Through vivid storytelling and rich historical detail, Sandler brings to life the key figures and moments of 1919, from Woodrow Wilson and Eugene Debs to Alice Paul and Marcus Garvey. He explores the complex interplay of race, class, and gender in shaping the nation's response to these events, as well as the enduring legacy of their impact on American society.

1919 The Year that Changed America is a book that you will want to be sure to read in 2019. Martin W. Sandler looks back 100 years to this watershed year in United States history that included fights for suffrage to race riots to strikes for labor rights and more.

Sandler lays the groundwork for each big event by discussing the events leading up to the momentous actions of 1919. At the end of each chapter, Sandler includes a timeline of events going forward to today, driving home how the events of 1919 have shaped our present.

Extremely well-written and informative and filled with images, 1919 is an engrossing read and a fantastic concept. I love a good commemorative read, and I'm so glad that I didn't miss out on this one.

Sandler is a good storyteller, sharing carefully chosen details to draw in his readers as he recounts a formative year in US history. I recommend this book with some caveats. It's very US-centric. For international schools, I would have liked more discussion of what kind of global impact these events had. My other complaint is that I didn't always follow the connections he tries to make between events in 1919 and America today. For example, after the section about labor strikes in 1919, he talks about climate change and the need for renewable energy, a concern I share, but without an obvious connections to the historical events described in the chapter. Still, I recommend this for US students who enjoy history.

I found the use of timelines helpful and the relation of past events to more contemporary issues. I'm not sure my students will pick this up on their own, but I do have students to recommend this title to.

While I can see that this is a good non-fiction title, the text and photographs of the galley were so mixed, broken, and convoluted, that it was nearly unreadable. Text from one chapter somehow, it appeared, was moved to another. Picture captions were mixed with the narrative text, and pictures, timelines and backgrounds were so broken up that it was very difficult to follow.

I expect these previews to be a bit rough, but I also expect to be able to read them.

While I knew a little about the events of 1919, I hadn't really put them together in the way that this informative book does. Yes, I knew about the Great Molasses Flood thanks to Joan Hiatt Harlow's 2002 Joshua's Song, but I had never tied it in to companies wanting to hoard molasses in order to make as much run as possible before Prohibition! It's good to see coverage of women's suffrage at this particular moment, right before 1920, and in the wake of the war. The Red Scare chapter helped lay the ground for all the fears about Communism after WWII, and the descriptions of the large number of strikes occurring made sense given the general air of social changes and concern for working conditions. The chapter on Prohibition was a nice overview.

What blew me away was the chapter on the Red Summer. I'd never heard of it. The history teachers in my building had never heard of it. Everyone should have. It was a HUGE deal, and involved more than riots in just Chicago, although the racial incidents came to a head there with a young African-American man being killed by a rock thrown by a white man because of a segregated beach. Sandler does a great job at tying many of these century old issues into topics of concern today, well illustrating the fact that if we don't remember history, it's going to be repeated.

I think that schools tend to teach history in isolation-- I only had World History for one year in school, so never had a good feel for how US history fit into that much larger picture. Of course, our textbooks ended with the Korean conflict, so we never studied anything about civil rights at all.

History that is not main line is definitely ignored, even today. If the US history teachers have not heard of the Red Summer, who else would? It's difficult to align EVERYTHING that happened in the world, but I do think history books need to get better about giving a more complete picture and incorporating history about all people.

I have one African-American student who loves to read about civil rights history, because his grandmother was born in Alabama in 1954 and has some stories that alarm him. He is reading about Medgar Evers right now, and his comment was "I thought it was just Martin Luther King. But there are a whole lot of people who worked for civil rights." Yes. Yes there were. His class is now reading about WWII, and I made sure he got Sheinkin's Port Chicago 50 so that he can chime in with another view point during class discussions.

Though written for young adults, anyone who wants a quick summary of the evens in 191 and an explanation of how those events changed the world should pick up this book and if no read it cover to cover, at least glance at some of the seminal events. Well-written in such a manner that effect of the events one doesn't even think about are explained and why they are important is illuminated.

A hundred years ago was a time of war, social inequality, and injustice. It is interesting that even though it may seem like such a long time ago, some things haven't changed. This book depicts what life was life during this time and how people lived their lives through it.