The designation meant national fame for Hoboken General John J. Pershing’s promise to the troops that they’d be in “Heaven, Hell or Hoboken” by Christmas of 1917 became a national rallying cry for a swift end to the war, which actually dragged on for another year. But it also meant economic hardship for the city after the federal government seized Hoboken’s piers and the German shipping lines, closed most of its bars and beer gardens, and displaced or interned hundreds of German nationals as “enemy aliens.” At the time, German citizens and Americans of German descent made up about 25 percent of Hoboken’s population, far outnumbering the next largest immigrant groups, Irish and Italians.

Education coordinator Sherrard Bostwick is developing programs for local school groups to experience the exhibition through activities such as imagining what soldiers might have taken with them to remind them of home.

Ziegler-McPherson will give a talk on Sunday, Oct. 5 at 4 p.m. at the Museum. (admission is $5, free for Museum members, exploring the federal government’s struggle to build the infrastructure necessary to conduct the war, using a combination of persuasion, exhortation and coercion to drum up volunteers both to fight and to muster supplies and logistics for the effort. Most of the local draft boards, for example, were staffed by volunteers, as were the medical experts who examined the new recruits, she says.

The government hired so-called “dollar-a-year” men, professionals who donated their time and expertise to the war effort. The Red Cross, YMCA, and other social service organizations mobilized volunteers to conserve food and fuel, sell war bonds, and provide recreation, entertainment and spiritual services to the troops. Sometimes, volunteerism went too far, however, according to Ziegler-McPherson, as large networks of self-appointed vigilantes developed, such as the “American Protective League,” which numbered some 10,000 members nationally, who opened mail and spied on neighbors in the name of helping the government identify possible German operatives.

Then in November, historian Ann Hagedorn, author of 2007’s Savage Peace, Hope and Fear in America, 1919, will talk about the tensions generated throughout the nation by WWI and its aftermath. According to the author’s website, the book tells the story of the watershed year just after World War I, when the nation’s struggles eerily resemble ours today. Savage Peace is a striking portrait of American democracy under stress, at a time when Americans worried about terrorism and were deeply divided over the issues of domestic spying, free speech, immigration and U.S. intervention abroad.