Most major centennials are accompanied by the establishment of a unique centennial commission by the United States Senate which acts as an official body to oversee a centennial. The United States World War One Centennial Commission was brought into existence on the 16 January 2013 when President Barack Obama signed into law the World War I Commission Act and has been tasked with directly planning commemorative events, encouraging private organisations and local governments to participate in proceedings, disseminating information about centennial events and providing recommendations for both Congress and the President for appropriate way to commemorate the centennial.

The commission is set to carry out its duties until 2019 and will do so with the assistance of a voluntary network of partner organisations such as the National WWI Museum, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion. The act deemed that the 2014 centennial provided an opportune moment for the people of the United States to learn about the history of the nation’s involvement in the First World War, which suggests that the anniversary of the outbreak of the war itself rather than American belligerency is perhaps an important enough occurrence to garner interest in the nation’s past.

Yet because the centennial anniversary of United States belligerency is still to come, the frequency of commemorative events within the United States that have taken place this year, compared with nations such as Britain, has been relatively low. It is as if present day events are mirroring the initial reaction of the past, in that the “European War” holds the nation’s interest but is not to be engaged with directly; only the American experience will be taken into account. One of the National WWI Museum’s first major commemorative events, a symposium titled “1914: Global War and American Neutrality” held on the 7th and 8th of November, seems to epitomise this by choosing to focus on American neutrality over other aspects of the war despite the museum’s normal role as a museum of the entire war. This semi-involved state of affairs perhaps sends out a reminder to the world that, whilst a major participant in the war, the United States needs to be remembered as a late-comer which did not instigate the horrors of war and chose a path of peace whilst it could.