In late summer of 1918, three things came to Boston: war, plague, and the World Series. Putting a human face on these outsized events from a century ago, Skip Desjardin tells of the Massachusetts militia volunteers who led the first unified American fighting force into battle in France, even as the world's deadliest pandemic—the Spanish Flu—erupted in Boston, and a young pitcher named Babe Ruth rallied the Red Sox. Panoramic in scope, the characters in this history include Calvin Coolidge, Knut Rockne, E.E. Cummings, suffrage leader Maud Wood Park; and teenager David Putnam, one of America's first World War I flying aces.