RESOURCES

If you would like to learn more about World War I, additional resources are found below. The list includes a selection of primary (historical) documents and secondary (academic) sources as well as digital archival material. While this website it dedicated to WWI in Chicago, some of the resources below are national in scope. Students will continue to add to this list.

Manuscript Collections and Digital Archives:

Primary Sources:

  • Preliminary Inventory to the American Library Association War Service Records, 1917-1923. The Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf8n39n9nm/.
  • “To Strike Germany from Map of U. S.”. New York Times, June 2, 1918. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1918/06/02/102705536.pdf.
  • Editorial. “Our Nurses in the War.” The Chicago Defender, July 20, 1918, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Defender.
  • Gay, George I.; Fisher, H. H. Public Relations of the Commission for Relief in Belgium: Documents. Stanford University: Stanford University Press, 1929.
  • National Lamp Works, and General Electric Company. The National in the World War: April 6, 1917-November 11, 1918. First ed. Cleveland, OH: General Electric Company, 1920.

Secondary Sources:

  • Capozzola, Christopher. Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
  • Desantis, Alan D. "Selling the American Dream Myth to Black Southerners: The Chicago Defender and the Great Migration of 1915–1919." Western Journal of Communication 62, no. 4. 1998.
  • Gustaitis, Joseph. Chicago Transformed: World War I and the Windy City. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016.
  • Keene, Jennifer D. Doughboys, The Great War, and the Remaking of America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
  • Kingsbury, Celia M. For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front (Studies in War, Society, and the Military). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2010.
  • Leuchtenburg, William E. The perils of prosperity, 1914-1932. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
  • Ramsey, Paul J. "The War against German-American Culture: The Removal of German-Language Instruction from the Indianapolis Schools, 1917–1919." Indiana Magazine of History 98, no. 4. 2002. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27792420.
  • Schneider, Dorothee. "Polish Peasants into Americans: U.S. Citizenship and Americanization among Polish Immigrants in the Inter-War Era." Polish Sociological Review, no. 158 (2007): 159-71. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41275011.
  • Smith, Christen D. Fort Sheridan, Illinois: An Analysis of Its Significance, Its Closure, and Possible Alternative Uses. University of Pennsylvania: Penn Libraries, 1995. https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1407&context=hp_theses.
  • Tuttle, William M. Race Riot : Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. Illini Books ed. Blacks in the New World. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1996.


This video, produced by local PBS-affiliate WTTW, provides a brief overview of Chicago during wartime