The Weekly War

How the Saturday Evening Post Reported World War I

By Chris Dubbs and Carolyn Edy. Review by Adam T. Steveley

Article published on: December 1, 2025 in the Army History Winter 2025 Issue

Read Time: < 7 mins

Chris Dubbs and Carolyn Edy. University of North Texas Press, 2023 Pp. viii, 279. 34.95

In The Weekly War: How the Saturday Evening Post Reported World War I, authors Chris Dubbs and Carolyn Edy provide an expert retelling of the United States’ most comprehensive international expedition and how it was depicted through the pages of the nation’s most popular circulation magazine. Having previously written comprehensive works covering the broad topics of journalism in the American Expeditionary Force and the importance of female war correspondents during America’s coming of age, the authors narrow their scope to recount how the era’s most well-known magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, told the stories of World War I, from the war’s outbreak to its armistice. The authors’ ability to transport their readers back to the age of the American Expeditionary Force, trench warfare, and news by print journalism is remarkable. In today’s world of twenty-four-hour news cycles and sound-bite reporting, literary journalism may seem as antiquated as war on which it reported; however, Dubbs and Edy provide an expertly curated selection of readings that transport their audience back to America’s entry into global affairs.

Through presenting a collection of the magazine’s most well-written, comprehensive, and representative articles, Dubbs and Edy introduce today’s readers to the era’s most luminary writers; many of whom, in a time before television and radio, were once household names (6). At the same time, they tell the story of how a floundering newspaper was transformed into the nation’s most widely circulated magazine by its visionary editor, George Horrace Lorimer, and how this magazine delivered the feelings and emotions of war to those on the home front. The most notable strength of this work is the opening pages of each chapter, in which the authors briefly set the stage concerning the war’s timeline and contextualize the primary sources that follow. This gives an excellent overview to those not intimately familiar with the details of the Great War and makes the text that follows more accessible. Like the journalists they represent, Dubbs and Edy have no pretention about their tactical expertise. Rather, like the journalists whose stories they tell, the authors are expert story tellers who consistently use the power of narrative to bring to life the human elements of war.

Interestingly, in an era that often is critiqued as an age of unquestioned, boisterous Americanism, Dubbs and Edy show how the Post’s writers covered the unfolding of the war from the perspective of all its belligerents. Additionally, the authors take special care to highlight how it was often the women of journalism who, because of prevailing stereotypes of the era, were able to get the best access to frontline troops and other restricted areas by posing as nurses and noncombatant morale workers (189). In another break from what is now assumed to be the pervasive pessimism of the age, Dubbs and Edy recall the exuberance and gallantry of the nation’s youth as they marched off to war (108). Unlike many books written about how humanity experiences war, this work succeeds in retelling how the true feelings of war—patriotism, valor, excitement, fear, and boredom—often are experienced in immediate proximity to one another. Overall, the authors succeed in their efforts not because of their own expertise but because they set the stage for the era’s own premier journalists to tell their own stories.

If the book has any noticeable flaw, it is its brevity. At just under 250 pages, The Weekly War leaves plenty of primary source material unused. Certainly, this was done intentionally to improve the readability of the book and decrease a reader’s likelihood of being bogged down by historical detail. However, the overall story is so riveting and the book is so well-written that it leaves the audience wanting more. Dubbs and Edy do an excellent job in challenging preconceived notions of how the story of world war reached an American audience without falling into the trap of becoming revisionists. The book easily could be extended to include an afterward on how the Post continued to inform and influence American’s perspective in the interwar years or on what we have lost without trusted authors writing for such a widely circulated magazine today.

Those who want to know more about what it was like to experience World War I from the home front would do well to add this book to their reading list. Rather than focusing only on the fighting troops or those they left behind, this book, like war itself, intertwines these stories. Dubbs and Edy’s work adds significantly to a field of history that, although deeply researched, is rarely covered from a novel perspective. Through this book, those new to the field will be able to gain a sense of the breadth and complexity of the Great War while those with a thorough knowledge of the conflict will gain a greater understanding of what it felt like to live in an age of unprecedented uncertainty and change.