This week, I’m asking you to take a deep dive into the horrors of the First World War. One hundred years ago, there was no Internet or social media. I want you to imagine what things might have looked like if there had been.
For this assignment, I am asking you to adopt the character of a person fighting and suffering during this era and write up a blog post for them. Choose one of the following six individuals to portray:
- An Austrian nobleman on the day of the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination (June 28th, 1914)
- An American survivor of the sinking of the R.M.S. Lusitania (May 7th, 1914)
- A German soldier during the Battle of Verdun (February-December, 1916)
- A British soldier during the Battle of the Somme (June-November, 1916)
- A French woman on the home front
- A Russian factory worker during the March Revolution (March, 1917)
In order to do well on this assignment, you will need to do some solid historical research on the great War. Feel free to use both traditional and online sources, but the sources must be scholarly and you must list them in a bibliography attached to your post. Here are some websites that you might find useful:
- of the History Learning Site
Please format the bibliography in whatever format is required by your major or the one you feel most comfortable with.
Assignment Requirements:
The blog post must be submitted through the Assignments tool as a Word document. For help on how to do this, please see this article from .
The text portion of the blog post must be between 600 and 900 words.
The post should show historical knowledge as well as a creative effort to write in the “voice” of the person you’ve chosen to portray. Because blog posts are by their nature informal, I expect a certain degree of informality in your writing, though you do need to remember to proofread for proper grammar, syntax, and punctuation. If you choose a non-English speaking character, you should still write in English (though using some “native tongue” expressions is certainly both appropriate and fun).
Blog posts also often include multimedia elements (images, animations, audio and video clips, etc.), so you should include some of these as well. Be sure to list the sources in your bibliography.
