

Copies of the book, Love and Death in the Great War, will be available for purchase.

Description: Americans of the Great War era often heard the tale of their nation’s intervention told as a love story. Fighting offered romance, and not just on the battlefield. It promised to stir “khaki-mad” passions in young women, bolster the romantic credibility of the doughboy, and cultivate national chivalric virtue. But this war story quickly crashed into the reality of experience. The daily lives of the Missourians Mae and Eliga Dees—visible through a full set of letters between the two while Eliga was fighting in Europe—suggests a different tale of war, one obscured by the passage of time and the romantic tones of American wartime culture. 

Biography: Andrew J. Huebner is Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama. He is the author of Love and Death in the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2018), and before that, The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). He received his doctorate in history at Brown University in 2004.

Sponsored by the Center for the Study of War and Society, the Department of History, and the Leatherby Libraries.