The American Girl Goes to War demonstrates the predominance of heroic female characters in in early narrative films about war. American Girls were filled with the military spirit of their forefathers and became one of the major ways that American women’s changing political involvement, independence, and active natures were contained by and subsumed into pre-existing American ideologies.
 

List of Illustrations
Introduction
1 American Girls and National Identity
2 Fighting Femininity on Home Soil in Civil War Films, 1908-1916
3 The American Revolution and Other Wars
4 Featuring Preparedness and Peace: America and the European War, Part I
5 From Serial Queens to Patriotic Heroines: America and the European War, Part II
6 The American Girl and Wartime Patriotism
Conclusion
Appendix 1: Civil War Films, 1908-1916
Appendix 2: World War I Films, 1914-1919
Additional Filmography
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

LIZ CLARKE is an assistant professor in communication, popular culture and film at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. She has published articles in Camera Obscura and Feminist Media Histories, as well as papers in edited anthologies New Perspectives on the War Film and Martial Culture, Silver Screen: War Movies and the Construction of American Identity.