Editors’ Introduction

A new birth of freedom. These words spoken by Abraham Lincoln on a Civil War battlefield catch what this volume intends to explore. Repeatedly wars have been seen as offering new beginnings, requiring a new start, promising rejuvenation. At the time of World War I Randolph Bourne advocated American non-intervention, seeing it as America’s chance to cut the umbilical cord with the English mother culture, as a chance for America finally to come into its own as a “transnational culture.” If war ...