The Curation of American Patriotism: The American Legion and The Story of Our American People

Abstract

Abstract: Attempts to frame the memory of military conflicts have often been driven by veterans' organizations whose members participated in the fighting. This article argues that, in the United States, the newly formed American Legion sought to control the national narrative of the Great War as part of its wider, ambitious project of Americanization and "100% Americanism," in particular via the curation and development of a school history textbook intended to deliver its ideology into every schoolhouse in the United States. In so doing, it revealed the contested nature of history writing, the depth of contemporary concerns over the value of history as a discipline and the difficulties of eliding the history of the American past with the concept of Americanization, especially in terms of sectionalism, race, immigration and empire.