Project Showcase: The Great War Project

14 April 2014 – John Felton

“It was a big war a long time ago.”

That was all that a young man shopping recently at a farmers market in Santa Monica, California, could say about World War I.  He’s not alone.  Most Americans seem to know very little about the war, which somehow has gotten lost in our collective memory about our past.

That’s why my colleagues and I – all of us former reporters, producers, or editors at National Public Radio – are embarking on what we call the Great War Project. The goal is to produce radio documentaries and shorter pieces, plus a website, making World War I come alive for contemporary audiences.

We hope to “report” the war as it happened – but with 100 years of perspective.

We’ll tell the stories of people involved in and affected by the war.  Our reporting will not be a dry recitation of battles and great power diplomacy. Instead, in the classic fashion of public radio, we will use diaries, memoirs, and other sources to tell about soldiers, sailors, airmen, relief workers, families left at home, workers in arms factories, generals, political leaders – in short, the people around the world who experienced the war.

And, just as importantly, we’ll try to explain how the war had an enormous impact on so many events since that time.

Our reporting will start this summer, the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the war. If people like what they hear and support our work, we’ll continue on through the course of the war, to the 100th anniversary of the November 1918 armistice.

In addition to documentaries and shorter pieces on radio, we will create a  rich multi-media website, with photos, audio, video, diaries – indeed an entire range of material about the war and its impact.

One of our goals is to create a search engine that will make it easier than it now is for Americans to locate information about their great-grandfathers and other family members who fought in the war.

And this brings me back to the quote at the top of this post.

Two of my colleagues went to that farmers market to ask people what they knew about the war. Most admitted that they knew nothing other than that it had been a major war in what they viewed as the distant past. Some thought that maybe their ancestors had fought in the war, but few knew any details.

By itself, our project is not going to revive the history of World War I in the minds of all Americans. But combined with what others are doing, we hope our reports, which will be heard by millions of people, will remind people not only of the sacrifices military personnel and their families made a century ago but also of the lasting impact of the first truly global war.

This project is a major undertaking, one that we are doing without any institutional support from NPR or other organizations. To raise the initial seed money, we have turned to a twenty-first-century technique: raising money through the Internet.

Our website – still very much a work in progress – has several options for interested people to help support our project.  Please take a look and tell friends, colleagues, and others who might be interested in supporting our work.

Also, we are looking for personal accounts of life during the war that we can use in our radio reports and on our website.  We are looking for diaries, memoirs, audio recordings–anything that will help us tell compelling stories about life at the front and at home in wartime.

Our project’s e-mail address is [email protected]

The members of our team are: Mike Shuster, Alex Chadwick, John McChesney, Loretta Williams, Katie Davis, and myself.

~ John Felton is a former NPR foreign editor and current freelance journalist specializing in foreign affairs. He is the author of The Contemporary Middle East: A Documentary History, published by CQPress in Washington, DC.