About This Project

   This project is intended to satisfy the requirements of the World War I Legacy class taught this semester in recognition of the 100 year anniversary of the beginning of World War I. My goal for the class was to incorporate travel and a study of public history into the project. Sites of interest have been an important part of our travel experience. Picture me reading the guide book as we drive the highways or walk in a city. In preparation for the class my husband and I scheduled a trip to France and I started searching for history museums in France. There was quite a selection. We considered Verdun, Alsace-Loraine, .... or even some sites in Belgium. I settled on Musee de la Grande Guerre pay de Meaux because it was just east of Paris, easily accessible, and it opened in 2011.

   Once that destination was settled it became apparent that the nearby National World War I Museum should be part of the study. I had visited that museum a number of years ago and was taken back by the sea of poppies underneath the glass walkway into the museum. When the docent explained that each poppy represented 10,000 casualties I was stunned. I had not understood the extent of this war. It, too, is a newer institution opening in 2006.

   In a prior class I had compared and contrasted museums of the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Midway into that study I found that the name of what I was doing was "Public History".  Broadly, public history includes "all the means, deliberate and otherwise, through which those who are not professional historians acquire their sense of the past" quote by Ludmilla Jordanova (2000:20) (Beck 30). My study of public history is limited to these two museums, although there is no end to the Public History of the Great War.