YT YouTube2Text

YouTube2Text → Transcripts → HIST 112 US 1877- present Chapter 20 Part 4 The US Home Front during World War I

HIST 112 US 1877- present Chapter 20 Part 4 The US Home Front during World War I — Transcript

by History Class with Dr. W · 1,683 words · 324 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

Open in transcriber Summarize with AI Download SRT/VTT

Full transcript

0:01[Music]
0:12the war had
0:13dramatic effects on the home front as
0:15well
0:16and i'll mention a couple of these ideas
0:19um briefly and then we will come back
0:21to some of them at greater length later
0:24on
0:24but for african americans world war one
0:28created the first real opportunity
0:31for thousands and thousands ultimately
0:34millions
0:35of african americans to leave their
0:38plight
0:39in the south to leave those sharecrop
0:42farms in the south and to make their way
0:45north collectively this movement of
0:49hundreds of thousands of blacks out of
0:51the south and up to the north
0:52has been called the great migration and
0:56again by its end
0:58more than a million blacks leave the
1:00south
1:01and head for the north you see here in
1:04this
1:05painting they're heading to places like
1:07chicago new york
1:08st louis some of the other big centers
1:12up in the north
1:15the war created this opportunity in
1:17large measure
1:20many many of the white men were gone
1:23they had been drafted or they had
1:24volunteered to fight in the war there
1:26were black soldiers as well
1:28but what this meant was that on the home
1:30front it created a tremendous
1:32need for jobs particularly in the
1:35wartime
1:36munitions industries in the north
1:40and those munitions uh factories and
1:43those companies
1:44began recruiting in the south they would
1:47send
1:47agents down to the south and these
1:50people would head out to the farms and
1:52plantations across the south
1:54and recruit blacks and many of them
1:58literally by the hundreds dropped their
2:01farm tools dropped their rakes and hoes
2:04and shovels
2:05and went to the train station with these
2:08recruiters and left the south forever
2:12it wasn't always as dramatic a moment as
2:14that but that happened in thousands
2:16of cases and once blacks began to get
2:20settled
2:21up in the north many of them would begin
2:24to
2:24right back home and begin to encourage
2:27other
2:27blacks to leave the south and so this
2:30movement
2:31fueled itself and hundreds of blacks at
2:34first then
2:35thousands and tens of thousands and
2:37again ultimately millions
2:39ultimately move up to the north we will
2:42talk in a future lecture about what they
2:45found in the north and what life was
2:47like
2:47but certainly many many of them left the
2:51south during the war
2:55world war one also led to some important
2:58developments on the home front for women
3:01after the united states declared war in
3:041917
3:06women supported the war effort in many
3:08ways
3:09in addition to continuing their pre-war
3:12reform work women reformers in things
3:16like the settlement house movement and
3:18the suffrage movement
3:19sold war bonds led a drive to conserve
3:23food on the home front organized relief
3:26efforts for
3:28soldiers who were suffering over in
3:30europe
3:31and these sorts of things women also
3:34found
3:34opportunities in the workforce during
3:36the war
3:38women served in the navy and the marines
3:40and thousands of women served
3:42during the war as nurses women on the
3:46home front also found
3:47opportunities in factories and in some
3:49cases
3:50in the government and finally we see a
3:53number of
3:54important advances for women that came
3:56about
3:58either during or as a result of world
4:00war one
4:01uh women's work during the war
4:04helped to increase support for women's
4:06suffrage
4:07and contributed to the passage of the
4:1019th amendment
4:11which passed in 1920 giving women
4:15the right to vote we also see that
4:17during the war
4:18the department of labor created the
4:20women in industry
4:22service which eventually became the
4:24women's bureau and began to spearhead
4:27important movements for the improvement
4:30of
4:31women's rights and conditions and
4:34pay in the workplace so again we will
4:38see these kind of gains
4:40building with the passage of time but
4:42world war one in many ways helped to
4:44spark
4:45these sorts of developments for women
4:50in the meantime the united states found
4:52itself embroiled in a horrific
4:55war abroad and so let me talk just a
4:58little bit about the combat conditions
5:01and the kind of war
5:02this was i think you're all familiar
5:05with the idea that world war one
5:08embroiled in a trench style of warfare
5:11both sides building these massive
5:14networks of trenches
5:18which made it very difficult to make any
5:20great gains on one side or the other the
5:23defenses were so thorough and yet
5:26life in the trenches was uh horrific and
5:30terrible for the soldiers
5:32who were fighting the war and the war
5:34exacted a tremendous
5:37human toll more than eight million
5:40soldiers were killed
5:41over the course of this war more than 20
5:45million
5:45civilians were killed as i mentioned
5:48previously more than four 000
5:52french towns were utterly destroyed
5:55over the course of this war and it is in
5:57the french countryside
5:59that world war one really bogged down
6:02and uh saw the the greatest destruction
6:05and suffering
6:06you see in the picture there on the
6:08right
6:11what some of this would have looked like
6:13now it appears to have been a forest
6:15before the war and destruction set in
6:18but
6:19what remains is just absolute
6:21destruction
6:22and devastation in the aftermath of the
6:25war and so much of the french
6:26countryside
6:28looked like what you see in that picture
6:32it's a very slow ponderous war
6:35i mentioned to you the trenches which
6:37made it very difficult
6:38for either side to move ahead at the
6:42same time
6:43over and over again during the war you
6:45saw one side or the other uh
6:48launching a terrific surge of tens of
6:51thousands of men
6:52pouring out of the trenches and into the
6:55so-called
6:56no-man's zone or no man's land in the
6:59middle
7:00uh between the trenches where they were
7:02almost certainly to be
7:04moaned down by machine gun fire or
7:06blasted with mortar fire
7:08or tangled up in uh barbed wire
7:11or hit with poison gas or any number of
7:14these sorts of things
7:17f scott fitzgerald the famous american
7:20author
7:21wrote about the ponderous and slow
7:24nature
7:25of the combat during world war one he
7:28was
7:28writing in this case about the psalm
7:30which was a
7:32a british or french river and it was the
7:35scene of one of the most
7:37horrible battles of the war see that
7:41little stream
7:42we could walk to it in two minutes it
7:45took the british
7:45a whole month to walk to it a whole
7:48empire
7:49walked very slowly backward a few inches
7:52a day
7:53leaving the dead behind like a million
7:56bloody rugs
7:58it's kind of a morose image
8:02perhaps even more terrifying to the
8:04soldiers
8:05out there on the front lines was the
8:07prominence of poison
8:09gas during this war and particularly
8:12mustard gas which had
8:16very painful and uh devastating effect
8:19if not always
8:20deadly it often rendered people
8:24blind sometimes temporarily sometimes
8:26permanently
8:28and it led to terrific
8:31insatiable itching
8:34and so while it did not always kill it
8:37had
8:39left many many soldiers in a great
8:41degree of suffering
8:42and and many of them did ultimately die
8:46as a result of some of these effects
8:49here's one description of the effect of
8:52mustard gas
8:54the soldier's clothing soon becomes
8:57impregnated with the stuff
8:58as he brushes through the undergrowth
9:00and the burns develop
9:02through the help of moisture those parts
9:05of the body
9:06subject to excessive perspiration are
9:08especially affected
9:11a bad feature of mustard gas however is
9:13that it almost invariably produces
9:15temporary
9:16but complete blindness nothing
9:18demoralizes a man so much as the fear of
9:21losing
9:22his sight and telling him that he'll see
9:24again in a day or two
9:26generally fails to reassure him by the
9:2916th
9:30there were nearly 700 gassed men there
9:32just out of the glare of the sunny court
9:35lying fully dressed on blanket-covered
9:37cots some of them badly gassed in the
9:39lungs and fighting horribly for breath
9:41which could be a little prolonged by
9:43giving them oxygen
9:44nearly all blinded many delirious
9:48all crying moaning tossing about
9:55it was in large measure the influx of
9:58fresh american forces into the war in
10:011918
10:03that ultimately led to the allied
10:05victory
10:06in the war and i invite you to consult
10:09your textbook for greater detail about
10:11the combat
10:12itself i rarely go into much detail
10:15about
10:17military strategies and battles
10:20i will occasionally meant to mention
10:22these things
10:24during the course of the semester
10:27but i do have the map here on the screen
10:30for your convenience and again if you
10:32read your textbook
10:33it explains in more detail the various
10:35battles and and different uh offenses
10:38but what you see essentially represented
10:40here is
10:41uh over a period between may
10:45and november of 1918 which really
10:48is leading up to the ultimate victory in
10:50the war
10:51american troops are involved gradually
10:55at first and by the end
10:57dramatically in some of the major
11:00periods of the war
11:02initially in stemming the german
11:05momentum we see a couple of examples
11:08there in may and june of american forces
11:11assisting the french and kind of holding
11:13the germans at bay
11:15and then by mid-summer beginning to push
11:18back against the germans and launching
11:21major
11:22offenses you also notice that the
11:24numbers of american troops
11:26are growing pretty dramatically during
11:28this time if you look
11:29to the left in in june 27
11:33500 american troops um assisting in this
11:36battle by july
11:37270 000 american troops
11:40and then on the right hand side in these
11:43final few battles you see
11:45uh in september 550 000 american troops
11:50and then
11:501 million 200 000 american troops and so
11:54hundreds of thousands of american troops
11:57being prepared being shipped over
11:59and joining the war uh over this
12:01relatively brief period of time
12:03and they are joining a war in which the
12:06other combatants
12:07have been battering away at each other
12:09already
12:10for pretty much three full years and so
12:14their forces were very much exhausted
12:18depleted worn down struggling to find
12:21reinforcements and suddenly you have
12:23this influx of
12:24hundreds of thousands of fresh american
12:27soldiers
12:28you really did stem the the tide
12:32during the war
12:40[Music]
12:54you

About this transcript

This page contains the full transcript of HIST 112 US 1877- present Chapter 20 Part 4 The US Home Front during World War I by History Class with Dr. W, generated from the public captions YouTube serves with the video. The transcript has 1,683 words across 324 segments, with the original timestamps preserved so you can click any line to jump to that moment in the embedded player.

What you can do with it

Use the transcript to take notes, quote the speaker, build a study guide, generate a summary with ChatGPT or Claude via the YouTube Summary tool, or export it as a timed subtitle file with YouTube to SRT. You can also re-open it in the transcriber to translate the transcript into 100+ languages.

Free YouTube transcript tool

YouTube2Text is a free YouTube transcript generator — no signup, no daily limit. Paste any YouTube link and get the full transcript instantly, with timestamps, click-to-jump, translation to 100+ languages, AI prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and exports to TXT, SRT, VTT, or Markdown.