Soldiers, Veterans, and War in U.S. and World History

• Humanities
• EDSITEment Lessons
• EDSITEment-reviewed Websites

NEH’s EDSITEment program offers a variety of resources for teaching and learning about the experiences of war and its aftermath and the role of citizen soldiers and veterans in world history and in our national life.

These digital resources, brought together to facilitate study and discussion, are gathered in three sections: articles from the agency’s flagship magazine, Humanities; lesson plans built around important primary source documents in all media; and vetted websites, many of which were supported through NEH grants.

Humanities

General

• “Digital Boot Camp for Military Historians”
• “Direct from the Front: Walking the Line between the Media and the Military”
• “A Soldiers Words: An Anthology of Writings by Veterans”
• “Theatre of War”
• “Veterans on Stage”
•  “Veterans Tackle PTSD with Traditional Healing”

French and Indian War to the War of 1812

• “Clash of Empires: How the French and Indian War Redrew the Map of North America”
• “A Forgotten Hero in a Forgotten War”

American Civil War

• “Day Break Gray and Dim”
• “How Did Robert E. Lee Become an American Icon?”
• “Incognito in the Infantry”
•  “The Living and the Dead: The Civil War Divided Americans into Two Kinds of People”
• “A Visit from Historian Shelby Foote”
• “The War 150 Years Later”
• “‘The War That Never Goes Away’: A Conversation with Civil War Historian James M. McPherson”

World Wars I and II

• “At War’s Painful Core”
• “El Movimiento: How Latino Americans Fought for Civil Rights”
• “How the G.I. Bill Became Law in Spite of Some Veterans’ Groups”
• “The Paradoxical General: Douglas MacArthur”
• “War Stories: American People in World War II”
• “Women in Combat”

Korea and Vietnam

• “At War’s Painful Core”
• “Speaking about Vietnam”

Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

• “Veterans in Tampa Bay Tell Their Stories”

EDSITEment Lessons

The Ancient World through the American Revolution

• 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae
• The American War for Independence

The Civil War

• The American Civil War: “A Terrible Swift Sword”
• Homer’s Civil War Veteran: Battlefield to Wheatfield

World War I

• African American Soldiers in World War I: the 92nd and 93rd Divisions
• African American Soldiers After World War I: Had Race Relations Changed?
• Poetry of the Great War: “From Darkness into Light?”

World War II

• The United States in WWII: “The Proper Application of Overwhelming Force”
• Korean War: “Police Action” 1950-1953
• The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the Escalation of the Vietnam War

EDSITEment-reviewed Websites

General

• Reporting America at War
• Veterans History Project

Specific Wars (in chronological order)

• The War That Made America
• The War of 1812
• The U.S.-Mexican War
• The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns
• Civil War in Art
• Visual Culture of the American Civil War
• The World War I Document Archive
• Ken Burns’s The War
• Vietnam: A Television History