The Texas Tech University Institute for the Study of Western Civilization is launching a symposium called the “Shadow of the Great War,” featuring lectures, films and exhibits. Dr. Jay Winter joins the Front Row to give more information.
How did you get interested in history and studying the Great War, World War I?
When I was an undergraduate at Columbia in the 60s, my dad had a project for me, which was to become a doctor. I never realized his dream and in the course of my studies of chemistry and mathematics and so on, I realized I really should make another choice. That other choice was to become a historian and to write about other people in the past.
In the 60s there were two things that really struck me. One, was the war in Vietnam was heating up. It occurred to me that Vietnam was America’s Great War in the sense that it was futile and stupid and botched and that the leaders that planned it, simply had no ability to control the instruments of violence that they let loose on the world. And they betrayed the decency and courage of the men that they put into the field without knowing fully well what they were doing.
How did you then draw parallels to the Great War? How did that interest you in the time of 1914 through 1917?
The other part of it is that the first World War history is based upon archives that are all over the world. And almost all of those official archives of the first world war were opened in 1964, 50 years after the outbreak of it. We historians don’t exist unless we have archives. We need archives so that you can stop people from lying about the past. It’s a straight forward matter. Every statement that I make has a reference that you can go and check and make sure that what I say is true.
Those archives opened up in the middle of the 1960s and have been opening up ever since.
Listen to the full interview at the top of the article.
