David W. Seitz is associate professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State University, Mont Alto.

David Seitz’s World War I, Mass Death, and the Birth of the Modern US Soldier: A Rhetorical History vividly demonstrates how a multiplicity of discourses intersect in the moment when a public memory takes shape. Marshalling the forces of historiography, textual analysis, visual rhetoric, and ethnography, Seitz’s genealogical exploration adroitly explores how the ideograph of “the US soldier as a global force for good” emerged from the material and rhetorical battlefields of World War I. His analysis illustrates how such a transformative ideograph is at once the production of historical forces, governmental rhetoric, and vernacular responses to efforts to shape the understanding of an historical moment.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter One. The “Uncensored” View from Afar: American Perceptions of the Great War, 1914–1917Chapter Two. “Body and Soul and Spirit”: Mobilization, Conscription, and Mass Death, 1917–1918Chapter Three. A Crisis of Speech: Addressing Mass Death and the Trauma of War, 1918–1922Chapter Four. Why They Died: Public Memory and the Birth of the Modern U.S. Soldier, 1922–1933ConclusionIndexAbout the Author

David W. Seitz is associate professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State University, Mont Alto.

David Seitz’s World War I, Mass Death, and the Birth of the Modern US Soldier: A Rhetorical History vividly demonstrates how a multiplicity of discourses intersect in the moment when a public memory takes shape. Marshalling the forces of historiography, textual analysis, visual rhetoric, and ethnography, Seitz’s genealogical exploration adroitly explores how the ideograph of “the US soldier as a global force for good” emerged from the material and rhetorical battlefields of World War I. His analysis illustrates how such a transformative ideograph is at once the production of historical forces, governmental rhetoric, and vernacular responses to efforts to shape the understanding of an historical moment.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter One. The “Uncensored” View from Afar: American Perceptions of the Great War, 1914–1917Chapter Two. “Body and Soul and Spirit”: Mobilization, Conscription, and Mass Death, 1917–1918Chapter Three. A Crisis of Speech: Addressing Mass Death and the Trauma of War, 1918–1922Chapter Four. Why They Died: Public Memory and the Birth of the Modern U.S. Soldier, 1922–1933ConclusionIndexAbout the Author

David W. Seitz is associate professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State University, Mont Alto.

David Seitz’s World War I, Mass Death, and the Birth of the Modern US Soldier: A Rhetorical History vividly demonstrates how a multiplicity of discourses intersect in the moment when a public memory takes shape. Marshalling the forces of historiography, textual analysis, visual rhetoric, and ethnography, Seitz’s genealogical exploration adroitly explores how the ideograph of “the US soldier as a global force for good” emerged from the material and rhetorical battlefields of World War I. His analysis illustrates how such a transformative ideograph is at once the production of historical forces, governmental rhetoric, and vernacular responses to efforts to shape the understanding of an historical moment.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter One. The “Uncensored” View from Afar: American Perceptions of the Great War, 1914–1917Chapter Two. “Body and Soul and Spirit”: Mobilization, Conscription, and Mass Death, 1917–1918Chapter Three. A Crisis of Speech: Addressing Mass Death and the Trauma of War, 1918–1922Chapter Four. Why They Died: Public Memory and the Birth of the Modern U.S. Soldier, 1922–1933ConclusionIndexAbout the Author