On April 2, 1917, the United States officially entered a war that had been raging for nearly three years in Europe. Even though America’s involvement in the Great War lasted little more than a year and a half, the changes it wrought were profound. More than seventy thousand Arkansans served as soldiers during the war.

Wartime propaganda led to suspicions directed against Germans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and African Americans in Arkansas, but war production proved a boon to the state in the form of greater demand for cotton, minerals, and timber.

World War I connected Arkansas to the world in ways that changed the state and its people forever, as shown in the essays collected here.