POETRY—Analyze in detail any one or two poems by Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen,
Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, and/or Alan Seeger. In what specific ways do the poem
or poems you have selected reflect particular aspects of the war as it was unfolding from
1916 onward?
2. MEMOIRS— In his great book about war memoirs, The Soldier’s Story, Samuel Hynes
identifies a common pattern in narratives about war: “the individual’s journey from
innocence into experience, the serial discovery of what had before been unimaginable,
the reality of war.” “Personal narratives,” he continues, “subvert the expectations of
romance. They work at a level below the big words and the brave sentiments. They don’t
glorify war, or aestheticize it, or make it literary or heroic; they speak in their own voices,
in their own plain language; they bear witness.” Apply these insights to any one or two
of the following: Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, Robert Graves’s Good-bye to All
That, Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel. Please analyze two or more specific passages in
which the writer(s) “subvert the expectations of romance” by refusing to glorify war. To
what specific realities of the war do they “bear witness”?
3. DIARIES AND LETTERS—James McPherson, the great historian of the American Civil
War, writes about Louis Barthas’s Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis
Barthas, Barrelmaker, as follows: “This translation of the diaries and letters of a French
corporal on the Western front in World War I brings the gritty reality of trench warfare to
an English-speaking audience in a manner unparalleled even in the best soldier writings
from that war. The reader feels and smells and hears the mud, the blood, the fear, the
deafening noise of exploding shells, the clatter of machine guns, the cries of the wounded
and dying. Here is the war as the men in the trenches experienced it.” Choose any three
passages from this rich primary source and use them to illustrate McPherson’s claim
about the gritty immediacy of the experiences captured in Barthas’s letters and diaries.
4. FILMS—Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1936), Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1958),
and Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) are three of the finest films
about the First World War. Compare any two of them, with particular attention to how
they depict the relationship between commanding officers and the men for whom they are
responsible and to whom they issue orders.
5. ORAL HISTORY—One of the extraordinary features of the Imperial War Museum’s
website is that it makes accessible the testimony of veterans and witnesses of the First
World War in their own words and voices, via interviews recorded during the second half
of the twentieth century. Choose any one of the interviews from the IWM Sound
Archive, and consider how this particular testimony sheds light on specific aspects of the
war and the speaker’s own experience in retrospect:
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/behind-the-voices.
A note on citation of sources: there is no need for elaborate footnotes, unless you use secondary
sources, including any you might find on-line, which must be cited in detail. Primary sources
may be cited with parenthetical references (e.g., Chevallier, Fear, p. 134).
The tips contained below are with regards to prompt 5 and are meant to help you better
understand the best practices for using oral history interviews, which are just another
type of primary source, in a history paper. These are merely guidelines meant to help
get everyone started, so do feel free to adapt them to your own writing style. Prompt 5,
if broken up into two parts, asks you to do the following:
A. Place the individual’s experiences and/or perspective within a larger historical or
social context.
B. Use the individual’s experiences and/or perspective to make an argument about
a larger historical or social context.
The following sections give suggestions on how to fulfill each part of prompt 5:
For part A. of this prompt, you want your essay to place the individual’s
experiences and/or perspective within a larger historical or social context, so
consider the following questions and responses:
What should you say about the interviewee’s comments?
Analyze the interviewee’s comments with a focus on what they illustrate about their
historical or social context. You might consider how your interviewee’s identity (his or
her class, gender, and ethnicity, for instance) relates to the nature of the interviewee’s
experience or perspective. For this kind of essay, you’ll need an analytical thesis
statement, a plan for how to organize the subtopics that demonstrate your thesis,
analysis/interpretation of the interviewee’s comments, and a conclusion that draws your
analysis together.
Example
Here is an example of how you might incorporate an oral history interview in your paper
in a way that places the interviewee’s experiences within their historical or social
context. Suppose that your paper is for a women’s studies project in which your
instructor has asked you to use an interview with a grandmother named Lucretia.
Suppose that the prompt asks you to consider Lucretia’s perception of her ability to
choose her own employment. Here is one example of how to integrate quotes from
Lucretia’s interview, along with some analysis (underlined) of how her experiences fit
into her social context. You may also include some references to secondary sources,
depending on the context of the quote in question and your own sense of whether they
would strengthen your analysis:
Lucretia describes feeling limited in terms of her occupational life: “I have always
been good at organizing things and getting along with people, so that made it
easy for me to find receptionist jobs. But in those times, you didn’t see women
executives. That was just how things were; people simply didn’t consider women
for those jobs.” Her account reveals a sense of how fixed gender roles were in
the workplace and seems fairly typical for the time and place, as feminist
historian Tammy Ixplox’s scholarship suggests (Ixplox 39).
For part B. of this prompt, you want your essay to use the individual’s
experiences and/or perspective to make an argument about a larger historical or
social context, so consider the following questions and responses:
What should you say about the interviewee’s comments?
Use the interviewee’s comments as evidence for an argument you want to make about
a particular historical or social context. For instance, you might want to argue that
working-class women’s experience in 1950s America does not necessarily fit with
popularly-held notions of the fifties housewife. Or you might want to show how racism
affected one African-American man’s everyday life to demonstrate how insidious racism
can be. For these kinds of essays, you likely will need some supporting secondary
sources to get a better sense of the historical and social context, so you’ll understand
how the individual’s experience relates to broader cultural trends and phenomena. In
terms of what the essay will look like, you’ll need a thesis that makes a claim, an
organizational plan that reflects the main points you think will best support that thesis,
lots of explanation of how the interviewee’s comments illustrate the thesis, and a
conclusion that draws your argument together.
Example
Here is an example of how to incorporate an oral history interview in a way that takes
the interviewee’s experiences to make an argument (underlined) about the larger
historical or social context. If we work with the same example prompt from earlier that
asks you to make an argument about how the interviewee’s responses reflect gender
issues and roles, you will need to integrate the quotes into your text as evidence for
your argument about gender roles, likely with reference to appropriate secondary
sources:
Lucretia’s experiences reveal gender roles in the workplace, in which men
tended to fill the executive positions and women the less prestigious ones. She
describes feeling limited in terms of her occupational life: “I have always been
good at organizing things and getting along with people, so that made it easy for
me to find receptionist jobs. But in those times, you didn’t see women executives.
That was just how things were; people simply didn’t consider women for those
jobs.” In her experience, no one questioned these roles, which reveals how
ingrained and even internalized social expectations for men and women were at
the time. This phenomenon is consistent with feminist historian Tammy Ixplox’s
scholarship on this cultural context (Ixplox 39).
Here are some more general suggestions for your paper:
How should you structure your essay?
You’ll need an introduction with a strong, interpretive thesis statement that the body of
the essay explains and demonstrates. The interviewee’s comments will function as
evidence for your argument, so each body paragraph should correspond to a point in
your argument.
How should you present quotes and use paraphrases?
You’ll provide framing phrases as in the previous case, but you’ll also need to include
your explanation of the significance of the quotes. A good general guideline is to include
at least as much explanation of the quote as the quote is long. Paraphrases are helpful
when you need just the content of the comment to make your point—that is, when the
language the interviewee uses is not the primary issue. In general, when writing an
analytical or argumentative essay, a mixture of paraphrases and quotes will probably
serve your purpose best.
Should you read and/or incorporate secondary sources?
You should refer explicitly to some secondary sources so that you will have the
necessary evidence to create a picture of the broader historical or social context.
