Centenary News writer Dr Jillian Davidson has compiled the following summary of recent and upcoming academic centennial events in the United States.
Although America won’t be fully commemorating the centenary of its participation in WWI until 2017, several American institutions are convening WWI conferences this coming year. Examples include:
July 27 2014, the National WWI Museum in Kansas City hosted ‘One Century Later’.
Journalist Barbara Pinto moderated a discussion amongst historians Mitch Yockelson, of the National Archives and the United States Naval Academy and author of Borrowed Soldiers: Americans under British Command, 1918 (2008); Graydon Tunstall, Senior Lecturer and Executive Director of Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society at the University of South Florida and author of Blood on the Snow: The Carpathian Winter War of 1915 (2010); and Chad Williams, Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University and author of Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (2010).
Co-sponsored by the WWI Museum, the National WWI Centennial Commission and the History Channel, the panel discussed ‘surprising ways WWI continues to shape our world, culture and lives’.
To watch a video of the event, click here
September 11-14 2014, the Department of History and English at West Point, the United States Military Academy in NY, will host a conference on ‘Literature, Memory, and the First World War’.
Timed to commemorate the beginning of the war’s most salient feature, trench warfare, the conference will bring together up to 250 scholars to consider the literature inspired by trench warfare and the memory of it in our modern consciousness.
Speakers will include Professor Vincent Sherry, author of both the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War and The Great War and the Language of Modernism and Professor Michael Neiberg, founding member of the Société Internationale d’Étude de la Grande Guerre and author of Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War, The Second Battle of the Marne, The Western Front, 1914-1916 and editor of The World War I Reader: Primary and Secondary Sources.
For more information, click here
November 7-8 2014, the National WWI Museum in Kansas City will host a symposium entitled ‘1914 – Global War and American Neutrality’.
Co-sponsored by the Western Front Association and the World War One Historical Association, the symposium will examine the origins of, reactions to and early confrontations in the First World War.
Speakers include Christopher Capazzola, Associate Professor of History at MIT and author of Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (2008); John Milton Cooper, an expert in American diplomatic history, Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (2009); Robert Doughty, Chair of History at West Point and author of Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War (2005); and Nicholas A. Lambert, associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute, Whitehall, London and author of Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War (2012).
For more information, click here
November 14-15, 2014, the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia, will present a ‘World War I Centennial Symposium’.
In partnership with the Hampton Roads Naval Museum and the Old Dominion University Department of History, the symposium will address the question of how the self-proclaimed modern, civilized world crashed into a war that engulfed the globe and consumed 10,000,000 lives and explore the early stages of the war.
Speakers include Catrine Clay, former director of documentaries at BBC television and author of King Kaisar Tsar (2006); Frederick Dickinson, professor of Japanese History at the University of Pennsylvania and author of World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919-1930 (2013); Nimrod Frazer, author of Send the Alabamians: World War I Fighters in the Rainbow Division (2014); and Holger Herwig, Professor of History at the University of Calgary and Canada Research Chair in the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies and author of The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918 (1996) and The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle that Changed the World (2009).
For more information, click here
February 6-7, 2015, the College of Arts and Sciences at University of South Florida in Tampa is marking the centenary of the outbreak of war with a ‘World War I Conference: 100 years of impact’.
Discussing the impact of the war on the U.S. and the world, keynote speakers include Dennis Showalter, a Professor of History at Colerado College and author of Tannenberg: Clash of Empires 1914; Hew Strachan, Chichele Professor of the History of War at All Souls College, Oxford and author of The First World War (2005); and John H. Morrow Jr., Professor of History at the University of Georgia, Charles A. Lindbergh Visiting Professor (1988-9) at the National Air and Space Museum and the author of The Great War in the Air (1993) and The Great War: An Imperial History (2004).
For more information, click here
Posted by: CN Editor