David W. Seitz is associate professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State University, Mont Alto.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter One. The “Uncensored” View from Afar: American Perceptions of the Great War, 1914–1917Chapter Two. “Body and Soul and Spirit”: Mobilization, Conscription, and Mass Death, 1917–1918Chapter Three. A Crisis of Speech: Addressing Mass Death and the Trauma of War, 1918–1922Chapter Four. Why They Died: Public Memory and the Birth of the Modern U.S. Soldier, 1922–1933ConclusionIndexAbout the Author

David Seitz’s World War I, Mass Death, and the Birth of the Modern US Soldier: A Rhetorical History vividly demonstrates how a multiplicity of discourses intersect in the moment when a public memory takes shape. Marshalling the forces of historiography, textual analysis, visual rhetoric, and ethnography, Seitz’s genealogical exploration adroitly explores how the ideograph of “the US soldier as a global force for good” emerged from the material and rhetorical battlefields of World War I. His analysis illustrates how such a transformative ideograph is at once the production of historical forces, governmental rhetoric, and vernacular responses to efforts to shape the understanding of an historical moment.