| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Individuelle Bewährung im Krieg: Amerikaner in Europa, 1914–1917 (Individual volunteers in the war: Americans in Europe, 1914–1917). By Axel Jansen. (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2003. 334 pp. Paper, €39.90, ISBN 3-59337285-1.) In German.

The bulk of this volume (and almost all the original research in a vast collection of scattered primary sources) deals with Americans who served in various medical services in France and why they did so. The space given to military volunteers is relatively brief, and the attention devoted to the famous Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) is, though competent, essentially a summary based on well-known materials. A thoughtful concluding chapter explains the motivations of American volunteerism. Axel Jansen argues, perhaps too grandly, that the American elites undertook a collective search for a new version of the Puritan ideal of service in order to achieve a cultural renewal of the country. The very theoretical introductory essay is rather unnecessarily laden with ponderous and mostly self-conscious abstractions.

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