With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

What a Century! Observing the Centenary of the First World War

Historians have a love-hate relationship with major anniversaries of historical events. An anniversary like the approaching centenary of the start of the Great War in 1914 does on the one hand bring increased book sales, more attention to their work, and more frequent academic conferences on their subject. The 90th anniversary of 1917, the year the United States entered World War I, took me to conferences in Australia, Israel, and France in the span of a few months. Those gatherings gave me a chance to meet likeminded scholars from around the globe and expand my knowledge of facets of the First World War that I had not fully considered. Anniversaries can inspire a whole new generation of scholarship, especially when they mark an event as fundamental to the history of the modern world as the First World War.

But such commemorations can also be frustrating to scholars. People inevitably ask them to sum up in a few lines the complex subject they have been studying most of their professional lives. All of a sudden, journalists, politicians, and even other academics discover a deep interest in a subject that specialists have always found fascinating. The newly enamored may even be inspired to write books and articles, despite their temporary interest. Indeed, the bookshelves and blogosphere are already filling rapidly with work by people now calling themselves historians of the First World War—all because the approaching anniversary has a couple of zeros at the end.

So far, to no one's surprise, most of the attention to the approaching centenary has arisen in Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In the United States, we may either commemorate the war in 2017, to mark the 100th anniversary of American entry into the war, or let it pass altogether. Unlike its counterparts across the globe, the United States government has done little planning for the event beyond asking the Postal Service to issue a commemorative stamp and forbidding the construction of a World War I memorial on the National Mall in Washington. The serious thinking about the anniversaries has come from the National World War I Museum at the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, from private groups with links to the war, and from academics hoping to influence the discourse about what this most critical of all wars means 100 years after its outbreak.

Modern politics tend to interfere with and distort societies' anniversary commemorations. Frequently, historical events are used for political gain or refracted through the prism of the present. Thus did the 50th anniversaries of World War I revolve around a revulsion toward the elites of 1914 and all they stood for. That period produced the scathing British play (later made into a movie) Oh! What a Lovely War and a resurgence in interest in the supposedly antiwar British trench poets, even though that label does not exactly describe most of them.They were antiwar in seeing it as a waste and a tragedy, but they all wanted their side to win and were willing to keep fighting to achieve that aim. The retrospective stereotypes obfuscate more than they clarify... 

Read entire article at HistoryNet