Suchergebnisse

British veterans of the First World War were avid writers. From The First Hundred Thousand to The Last Tommy, Britain's soldiers and aid workers left behind a vast literature of wartime memories. Veteran recollections have been a significant part of the formation of British popular memory of the conflict, as well as part of the 'cultural turn' in First World War studies since the 1980s. The war's literary legacy, it has been argued, has helped to frame the public narrative of the conflict. What has attracted less attention has been the British publishing industry's role in the dissemination of war memories to the public when those memories were most acute, the interwar period. This article considers the British publishing industry and commercial war memoirs. It assesses the literary marketplace for martial literature and the commercial memory of the First World War in the interwar period.

In the summer of 2015, a team at Gettysburg College formed in order to tell the story of British officer H.J.C. "Jack" Peirs through the letters he wrote home during the First World War. For the last 3 years, our team, with the support of student assistants, has maintained a digital history project that publishes Jack's letters 100 years to the day they were written. By telling the story of one person, we have helped to humanize a dehumanizing war and raised awareness of all who sacrificed during the Great War. While the project was conceived with pedagogy in mind, it has grown beyond the letters and crossed boundaries: from the analog to the digital, from the classroom to the public, and from the archives to the field. Isherwood, Lucadamo, and Miessler will discuss how the Peirs project has evolved, how it has engaged with the public, and plans for what comes after Armistice Day.

Using the framework of The First World War Letters of H.J.C. Peirs: A Digital History, this workshop will give guidance for team-building and project management, provide examples of Digital Humanities tools and methods that can be used with First World War collections, and outline pedagogical uses for digital history in the classroom.

The First World War Letters of H.J.C. Peirs is a digital history project that publishes the letters of a British World War I officer 100 years to the day they were written. By telling the story of one person, we have aimed to humanize a dehumanizing war and supported the effort to commemorate the centennial of the conflict. While the project was conceived with pedagogy in mind, it has grown beyond the letters and crossed boundaries: from the analog to the digital, from the classroom to the public, and from the archives to the field.

In September 2015, our team launched The First World War Letters of H.J.C. Peirs (www.jackpeirs.org), a digital history initiative built on collaboration between faculty, students, and library staff. The project is founded on amazing primary source material, but with limited financial support and little dedicated staff time. We leveraged the creativity and hard work of our team members to build a website that is maintained by students and enhanced whenever possible with features and commentary from faculty and staff. Members of #TeamPeirs discussed the evolution of the project, the nature of our collaboration, and the intersection of audiences we have discovered.

Although war memoirs constitute a rich, varied literary form, they are often dismissed by historians as unreliable. This collection of essays is one of the first to explore the modern war memoir, revealing the genre's surprising capacity for breadth and sophistication while remaining sensitive to the challenges it poses for scholars. Covering conflicts from the Napoleonic era to today, the studies gathered here consider how memoirs have been used to transmit particular views of war even as they have emerged within specific social and political contexts