#59 The History of World War I w/ Mitchell Yockelson
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2017
⏱️ 39 minutes
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Summary
On April 6, 1917, the United States House of Representatives voted to declare war on Germany, bringing the United States into the brutal war that had raged across Europe since the summer of 1914. America's entry into World War I helped turn the tide of the war, securing a victory for the US and its allies. And while the final shots of the war took place on November 11, 1918, the consequences of "The Great War" live on nearly a century after its end.
Why did the United States become involved in World War I after remaining neutral for so long? How did the war in Europe shape American society? And who actually won World War I? In this episode of The Road to Now, we get the answers to these questions and more in our conversation with military historian and archivist Mitch Yockelson.
For more on this and all other episodes of The Road to Now, please visit our website: www.TheRoadToNow.com.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Ramser Records David Chilters reteams with producer Don Dixon for Run Skeleton Run. |
| 0:11.0 | The lauded North Carolina singer-songwriter's latest effort features vocals and banjo contributions by Scott Avid of the Avid Brothers. |
| 0:19.0 | Road to Now listeners can even get a 20% off discount on David Childers' new album |
| 0:23.5 | by using the promo code, History at Ramsor Records.com. |
| 0:39.5 | I'm Bob Crawford. And I'm Ben Sawyer. |
| 0:41.2 | This is the road to now. |
| 0:43.0 | We had a wonderful opportunity to interview someone. |
| 0:45.5 | This opportunity came through our good friend, Chris Freights, and we spoke with Mitch |
| 0:50.6 | Yackelson. |
| 0:51.5 | He is currently working on a project to get a memorial to the World War I soldiers |
| 0:55.9 | on the National Mall. And this is something that's pretty amazing to me as a historian, you know, |
| 1:02.5 | that we have a lot of memorials, but we have done very little when it comes to World War I. |
| 1:07.3 | So we have all these American troops ended up going all over the world. And this is a |
| 1:11.5 | period where a lot of people see a lot of things. Black soldiers, as we'll talk about, we talked about |
| 1:15.7 | in this interview, black soldiers get to see what it's like to live somewhere that doesn't |
| 1:20.7 | look down on them because of the color of their skin. And so it's this crazy period, but also |
| 1:25.8 | it shapes American history afterwards. And this is something |
| 1:28.8 | we didn't cover in the interview because when World War II starts to break out, you know, in the 30s, |
| 1:34.2 | when you see the fascist governments rising, what you see is that there's clear signs we need to |
| 1:39.1 | get involved. The slaughter at Nanjing, the massacre there, the Spanish Civil War and the coup by the fascists, Hitler |
| 1:45.5 | invading and taking over territories, we turned a bit of a blind eye because a lot of Americans |
| 1:50.1 | felt like what got us involved in World War I was being too, too heavily involved in European |
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