On May 18, 1918, fourteen thousand high school students from St. Louis, Missouri, public schools, accompanied by fourteen drum corps and seven professional bands, paraded through the city’s Forest Park. Each school marched behind the US flag and its banners. Boys were dressed like soldiers and girls like nurses, in white uniforms bearing a tiny red cross. Battalions of young drummers, followed by legions of adult nurses, closed the parade. As the young people passed by, spectators applauded the inspiring sight. They could feel their hearts burn with new patriotism and new reverence. As the parade ended at Art Hill, eight thousand children in red caps and capes stood at attention on the slope, saluted the onlookers, and began to form a living cross. Below them, the remaining six thousand young people fell into place to form the word Red Cross. For the occasion – the Inaugural Junior Red Cross Parade – the youth had been rallied to demonstrate their patriotism and participation in the war effort. One journalist noted that “the present generation of children are learning that Service means sympathy as well as sacrifice, a desire and willingness to help others as well as a feeling that it is one’s duty and obligation to do so.”

A national conference on Americanization in April 1918 evidenced how social and political concerns mattered in wartime. Many regarded the global war as an unhoped-for opportunity to patch up the American nation and bring together the various ethnic groups living in the United States. Across the United States, ethnic enclaves existed and hyphenated Americans oscillated between pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes and being loyal to their homelands. Assimilationists seized the opportunity to foster American ideals in children. They consistently rallied politicians in their crusade against the hyphen and eventually defeated progressive integrationalists.

From August 1914 to April 1917, although the United States remained officially neutral, private individuals engaged American children in the war effort. At the local and state levels, initiatives mushroomed to capture children’s energy. Educationalists feared that explicit talk of war and propaganda in all forms would spoil children’s innocence. This is why they decided to engage children in civic leagues while others sought to mobilize children in the war effort. Although the leaders of these initiatives differed on how best to foster patriotism in the nation’s youth, the consensus was that American children needed to be engaged in civic and patriotic activities and be aware of their responsibilities as future adults.

As the war ended, politicians and educationalists saw the American Junior Red Cross as a means to promote American ideals abroad. Consequently, the American Junior Red Cross shifted its focus on a new form of Americanization, using children as part of a cultural diplomacy that positioned the United States as the global Good Samaritan. Children reached out around the globe, waged war against diseases, dedicated much of their spare time to rescue foreign "brothers" and "sisters," and sponsored children overseas.

Across the nation, children were urged to become “soldiers of the soil,” members of the United States School Garden Army, an initiative created in February 1918 by the US Bureau of Education to promote local gardening. Federal authorities urged local communities to feed themselves while the United States fed the Allies and other nations dependent on the US food supply. The more food civilians grew, the better the United States could feed the world. Children thus became part of a large pool of unpaid labor, serving the interests of both politicians and educationalists: as youth helped to increase food production, they learned skills and habits of self-reliance. Through the United States School Garden Army, children hooverized and learned to change their diet and eat with moderation. Gardening taught them the meaning of sacrifice.

Medical experts and epidemiologists knew the importance of hygiene on the home front. They convinced local, state, and federal authorities that the war on disease had to be fought. Consequently, the Modern Health Crusade, which originated in Detroit, became a nationwide movement in 1915. Federal authorities realized that a high infant mortality rate threatened the fabric of American society in the long run. Additionally, in order to build a strong and healthy army (and nation), bodies had to be physically fit. Children began to matter to the military and the nation writ large. As hygiene became a national concern, between 1914 and 1918, both medical and military authorities promoted hygienic standards to lift the nation.

In organizing a juvenile division of the American Red Cross – the so-called American Junior Red Cross – in September 1917, Woodrow Wilson attempted to mobilize the nation’s twenty-two million schoolchildren. Consequently, the American Junior Red Cross became the first federal youth-focused organization to be specifically dedicated to mobilizing American youth in wartime. In designing this first national youth-focused organization, Wilson impeded radical interventionists and quelled educationalists’ concerns. While directing children’s energy to altruistic humanitarian tasks, the organization opened schools to federal oversight of efforts to instill loyalty and deter dissent. Federal authorities attempted to control teachers and relied upon the educational structures to instill loyalty in the future generations of Americanyouth.

This chapter re-examines slavery and abolition in the writing and reception of the Declaration of Independence. Far from being marginal parts of the nation’s founding document, as previous generations of scholars asserted, both slavery and abolition proved to be essential to the making and meaning of the Declaration. Indeed, during and after the American Revolution, the Declaration testified to the nation’s high abolitionist ideals and the enduring problem of slavery in American statecraft. By examining not only Jefferson’s ideas about black freedom in the Revolutionary era but a wide range of reformers who meditated on it as well – including African American writers and reformers like Benjamin Banneker – this essay argues that the Declaration itself remains a testament to the conflicted nature of emancipation in the American mind.

The twenty-six grievances in the Declaration of Independence targeted two distinct categories of British policies: reforms and punishments. Parliamentary reforms like taxing the colonies to help pay for the 10,000 troops left in America at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 (mostly as a human wall protecting colonists from Native Americans – and vice versa) angered free colonists, but not sufficiently to make them want out of the British Empire. Free Americans did, however, protest Parliament’s reforms, for example, by tarring and feathering Customs officials who cracked down on molasses smugglers, burning stamped paper, and throwing 340 chests of tea – taxed by Parliament and carried to American ports by the East India Company – into Boston Harbor. To punish the colonists for these protests, Parliament revoked Massachusetts’ charter, sent troops to reoccupy Boston, and more. Ultimately royal officials in the colonies even forged informal alliances with black Americans previously enslaved by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other Founders. It was these British punishments, not Parliament’s original reforms, that pushed free colonists over the edge into independence.

This chapter traces the experiences of Sarah Osborne Benjamin, who married a soldier in the Third New York Regiment and traveled with him from West Point to Philadelphia and Yorktown. Although she never learned to write, she left behind a rich oral autobiography: her application for a Revolutionary War pension. In it, she recalls her work as a washerwoman and cook, her relationships with other Continental Army women, and her postwar financial challenges. She offers a nuanced picture of the Continental Army as a place of oppressive surveillance but also complex social networking and protest. By exploring her interpretation of the American Revolution, I argue that, even as Continental Army women confronted bodily scrutiny and restrictive military regulations, they also derived power from their relationships. After the war, they used oral testimony, material culture, and strategic storytelling to exercise a distinctive form of archival agency.

The American War of Independence felt the influence not only of statesmen and generals but also of subordinate officers, enlisted men, women, Native Americans, and African Americans. Red-letter events were triggered by incidents as diverse as grassroots rebellions and epidemics. A crucial mistake might cost a general a battle – but it could also have the ironic effect of leaving him better off than before. Factors such as climate, disease, and geography further complicated commanders’ decisionmaking process, if anything increasing their significance. Various white, enslaved, and Indigenous leaders excelled at everything from manipulating morale to obtain their ends using nothing more than threats. But commanders’ influence was not always positive. For example, it took George Washington most of the Revolutionary War to learn what his British counterparts had known all along – that the war was his to win so long as he stifled his own aggressive instincts and mostly stayed on defense.

In considering the cacophony of calls to action and the responses or lack thereof to these efforts, this chapter provides a comprehensive view of the varied tools of mobilization that attempted to entice men and women to serve or support military service and the Revolution by engaging in a conflict that entangled individuals throughout the Atlantic world. In a war that involved the military mobilization of more than 175,000 individuals within the colonies and about 300,000 British and Irish subjects alongside 30,000 Hessians, studying the process behind these figures highlights an opportunity to better understand not only the mechanics of the war but the meaning given to the Revolution by individuals who chose at various moments during the eight years of war to heed the call to action in many forms.

This chapter focuses on ways to understand the Vietnam War through the operation of race in US interventions during the 1960s. As part of the inquiry, it examines friction between the United States and Panama in 1964 and the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. France’s legacy in Vietnam and the US adaptation of French racialized colonial policies provide a backdrop for the war. The Cold War, rather than territorial annexation or economic exploitation, provided the chief rationale for the US presence in Vietnam and provided a path for particularly American forms of racism to emerge there and in areas of US domestic life that were affected by the conflict. In the interim, Vietnam served as a laboratory in which various theories about modernization and development were evaluated and carried out. The experiences of American minorities in the military are documented, including officials’ efforts to control dissidence in the ranks. African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans experienced the war in somewhat different ways, but all found themselves confronted by leading assumptions and practices about their minoritarian status. The war led many to see themselves as racially defined in a struggle whose costs were disproportionately borne by people of color amidst discrimination at home and by Vietnamese combatants abroad. As a result new sensibilities led to transformation in American civil society.

Ensuring the future of France – its children – meant fighting on multiple dimensions. One set of enemies included infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis and the influenza pandemic; the other set comprises illnesses and infant mortality attendant to poverty and malnutrition. Thousands of volunteers from the United States fought these battles with treatment and prevention strategies. They toured the Franco-American colonies, organized large antiepidemic campaigns, and produced leaflets providing practical advice on managing the care of babies and children during wartime. With the help of the Children’s Bureau of the American Red Cross, the American Commission for the Prevention of Tuberculosis in France, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division, thousands of leaflets were distributed to the Franco-American colonies of the CFAPCF, fatherless children supported through the FCFS, as well as to schools and mothers across France. With the spread of tuberculosis in 1917 and the 1918 influenza pandemic, American medical experts realized that a sanitary ironclad was needed to block the spread of contagious diseases to the United States: to protect France was to protect the United States.