Greetings all.
We’re now just shy of three weeks away from the centenary of the start of the First World War, meaning that we’re currently a hundred years on from the thick of the July Crisis. While things are, thankfully, not nearly as tense, confused and dangerous as in July 1914 and although the stakes are nowhere near as high, we can nevertheless sympathise with the politicians and diplomats who were charged with handling the burgeoning situation with no idea of how it would develop.
Our project is in its very early stages, in the round that is still marked ‘planning’. We’re working to develop a programme of roadshows, making contacts in different community groups, devising ideas for research and public engagement and preparing a series of blogs, of which this is very obviously the first.
Overall, we’re looking forward to discovering many new and not-so-new stories of the First World War and the events and situations that encircled it. Our mission is to highlight those ‘hidden histories’ that may not have become part of the conventional narrative of the war but were no less a part of it. We hope that by the end of the centenary cycle we’ll have helped to bring these stories back to the surface and into the minds of those of us fortunate enough to live one hundred years after those blind steps towards war.
