A WWI Tour of London

Introducing a new series connected to my summer course

As usual, I’m spending part of my summer teaching an online course at Bethel. Last year it was my 200-level survey of World War II; for June-July 2025, I’m offering a course in the same gen ed category, but focused on the First World War.

It’s my third or fourth time teaching World War I in this format, though I made some changes this time, since HIS230L (like many other Bethel courses) recently moved from 3- to 4-credit format. I’ve added short quizzes after each narrative lecture, a fifth essay assignment on the ethics of war and peace, and weekly “sources lectures” introducing the different types of evidence students will use for each essay. For example, I just recorded a half-hour survey of the relationship between motion pictures and the war, featuring a clip from the 1930 German film Westfront 1918 and a French interview with a German veteran who, fifty years after the war, found that movie “true, perhaps too true.”

But amid those changes, one constant in my online version of World War I has been a weekly series of virtual tours that use a tool called StoryMap JS to let students “travel” to three battlefields (Ypres, Verdun, the Somme) and four cities (three in Europe, plus Minneapolis-St. Paul for some local/American history of the war). A kind of digital tribute to my experience in the 2010s teaching World War I as a travel course in Western Europe, each tour consists of seven or eight stops, at which I embed a short video of me talking through what happened at that site, how it commemorates the war, or how it stands in for some facet of our story.

Then each tour ends with me setting up a “travel journal” assignment in which students write two-paragraph responses to a prompt related to something from the tour. For example, here’s the end of our Ypres tour: an overview of Tyne Cot, the largest British/Commonwealth cemetery, some of whose nearly 12,000 graves students will explore using the detailed records available online.

Some of you may recall that I did something similar last summer with World War II. So as in 2024, each week from now through the end of July I’ll share with paid subscribers full access to that week’s virtual tour in my online WWI class.

We’ll start with a two-part tour of the capital city of the United Kingdom…