World War I in Our Minds: A Historical View

[Draggingtree]

World War I in Our Minds: A Historical View

Mises Daily: Wednesday, October 22, 2014 by T. Hunt Tooley

The fiftieth anniversary of the First World War in 1964 felt nothing like the current centennial observances. It is worth asking what has changed. When I was growing up in the sixties in a small town in Texas, World War I seemed as remote to me as the Revolutionary War. Not that the conflict was not unknown to me. In our city park there was a statue of a First World War soldier and a memorial to hometown sons who had died in the war. And my grandmother and grandfather .told me stories of relief and celebration in 1918 at the war’s end,

 

At school, the dumbing down of “social studies” was already well underway, but my teachers did mention the war, though with few details included. Most of those possessed of a public school education in the mid-sixties had at least a chance of encountering Alan Seeger’s poem, “I Have a Rendezvous With Death.” And I had heard of historical episodes like the Lost Battalion.

http://mises.org/daily/6933/World-War-I-in-Our-Minds-A-Historical-View