I’ve taught several classes on WWI literature and culture, and one challenge has often arisen. Most of the literature we now study that takes up the war, whether it be canonical (Wilfred Owen, Ernest Hemingway) or not (Helen Zenna Smith) was written or published in the decades after the war ended. How can students get a sense of what people thought about the war while it was being fought between 1914 and 1918? Moreover, how can a teacher get students to answer this question for themselves?

A recent assignment to present a period advertisement helped students develop answers to both questions. Students could select any advertisement they found interesting; my assignment sheet pointed them towards both online and local archives they could search to make their selection. The assignment sheet also provided several questions they could address in the course of their presentation. I modeled the assignment by making my own presentation on a French promotion for “Lithinés du Dr Gustin,” a French medicinal water additive. Pointing out the images used in the advertisement, which depicts soldiers in a range of uniforms raising a glass, and the copy, which lists a range of civilian ailments Lithinés might cure, my students and I talked about the fact that the product was promoted as necessary and useful to those in military service but also had its place on the home front. Importantly, all of the soldiers depicted in the ad are cheerful, clean, and evidently healthy—a far cry from the representations of military men that would emerge in the literature published after the war.

Wartham watch. ExposureStudio via Compfight

Throughout the semester, it was a delight to see what students found in the archives and the ways in which they unpacked the attitudes during the war and the way literature revised those attitudes in later decades. Students presented advertisements for Royal Vinolia Cream (“Beauty on Duty has a Duty to Beauty”) and discussed the demand that women war workers remain pretty and feminine while on the job; linked promotion for the Swan Pen to scenes of writing in A Farewell to Arms and Testament of Youth; and used an ad for a Waltham watch to introduce the fact that individual timepieces became widely available during WWI and to note the many places in which literature represents “clock watching” as part of the boredom and terror of trench warfare. 

Students were enthusiastic about this assignment, noting that “even though I don’t like giving presentations, the presentation on advertisements really put things into perspective” and “I feel like I am an expert on the Great War now.” In part, this expertise emerged because students had to scan through many advertisements before selecting the one they would eventually show to the class. By developing their research skills through locating the ads, and by stretching their analytic skills in developing readings of images as well as text, this assignment paid dividends while also making students fully aware of  the differences between wartime and postwar culture.