Unraveling Freedom: The Battle for Democracy on the Home Front During World War I

Bausman, Ann.   Unraveling Freedom:  The Battle for Democracy on the Home Front During World War I.   National Geographic, 2010.   

Audience:  Middle School, 12+

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Social Studies

Topics of Focus:  First Amendment Rights, Civil Liberties, Woodrow Wilson, World War I, Wartime Security

Bausman presents an appraisal of the challenges to civil liberties in the United States at the onset of World War I that is inconsistent in strength and effectiveness.   While her language is approachable to a younger, middle-school reader, it may be too advanced in concept and historical perspective for that same audience.  
Bausman sets up the key issues of civil liberties in her introduction, but then follows that information with a far-too-protracted account of events, specifically the sinking of the Lusitania, leading the United States into war.  Young readers will most likely skip an introduction and move right into the first couple of chapters.  Those readers may become frustrated and overwhelmed by the story of those critical events, losing track of the book’s intended focus.   Bausman also fails to establish what our foundational freedoms are as outlined in our national Constitution.  This failure prohibits the book from being read effectively without adult support.

Bausman’s book also disappoints in organization and use of visual embellishments.  The Forward cartoon would be better placed at the end of the text narrative when the reader has a stronger sense of the historical overview of limited freedoms in wartime.   A younger reader would not have enough background knowledge to fully understand the author’s meaning with this cartoon.   It seems to act solely as an edgy teaser capitalizing on the popularity of graphic novel formats.   While the visual design is meant to set the reader off balance (as noted on the copyright page), it fails to consistently support the narrative.   The red, white, and blue color scheme is effective in supporting the idea of freedom and national perspective, yet the colored floating bars are distracting and serve little purpose for the information.   The overuse of collage design distracts from the text itself.  The quote fonts used throughout each chapter are poorly chosen and mixed in style, breaking rules of effective text typography.    Aside notes and images put faces to the concepts, but they disrupt the narrative flow as connections are not always clear or well-situated on the page.

The author also claims that her topic has “rarely been the focus of scholarly study,” a statement I have found to be untrue in my own curriculum preparation on this topic over the last decade.  Perhaps the author needed to make use of a better librarian.

On the positive end, the appendix materials following the formal World War I chapters are useful and well placed.  Yet, references to this section should be made throughout the text for a greater comparative understanding of President Wilson’s policies.

Other than that final appendix, I found very little in this text to recommend its addition to a middle or high school library.

Annotation by Denise Aulik