Just a few days ago, Bethany College’s Honors students presented and concluded their Digital Humanities semester project on how Bethany College and Lindsborg, Kansas was affected by The Great War. Each student had the opportunity to do intensive research and learn about the changes in the town after nearly a century. After spending the first month of school reading a novel called To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild on the Great War, students were able to get a better understanding of what the war was like and develop and interest in what was going on at the time. With the college and town being founded by Swedish immigrants, their task was to find out if and what the impact of the war was on the college and town and share it. Their research process consisted of hours of analyzing microfilm at the college’s library, recording and counting old census, reading through old yearbooks, and digging through archives at The Old Mill museum. The website includes one hundred year old documents and pictures that tell the untold story of the town from the time the war began to the time it ended. The students were even able to reach out to people that had old letters and pictures of soldiers from the war (as you may have already read about in their blogs). Interested in the story of the town and what they found? Click the link below and check out their new website:
Author: Tehya Peters
Sophomore Honors Student at Bethany College in Lindsborg KS.
A trip to the Old Mill Museum revealed a lot about the conditions on Sweden during World War 1 and the position of many Swedes at the time. The letter was found in the Old Mill Museum’s archives and was written by a member of the Swedish People’s Party of Finland named Axel Palmgren. He mentions that the Swedes in both Sweden and the United States were neutral and did not want any association with the war.
Thomas E. Green was a professor at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas back in 1915. He was also elected Vice President of the Peace Society after returning from a trip around the world where he met with people of influence and discussed the conditions in Europe and how they threatened global peace. Green delivered an address on campus educating the public and students on what he believed were the four major causes of the first World War. The information he presented was primarily from personal investigations and observations he had made while traveling.