The Weekly War

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World War I

Military History

Journalism

An elite team of reporters brought the Great War home each week to ten million readers of the Saturday Evening Post. As America’s largest circulation magazine, the Post hired the nation’s best-known and best-paid writers to cover World War I. The Weekly War provides a history of the unique record Post storytellers created of World War I, the distinct imprint the Post made on the field of war reporting, and the ways in which Americans witnessed their first world war. The Weekly War includes representative articles from across the span of the conflict, and Chris Dubbs and Carolyn Edy complement these works with essays about the history and significance of the magazine, the war, and the writers.
By the start of the Great War, the Saturday Evening Post had become the most successful and influential magazine in the United States, a source of entertainment, instruction, and news, as well as a shared experience. World War I served as a four-year experiment in how to report a modern war. The news-gathering strategies and news-controlling practices developed in this war were largely duplicated in World War II and later wars. Over the course of some thousand articles by some of the most prolific writers of the era, the Saturday Evening Post played an important role in the evolution of war reporting during World War I.

About the Author

CHRIS DUBBS is editor of American Women Report World War I and co-editor of The AEF in Print: An Anthology of American Journalism in World War I. He lives in Edinboro, Pennsylvania. CAROLYN EDY is the author of The Woman Correspondent, the U.S. Military, and the Press, 1846–1947. She lives in Boone, North Carolina, where she is an associate professor of journalism at Appalachian State University.

Reviews

“The Weekly War frames the war—or rather the presentation of the war to a reasonably wide swath of the American public—in a new way. Documenting the shift from the raw perception we see in the articles by Blythe, Cobb, and Rinehart to the more routinized perception once patriotic fervor had been stirred strikes me as the single most valuable contribution made by this book.”—Tim Dayton, co-editor of A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War

“This will appeal to history and literature professors who talk about World War I—it will provide evidence we can use in teaching or analyzing public opinion about the war. It will also appeal to students researching the culture and literature of the 1920s.”—Pearl James, author of The New Death: American Modernism and World War I and editor of Picture This! World War I Posters and Visual Culture

“From life aboard ship as Europe plunged toward Armageddon, through the horrors of trench warfare, to the Paris peace conference, The Weekly War contains not only adeptly chosen stories showcasing the Saturday Evening Post’s reporting but also excellent essays that skillfully contextualize the magazine’s output. A must-read for anyone interested in how Americans have consumed war.”—Steven Casey, author of War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War against Japan

“In a narrative with pace and substance, Chris Dubbs and Carolyn Edy treat us to what they rightly describe as the Saturday Evening Post’s ‘American time capsule of the Great War,’ replete with the authors’ insights and the actual writings of the popular mystery writers, humorists, and theater critics who became war correspondents, as they appeared in the magazine's pages each week. As the stories made their way into the homes of the Post’s legions of readers, they helped the nation fashion a view of what was happening ‘over there.’ What a riveting approach to telling us the story of World War I anew.”—Brooke Kroeger, author of Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism

"Most articles are quite memorable, with wonderful turns of phrase and imagery. They're occasionally filled with humor but always a sense of pathos. . . . All in all, this is a well-curated tome and a must-have for a lover of long-form writing from the era."--Roads to the Great War

"A fascinating and seminal study. . . . The Weekly War is a singularly unique and very strongly recommended addition to personal, professional, community, and academic library 20th Century Journalism History and World War I collections, as well as college and university supplemental curriculum studies lists."--Midwest Book Review

"Dubbs and Edy show how Post correspondents placed themselves in the center of a war drama by writing first-person eyewitness accounts. With vivid imagery, striking dialogue, and engaging characters, these talented and trusted writers brought a faraway conflict home to loyal readers. . . . Letters between Lorimer and his correspondents, along with anecdotes pulled from the archives of Post writers, give a sense of the horror-and hope-writers felt as witnesses to the tragedy of war."--American Journalism

Published by University of North Texas Press