History WW1 Essay

History WW1 Essay

Instructions/Descriptions

History WW1 Essay

Our first essay offers an opportunity for you to explore a major theme in the history of the First World War either by drawing on some of the primary sources we have read, or by exploring some of the resources accessible via the website of the Imperial War Museum in London. Here are four criteria for an excellent paper: (1) an incisive, illuminating thesis; (2) well-selected examples drawn from primary or archival sources; (3) awareness of the historical contexts in which these sources were created; and (4) clear, engaging, error-free writing.

(Choose 1 of next 5 prompts to write on)

1. Compare Rupert Brooke’s 1914 patriotic sonnets “Peace” and “The Soldier” with Alfred Lichtenstein’s sardonic “Prayer Before Battle,” also written in 1914, or Charles Hamilton Sorley’s haunting “When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead,” written in 1915. In what specific ways do their implied attitudes toward the war differ from each other? How do they use different poetic languages or strategies to convey different visions of the war? Why are these poems, in spite of their different visions of the war, equally powerful?

2. Almost three millennia ago, the ancient poet Homer created an enduring image of the hero: a warrior who combines pride in his extraordinary physical prowess on the battlefield with courageous leadership in the service of his cause and his comrades. During the First World War, a French general observed, “Three men and a machine gun can stop a battalion of heroes.” Choose any one or two of our authors and consider how he or she either supported the traditional image of heroism or challenged it by suggesting how the specific conditions of trench warfare on the Western Front rendered it obsolete.

3. It is difficult to imagine two more radically different autobiographical books about the First World War than Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear and Cecil Lewis’s Sagittarius Rising. What are some of the major differences between them, and how do you account for them? Please pay particular attention to experiences of combat, and analyze at least one passage from each work in detail.

4. Lost illusions, loss of innocence—these are among the salient themes of the memoir literature of the First World War. In what respects does Vera Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925, provide a classic example? Why was her account of her life as a middle-class woman caught in the vortex of the war so poignant and powerful?

5. Many of the poets and novelists of the First World War are still famous a century later: their books are still in print, their poems accessible via the internet. One of the advantages of the Imperial War Museum’s website is that it gives us access to the records about First World War participants who are not so well known, but whose lives and experiences are nevertheless worthy of study, if we can recover them.

The purpose of this prompt is to allow you to work with and create a very specific kind of history, which operates on the level of the individual and focuses on personal experiences as a way of viewing large-scale historical events. In doing so, we’re asking you to craft a history of one person and his or her relationship to the First World War by using the Imperial War Museum’s Lives of the First World War database. It might be helpful to think of this as similar to an encyclopedia entry; you are trying to find as much information as is relevant for an understanding of your individual’s experience of the First World War and to explain some of that information by linking it to the events of the war and trying to pull out some themes that punctuate this person’s experience.

Using the IWM Lives of the First World War database, choose a particular participant in the war and construct his or her profile and experiences of the war by considering the following questions:

1. What was this person’s age during the war, background, occupation, education, etc.? Here you should include the basic and relevant information about this person that helps you to understand what his or her wartime experience might have been like.

2. How did this person experience the war? In other words, what are some events or aspects of the war that he or she would have experienced and what were his or her responses to them? This will be speculative but do your best to offer a reason behind your speculation such as a fact from this person’s history.

3. What are some recurring themes in this person’s life and wartime experience? Consider concepts like personal vs. national identity, separation/alienation, beliefs/attitude, bravery, loss/trauma.

Notable Individuals We’ve broken up this list along the categories suggested by the Imperial War Museum to help you narrow down what type of experience you’re interested in exploring. The brief descriptions of each person are there to help you further in your choice but please note that your answers in steps 2 and 3 should go beyond these short blurbs. Lastly, feel free to go beyond this list in your choice if you know of another individual who might be featured in the IWM database but try not to spend too much time in making your choice.

Recruitment and Conscription:

Albert French—Volunteered underage at 16 years old

John Boon—Involved in the Derby Scheme and was called up at the end of 1916

Henry Wallace—Veteran of the Boer War who re-enlisted in Canada in 1914

Edward Forster—Pacifist who volunteered with the Red Cross

James Hudson or William Harrison—Refused to fight and were imprisoned as Conscientious Objectors

Thomas Hooker—Still at school when the war began and was conscripted on his 18th birthday

The British Home Front:

Beatrice Bennett—Member of the Women’s Land Army in West Sussex

Dorothy Brown—Munitions worker who died in an accidental explosion

Emma Watkins—Teacher at a school which was bombed during an air raid over London

William L Robinson—Earned a Victoria Cross for shooting down a Zeppelin airship over Hertfordshire

William Rivers—Treated ‘shell shock’ patients at Craiglockhart Hospital, including famous poet Siegfried Sassoon

Trench Warfare:

William Hackett—A tunneller who dug under the German trenches

Thomas Edmed—Fought in Gallipoli and the Western Front

Dorothy Lawrence—Disguised herself as a man with alias Denis Smith to serve as a soldier in the trenches

Rufus Rigney—An indigenous Australian who fought in Belgium

Alan Lloyd—A forward observing officer in the trenches who calculated enemy positions

Alfred Roy Reiffer—Involved in the first tank action in the Somme in 1916

Injuries and Treatment:

Beryl Butterworth—Member of First Aid Nursing Yeomanry

Charles Frampton—Suffered a shrapnel wound which became infected

Robert Jones—Surgeon who specialized in fractures

Ethel Smyth—Trained as a radiographer in France

Harold Gillies—Developed new techniques in plastic surgery

Geoffrey Keynes—Developed mobile blood transfusion units

Beyond the Western Front:

Flora Sandes-Yudenitch—The only British woman who officially served as a soldier, with the Serbian army

John Simpson Kirkpatrick—Australian medic who served in the Gallipoli campaign

Charles Algernon Fryatt—Captain of a merchant ship that encountered German submarines

Ralph Garland Hockaday—Served in Mesopotamia during the war, in what is now Iraq

Florence Farmborough—Served as a nurse in Russia

John Travers Cornwell—Took part in a naval battle at age 16 and received Victoria Cross

Charles Ernest E Bellamy—Barbadian who was awarded Distinguished Conduct Medal

Remembrance and Legacies:

John McCrae—Canadian medic who wrote the famous poem ‘In Flanders Fields’

Edith Cavell—Nurse whose death caused international outrage

William Towers—Wounded in the war and provided with an artificial leg

Evelyn Mackintosh—Member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service and died in 1918 influenza pandemic

Bertrand Trees—Born in the West Indies and killed in 1918 while serving at sea

Charlotte Meade—Died of TNT poisoning from working in a munitions factory

A note on format: The essay should be submitted with a length of five pages, double-spaced lines, one-inch margins, and size 12, Times New Roman font. A note on citation of sources: In all of your assignments, you may use words or ideas drawn from secondary sources in publications, web sites, or other media, but only with proper attribution. “Proper attribution” means that you have fully identified the original source and the extent of your use of the words or ideas of others that you reproduce in your work for this course, usually in the form of a footnote or parenthesis. As a general rule, if you are citing from a published source or from a web site and the quotation is short (up to a sentence or two), place it in quotation marks; if you employ a longer passage from a publication or web site, please indent it and use single spacing. In both cases, be sure to cite the original source in a footnote or in parentheses. Students are expected to familiarize themselves with and follow citation practices as described in either the MLA or Chicago Style Guides.

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