How to Follow Along with Our WWI Trip

Later tonight twelve Bethel University students, my colleague Sam, and I will be flying off to London to start our three-week adventure studying the history of the First World War on location in England, Belgium, France, and Germany.

I don’t expect to do a lot of blogging during the trip (maybe a few tweets — follow @cgehrz). But if you’re a longtime reader — or if you just stumbled across this blog and would like an introduction to one of its most popular themes — you can “follow along” by using the chart below.

Day by day it suggests some blog reading that relates to what we’ll be up to that day: mostly posts from my summer 2011 series in which I thought through this very trip (some matched up closely, some got changed as details came together), but then a few other Pietist Schoolman posts on the history of the war and its commemoration and legacy, plus links to the Bethel History Department blog (AC 2nd) on days that I expect to post updates.

Date	Where We’ll Be / What We’ll Be Doing	Suggested Reading
Jan. 4	Arriving in London	“Travel and Sojourning” or “Reclaiming Travel“
Jan. 5	London: Touring memorials in Whitehall and Hyde Park Corner	“Commemorating World War I: Lest We Forget”
Jan. 6	London: St Paul’s Cathedral, Museum of London	“Suffrage, Empire, and Strikes”
Jan. 7	London: National Army Museum (the Imperial War Museum is closed until June)	“Cathedrals of the Modern World: London”
Jan. 8	London: the Tate Britain	“Nevinson’s War”
Jan. 9	London: War Horse at the New London Theatre	Not much on theatre in my oeuvre, but next closest is… “Great Films about the Great War”
Jan. 10	Day trip to Oxford	“Tolkien, Lewis, and the Memory of War”
Jan. 11	London: free day	Visit our department blog for my first update
Jan. 12	Touring battlefield and memorial sites near Ypres	“What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown?” or “Last Post”
Jan. 13	Touring sites near Vimy Ridge and the Somme	“Commemorating World War I: Post-Christian Memory” or “The First War Documentary”
Jan. 14	Touring American sites near Belleau and Château-Thierry	“Text in Context: Readings for Our World War I Travel Course” or “Bennie and Mabel“
Jan. 15	Paris: Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, and Les Invalides	“Cathedrals of the Modern World: Paris and Ieper”
Jan. 16	Day trip to Versailles	“The Right Kind of Peace”
Jan. 17	Paris: free day	Visit our department blog for my second update
Jan. 18	Paris: sites associated with American expatriates and Armenian refugees	“Expats”
Jan. 19	Traveling to Munich	“A War of Words”
Jan. 20	Munich: the Pinakothek der Moderne	“Now Where?”
Jan. 21	Munich: free day	I’ll be using my day off to visit the Nazi sites at Nuremberg, so maybe read… “This Day in History: The Worst of Sinners”
Jan. 22	Munich: walking tour of Nazi sites	“The Capital of the Movement”
Jan. 23	Day trip to Dachau	“There’s No Crying in History: Teaching the Holocaust”
Jan. 24	Flying home to Minneapolis-St. Paul	“Loving War, Seeking Peace” or perhaps my series on how the war has been commemorated in Minnesota

After we get back, I’m sure I’ll have some reflections to share here (and some initial thoughts about my next new course — on the history of the Second World War), plus a couple of our students are planning to produce photo essays for their course research projects, which will also be published at the department blog.

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The Pietist Schoolman

The website and blog of historian Chris Gehrz