The Bruising Battle

The Bruising Battle

After returning from the Paris Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson was determined to see the United States join the League of Nations, as he told the members of Congress. Still, many American politicians were unsure of whether entry into the League would be good for the United States. In order to fight for ratification, Wilson began a public speaking tour of the country in order to convince the American people to sway their senators in support of his plan.

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Touring the Ruins

Touring the Ruins

One hundred years ago, in June of 1919, President Wilson took a break from the peace conference in Paris to take a trip through Belgium by automobile. In a letter to his wife, after a long anecdote, Dr. Grayson mentions that he, himself, will be glad to go on the trip, suggesting the frustrations of their time facing off with diplomats in France. A memo to one of the drivers beforehand shows that this would include several cars from America and suggests the complexity of planning the tour.

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Mining Text

Mining Text

One thing that scholars have been doing with all of the historical sources and literary works online these days is to apply tools of linguistic analaysis to the texts. For instance, if you take Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government from 1885 and look at weighted word frequencies through what is called a word cloud, you can see what sort of language he was using

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Wilson's Sheep

Wilson's Sheep

For several years, beginning in the spring of 1918, a flock of sheep grazed on the White House Lawn. After America entered World War I, the sheep helped to save manpower by keeping the grass trimmed. We don’t exactly who came up with the idea, but Dr. Cary Grayson contacted his horseracing friend Wiliam Woodward about getting some sheep for the president. Woodward sent along a small flock from his farm in Maryland by wagon.

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