The Lion's Pride Lion's Pride Volume 12 (Spring 2019) | Page 26

The Narrative of Victory in World War One
Lillian Beegle
I am a student at Lake Washington Institute of Technology and am
transferring to the University of Washington to study European history
as an academic career. For this assignment in English Composition II, I
decided to write a research paper on my “favorite” war, World War I.
For me, this paper was an exercise in researching and implementing
sources. One source in particular I had already read and had used to
formulate my argument; the challenge was finding sources to support it.
I hope readers will enjoy and learn something new from this obscure
topic.
The recent centennial of the First World War from 1914-1918
brought the conflict and its consequences back into the public eye…in
Europe. Notable in the United States was less acknowledgement of the
Great War and the American contribution to the victorious Powers, and
how President Woodrow Wilson and the United States shaped the post-
war world. Perhaps this is because World War II so thoroughly
overshadows World War I in the popular psyche, in which the “good
guys” and “bad guys” are easily delineated, and because survivors and
veterans are still with us today. World War I is distant, gray and morally
ambiguous, and the last living war veteran died in 2011. It may not be as
well-known to the layperson, but, among historians, an argument exists
regarding whether or not the United States really was as important as
claimed to the outcome of the Great War: the victory of the Entente and
the defeat of the Central Powers. These details and terms will be covered
in more depth in this paper. The argumentation given is that the Entente
(in this case France and Great Britain) would have been victorious