A Western University history professor’s First World War postcard project is being employed in communities, schools and libraries to localize The Great War for the younger generation.
In 2023, Jonathan Vance launched the project, sending replicas of postcards sent by soldiers overseas to the original addresses recorded on the cards.
He explains where the postcards had been archived.
In total, more than 400 cards were mailed out.
That went really well, noted Vance, although there was something they had not considered.
” The downside was that it only worked for places that had street addresses in 1914, and that only involved big cities. So we were missing out a considerable part of the country, certainly more than half of the country during the First World War.”
Vance continued, “So I wanted to find another way to do a slightly different project. but in such a way that we could bring in smaller towns and rural communities. And that led to the school project, which was last summer’s (2024) project.
“And so essentially it was the same basic process, but obviously directed at elementary and secondary school students in which we would give them a bunch of postcards from their own community.
Vance was assisted by three summer research students.
“And I think they’ve learned a lot, and I’ve learned a lot, and we’ve done a really good – we’ve done good work in getting this history out to the country.”
“We tried as much as we could to align it to the curriculum. And our other priority was to make this all ready to go for teachers. We didn’t want to send teachers kind of half-finished stuff that they would have to devote hours to.
“So this was a package that the teacher could quickly look over and it was all ready to go in the classroom. We sent them photocopies of everything so they didn’t even have to photocopy it. That’s what we wanted because you don’t want to create extra work for teachers because you think you’re doing good.
The packages included exercise sheets for students.
And this year, Vance and his research students expanded the project to include libraries and museums.
One of those libraries is the St. Thomas Public Library.
And as for next year, how about the world stage?
“We might go international and do the same thing that we did first year, the mailing out postcard thing, but to international addresses. Because Canadian soldiers in the First World War were from around the world. So it would be kind of interesting to do that and to use it to demonstrate the kind of multicultural society that we had in 1914 and Canada as part of the wider world.
“So that’s the early glimmery of an idea for next year. We’ll see how that develops.”
Written by Ian McCallum
