The Wounded World

How a new book about a civil rights pioneer enriches our understanding of World War I

While I’m spending most of my time this week gearing up to start fall classes, I also just submitted the last grade for an online summer course about one of my favorite historical subjects, World War I.

Favorite is a strange word for a conflict that killed 10-15 million people, but I’ve always enjoyed teaching the history of the First World War — perhaps more so than its sequel, if only because the Second World War is so much better known to most Americans. I’ve offered my WWI class in three distinct modes now: as an in-person intensive during our January session; as a travel course that took students to England, Belgium, France, and Germany for three weeks of immersion; and now as an online course that integrates recorded lectures and virtual tours of key sites over a six-week summer term.¹

Each version of my WWI course has fulfilled the gen ed category at Bethel that lets students dive more deeply into U.S. history. So while we spend most of our time in Europe, I also have students consider how the war marked a turning point for Americans: in their nation’s relationship with the world, but also their relationships with each other. We talk about everything from women’s suffrage to the labor movement to immigration. But above all else, I use WWI to shed light on another lesser-known chapter of history: the development of the civil rights movement in the years between the rise of Jim Crow and the advent of Martin Luther King Jr.

W.E.B. Du Bois as he looked in 1918, the year he urged African Americans, “while this war lasts,” to “forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own fellow white citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy” - Library of Congress

Our pivotal figure for that story is W.E.B. Du Bois, the brilliant scholar who helped found the NAACP in 1909 and edited its influential magazine, The Crisis. Here’s how I normally tell the story of Du Bois and WWI, and how a recent book has deepened my understanding of that narrative.