World War I Centennial Events

Few Americans today grapple with why the US declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. A hundred years later, maybe it’s time to settle the issue. US troops’ experience on the Western Front was as scarring as it was for the Europeans who’d spent nearly three years in World War I’s meat grinder, and while the war helped make the US a superpower, it was quickly overshadowed by the much clearer-cut world war that followed two decades later. This month, a number of events aim to help us figure out just what we were doing “over there.”