Public History Commons^™

Ms-238: Prisoner Of War Letters From World Wars I And Ii, Kelly A. Murphy

All Finding Aids

This collection consists of various correspondence between POWs and their families, including 86 letters, 174 postcards, and about eight package slips during both world wars. Most of this correspondence was authored by the prisoners and sent to their families from camps in Europe, although it contains some correspondence from camps in Asia and Africa. The collection also contains correspondence from prisoners in concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, and from interned civilians in France and Germany. Because these letters were the main way to contact family members, most of the POW correspondence contain thoughts of homesickness and loneliness along with updates …

Arnold Whitridge: Scholar And Veteran Of Two Armies And Two Wars, Keith J. Muchowski

Publications and Research

This is an invited blog post written for Roads to the Great War, a site dedicated to the study of the First World War edited by historian Mike Hanlon. The article discusses the life and career of Arnold Whitridge, a soldier, scholar and grandson of British poet Matthew Arnold.

This is the url:

http://roadstothegreatwar-ww1.blogspot.com/2017/01/arnold-whitridge-scholar-and-veteran-of.html

American Battleship At War: Uss New York, Keith J. Muchowski

Publications and Research

This invited blog post tells the story of the USS New York, a dreadnought built just prior to the outbreak of the First World War and decommissioned after World War II.

On The Fields Of Glory: A Student’S Reflections On Gettysburg, The Western Front, And Normandy, Kevin P. Lavery

The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History

I’m very fortunate to have had no shortage of opportunities to get out into the field and put my classroom learning into practice. I am especially lucky to have twice had the opportunity to travel to Europe. Two years ago, I went with my first-year seminar to explore the Western Front of World War I in France and Belgium. This year, I travelled with The Eisenhower Institute to tour the towns and beaches of Normandy where the Allies launched their invasion of Hitler’s Europe during World War II. Having experienced these notable sites of military history, and having taken a …

“To Fly Is More Fascinating Than To Read About Flying”: British R.F.C. Memoirs Of The First World War, 1918-1939, Ian A. Isherwood

Civil War Institute Faculty Publications

Literature concerning aerial warfare was a new genre created by the First World War. With manned flight in its infancy, there were no significant novels or memoirs of pilots in combat before 1914. It was apparent to British publishers during the war that the new technology afforded a unique perspective on the battlefield, one that was practically made for an expanding literary marketplace. As such former Royal Flying Corps pilots created a new type of war book, one written by authors self-described as “Knights in the Air”, a literary mythology carefully constructed by pilots and publishers and propagated in the …

Ms-103: Jes Jerry Jessen World War I Letters, Kate Boeree

All Finding Aids

This collection contains 109 letters written by Jes Jerry Jessen addressed to his family in Spokane, WA, including his mother and father, his brothers George and Ralph, his sister Helen (“La La”) and his aunt Molly between June 6th, 1917 and June 22nd, 1919. These letters follow him through his training in Vancouver, Washington; Charlotte, North Carolina; France; and Germany, where his correspondence ends.

Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids are discovery tools used to describe and provide access to our holdings. Finding aids include historical and biographical information about each collection in addition to inventories of their content. …

Ms-048: World War I Service Questionnaires, Keith R. Swaney

All Finding Aids

After the conclusion of the First World War, two distinct entities at Pennsylvania (Gettysburg) College—Professor S. N. Hagen and the Phi Delta Theta fraternity— endeavored to document and commemorate the experiences of the college’s graduates in the First World War.

The first section contains the Phi Delta Theta questionnaires, which the fraternity sent to its alumni to record their participation in the field or on the home front. As the questionnaires note, the historian of the Pennsylvania College chapter wished to use this information in a publication to be entitled the “Karux.”

The second section contains questionnaires that Hagen, a …