Describe how the United States mobilized for World War I, evaluate the wartime restrictions on civil liberties, and explain the war's outcome for American troops abroad.
Entering the war in April 1917 meant building an army almost from scratch: the Selective Service Act drafted roughly 2.8 million men, and General John J. Pershing led the American Expeditionary Force to France starting in mid-1917. American troops arrived in significant numbers just as French and British forces, exhausted after three years of trench warfare, badly needed reinforcement. The AEF played a major role in stopping a last German offensive at the Second Battle of the Marne in mid-1918 and then in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive that fall, the largest battle in American history to that point, which helped force Germany to seek an armistice. Fighting ended on November 11, 1918. Roughly 116,000 American service members died, more than half of them from disease -- including the devastating influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed tens of millions worldwide and moved through crowded military training camps with terrible speed.
At home, the government mobilized public opinion as aggressively as it mobilized soldiers. The Committee on Public Information produced posters, films, and pamphlets to build support for the war and encourage buying Liberty Bonds. Less defensibly, the Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Act (1918) criminalized broad categories of speech critical of the war or the draft; the Supreme Court upheld one such conviction in Schenck v. United States (1919), where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that free speech does not protect a "clear and present danger," a legal test that itself remains debated by historians and legal scholars as either a necessary wartime limit or a genuine overreach against dissent. The war economy pulled hundreds of thousands of Black Americans out of the rural South into Northern factory jobs in the early stages of what became known as the Great Migration -- but many who served in uniform, and many who migrated for factory work, came home to find their sacrifice had not changed how they were treated, a tension that erupted into deadly race riots across dozens of cities in the "Red Summer" of 1919.
Mastery looks like: They can describe U.S. military mobilization and one major battle, explain the Espionage/Sedition Act debate from both sides accurately, and connect wartime migration to the Red Summer's violence.
Common stumbles: Assuming combat was the main killer of American troops in this war, and glossing over the Red Summer as a minor detail rather than a direct consequence of wartime tensions.