The Great War: Expressions of Remembrance

 A hundred years ago, what would be at least 12,000 miles of trenches were just getting started, and half of these trenches would be on the Western Front. Soldiers were just settling in and the German/Austrian invasion of Polish territory was just beginning. The links that follow are a brief smattering of international expressions of remembrance starting with remembering the world as well as the war.

Falvey Memorial Library is participating in Home Before the Leaves Fall, a multi-institutional project. The UK Telegraph encourages us to do more to remember and asks, What if Archduke Franz Ferdinand had lived? The Royal British Legion asks us to remember the story of the poppy. McMaster University has a special online exhibition of WWI Trench Maps and Aerial Photographs. Special poster exhibits can be seen at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Library of Congress. The International Encyclopedia of the First World War, from the Freie Universität Berlin, is a work in progress and speaks to the fact that “Imperialism shaped almost every facet of international politics from 1898 to 1914.”

France remembers the first soldiers killed in WWI.

The Paths of Memory project will take several years to complete. The places of memory selected have one trait in common: they are all situated within the present-day frontiers of countries of the six institutions partnering on the project.

A hundred years ago the war on the Western Front was just beginning. Today Germany is still burying Eastern Front dead. Germany recently opened its last big war cemetery in Russia, “marking the culmination of a huge effort to recover Wehrmacht soldiers killed on its Eastern Front in World War II.” In August, Russia opened an exhibition of Moscow’s life during WWI entitled “Moscow in the Years of World War One.”

For a bit of nostalgia where it all seems quite clear that it’s all just a little bit of history repeating, try these “History Repeating” lyrics.

Article and resources prepared by Merrill Stein, liaison librarian for geography and political science.