For my final project for HIST 689, I am creating an Omeka exhibit over how the historical memory of WWI has been interpreted across different countries. I have narrowed my project down to specific countries such as the United States, Great Britain, and one or two other countries such as Russia and maybe a lesser-studied one such as Romania. My choice to narrow down my research emerged from the fact that there are literally thousands of monuments and memorials to the Great War. My overall goal of the final project is to have students learn about how historical interpretations of the conflict have emerged and how nations remember the war in different ways and for different reasons. I am subsequently interested in making the exhibit as interactive as possible while depicting how nations’ ideas of the war have changed.
I envision the final project to cover WWI and Cultural memory as well as how nations were affected by the war. There is a vast amount of primary sources on WWI such as digitized letters, diaries, political cartoons, newspapers, and WWI propaganda among other sources which will highlight the cultural memory of the war. My main section of the exhibit will include a geolocation map through Omeka to convey historical monuments and memorials from select countries as well as digitized primary sources through the WWI Museum and other museums. One possible way to convey historical memory through primary sources such as the Christmas Truce of 1914. I envision a section on WWI propaganda to convince citizens to join the conflict as well as first-hand accounts of Trench warfare if I can find them. I am subsequently interested in primary sources centered around the Versailles Treaty in 1919 and the end of the war.
My section on WWI propaganda will help to convey how nations viewed the war from 1914 to 1918. I envision this project to be a prototype of a potential larger chronology of the war through primary sources. My hope is that the project will provide students with historical thinking skills to answer various questions such as why specific nations went to war and how their experience impacted how they choose to remember the war.
