When the United States entered World War I 100 years ago this spring — a decision made when it seemed there was no other choice left — changed the course of the war, and the trajectory of American history. So it's no surprise that people all over the world expressed their complicated feelings about that turning point in a wide variety of visual formats, from newspaper cartoons to fine art.

Seen above are just a few of the many such artifacts from the collection of the Library of Congress that, through combined firsthand accounts and arguments from the time, the library is using to tell the story of that time, in the new book America and the Great War: A Library of Congress Illustrated History, a companion to an exhibition there. It was, as Stanford's David M. Kennedy notes in the introduction to the book, a "dramatic and convulsive" moment in American history, and one that left an extensive record of artifacts that conveyed that tumult.