Sunday marks 100 years since the Armistice which ended the First World War in Europe.The Library of Trinity College Dublin has curated a number of exhibitions and digital initiatives throughout the Decade of Centenaries, and those commemorating the Irish people who served in the First World War are among the most ambitious. This blog post gathers together some of the most prominent examples.
The Library is commemorating the end of the War in 1918, with an exhibition of artefacts from the Research Collections curated in the beautiful and sombre surroundings of the Long Room of the Old Library.
On display are photographs, diaries, scrapbooks, letters, medals and works of art. The subjects of these exhibits include prisoners of war, youthful casualties, injured survivors, Trinity medical students, and members of the public involved in the War effort. The exhibition, entitled ‘Manage to exist and try and be cheerful’, will be on display until 11 January 2019.
In 2016 to commemorate the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme the Library also launched the digital humanities transcription project ‘Fit as Fiddles, and as hard as nails’. The project digitised numerous diaries, letters and memoirs from the First World War. The platform for this project is a website that enables researchers to search 1,600 pages of digitised and transcribed first-hand accounts of Irish men fighting on European battlefields and in Middle Eastern deserts.
For a more general introduction to the Irish perspective on the First World War, researchers may also be interested in the online exhibition produced in collaboration with Google Cultural Institute, The Great War Revisited. This exhibition gives access to over 50 exhibits from the Library’s collection and is drawn from a physical exhibition originally curated in 2008 by Dr Charles Benson former Keeper of Early Printed Books in the Library to whose memory the online exhibition is dedicated.
Estelle Gittins