World War I Resources

2016 marks the centenary of the Easter Rising in Ireland, when a small band of republicans’ brief insurrection over Easter Week 1916 resulted in their declaration of independence from Great Britain to form the Irish Republic (Poblacht na hÉireann). Quickly and violently squashed by the British, the Easter Rising became a defining moment for the complex landscape of Irish culture, politics, and history in the twentieth century.

More than 9,000 Delawareans served during World War I. The state's shipyards, powder mills, and other industries operated at full capacity on behalf of the war effort. More than forty percent of the gunpowder used by Allied troops was supplied by the du Pont Company, whose diversified research and development efforts during the war helped transform it from a manufacturer of explosives to the largest chemical company in the United States.

Like many young men of his generation seeking to be involved in the action of World War I, Ernest Hemingway volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver. He was stationed in Milan and on July 8, 1918, he received leg wounds in battle. Hospitalized, Hemingway was captivated by his nurse, Agnes Von Kurowsky. That brief war experience and the short-lived relationship with Von Kurowsky inspired Hemingway's successful 1929 novel, A Farewell to Arms.

In the early days of modernism (a movement he himself spearheaded), Pound was the impresario, seemingly everywhere, promoting writers, editing and publishing, writing his own poems, reviews, and essays, and serving as a guiding light and beacon. One of Pound’s chief methods of disseminating information and presenting the work of new poets was publication through a variety of small literary and artistic-minded journals, including The Little Review, Pagany, Poetry, and Blast.

Photography, or "light writing," is at once an art, a science, a form of communication, and a craft. Since the first permanent images were captured in 1839, photography has continued to shift and change, interpreted by technological advances in equipment and processing, innovations in style and taste, and the socio-cultural discourses in which it has been produced, consumed, and used.

"Periodicals Across the Pond" is an exhibition of magazines and print ephemera from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection and the University of Delaware Library's Department of Special Collections that examines the transformations of print media and transatlantic public spheres at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Press, founded in 1917 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, was originally intended as a hobby for its founders, and, particularly for Virginia, as a diversion from the pressures of writing. Starting with a small handpress in the dining room of the Woolfs' home, Hogarth House in Richmond, Surrey, the Press emerged as a full-fledged, commercial publishing enterprise following the unexpected success in 1919 of Virginia's Kew Gardens.

This electronic exhibition assembles materials from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, on loan to the University of Delaware Library, that were first displayed on 1 November 2014 as part of “Remembering the Great War,” a symposium sponsored by the UD Office of Alumni Relations. Although the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection is usually associated with first editions, periodicals, works on paper, manuscripts, correspondence, etc., from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century in Britain, it is also rich in material from the period of the First World War, some of it with transatlantic connections.