World War I Resources Available from Ball State University Libraries

Exhibit Marks Centennial Anniversary of “The War to End All Wars”

Monday, July 28 marks the centennial anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, mistakenly believed to be “The War to End All Wars.”  Ball State University Libraries has created a special exhibit to commemorate this epic event.

Visitors to Bracken Library can view a variety of resources about World War I in the lobby just outside the Schwartz Complex.  Books—nonfiction and fiction—about the war are displayed, including Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants and a book about the “Buffalo” division of Black soldiers fighting in the war.  DVD movies like “War Horse,” “All Quiet on the Western Front,” and “Sergeant York” are also exhibited and available from the Educational Resources Collections.

The GIS Research and Map Collection (GRMC) created a poster (top above—click to enlarge) commemorating the centennial using maps and photographs from youth books in the Educational Resources Collections.  The maps show Europe before the war, the Western Front, the Eastern Front, and Europe after the war.  The poster is available for educational use from the Cardinal Scholar institutional repository and exhibited in the windows of the GRMC on the second floor of Bracken Library.

The GRMC also includes many maps and atlases depicting the events of World War I.  An original map published in 1918—The Literary Digest Liberty Map of the Western Front of the Great World War--details some of the battle lines and includes maps of the war areas showing Russian, Italian, Balkan, Palestine, and Mesopotamian campaigns and the zones of submarine blockades.

The Ball State University Libraries’ Digital Media Repository (DMR) includes several collections of resources related to the First World War, including photographs of soldiers and parades, letters, and original postcards (from the Archives and Special Collections).  The DMR also includes more than 2,000 World War I posters (above) from the Elisabeth Ball Collection from Italy, France, Belgium, England, Australia, Germany, the United States, and other countries.

The Archives and Special Collections also includes a map published by the Hungarian Geograph Institute in Budapest in 1919 showing the population by ethnicity, nationality, age, and language.  The text of the map is written in Hungarian, German, French, and English.  The map is believed to have been used for planning the division of countries and the peace agreement at the Treaty of Trianon at the end of World War I.

For more information about the Digital Media Repository or Cardinal Scholar, please contact the Archives and Special Collections at 765-285-5078.