Utah and the Great War: The Beehive State and the World War I Experience. Edited by Allan Kent Powell

Abstract

Allan Kent Powell’s edited anthology, Utah and the Great War, introduces and reprints seventeen articles about Utahns’ involvement in World War I. Most of the pieces were originally published in the Utah Historical Quarterly between 1978 and 2016. This volume increases their accessibility and provides a strong overview of Utah’s connections to World War I. Thirty-three clearly reproduced photographs enrich the volume. Inevitably, a collection of this nature contains some repetition and lacks a unifying voice or interpretive thesis. Despite gaps in coverage, reflecting lacunae in research to this point, the collection demonstrates that we understand Utah’s relationship to World War I much better today than we did in the 1970s. Four chapters explore the experiences of Utahns in the military and on the frontlines. Nearly twenty-one thousand served, and little is known about them, with the exception of nearly fifteen hundred who joined federalized units of the National Guard. Richard Roberts furnishes an excellent overview of the experiences of the Guardsmen, most of whom had just been ordered to the front when Germany surrendered. Miriam Murphy illuminates the roles and experiences of close to one hundred women who served at or near the frontlines in France as ambulance drivers and nurses. Brandon Johnson employs writings from a handful of soldiers to construct engaging “narrative snapshots” of the Meuse-Argonne killing fields (p. 53).