Dr. Susan Grayzel;Dr. Molly Cannon
Interviewee: Dr. Susan Grayzel;Dr. Molly Cannon
Interviewer: Johanna Bringhurst
Description: Join us for this episode to learn about the remarkable project co-directed by our guests that is working to preserve wartime stories, experiences, and objects to help communities connect with the history of war.
Date: 2023-11-08
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Johanna Bringhurst: Hello everyone, and welcome to context. This program is brought to you by the Idaho Humanities Council with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The views expressed here today do not necessarily represent those of the IHC or the NEH. My name is Joanna Bringhurst, and joining us today are Doctor Susan Grayzel and Doctor Molly Cannon, co-directors of the Bringing War Home Project.
Doctor Grayzel is a professor of history at Utah State University. Go Aggies go, researching and teaching about modern Europe and its empires, women's and gender, history and war and culture, especially of the world Wars. Her books include Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War. Awarded the British Council Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies in 2000.
Women and the First World War, At home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz, The First World War: A Brief History with Documents, and co-edited volume Gender and the Great War and most recently, The Age of the Gas, Gas Mask: How British Civilians Face the Terrors of Total War. This focuses on one material object, the civilian gas mask, to explore how the state and individuals responded to the first weapons of mass destruction.
She has received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has been both a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and held the UK Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Leeds with Molly Cannon, our other guest. Today she serves as co-director of the Bring You More Home project.
Objects, stories, memories and Modern War documenting and digitally preserving veteran and military families, objects, stories. Doctor Molly Cannon is an assistant professor of anthropology and director of the Museum of Anthropology at Utah State University. Molly specializes in community engaged museum practice and training the next generation of students in museology. Her museum work is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Parks Service.
Her work is published in American Antiquity, Journal of Archeological Science, and Advances in Archeological Practice. She holds a BA and PhD from the University of Nebraska and M.A. from the University of Wyoming. Molly serves as co-director for the Bringing War Home Project, and I'm so excited to have Susan and Molly here today. Welcome to context. Thank you.
So can you start by telling us how you got this project started and what inspired you? Molly, you want to start?
Dr. Molly Cannon: Sure. Thank you, Johanna, for hosting us and context for excited to be here. the, the project here, evolved out of a course from that Sue and her colleague Evelyn Fonda ho taught in in 2019. And so maybe we should let Sue actually start with, how the project got started.
Dr. Susan Grayzel: So. So, among other things, I'm historian of the First World War. And so during the First World War, the 100th anniversary, people, particularly in Europe, got very excited about preserving just artifacts and ephemera that might be in families. And so I was lucky enough to be at some conferences where people were sharing this. So in 2018, they came, back to Utah State and was co-teaching a class on 1918 and 1918, a very exciting year, right, that the war ends.
But America participates in some of its most important battles, then we have the flu pandemic. And I thought it would be fun to try to do something on a small scale that I've been reading about and hearing about. So I turned to Molly as someone who had not collected objects before, although I'd been studying them, I didn't know any of the, you know, appropriate techniques, and we just decided to hold what we came up with.
The term that we still use, which was a roadshow. So at the end of this class, we invited our students to help publicize a roadshow, an event sort of like Antiques Roadshow, but for the First World War, where we invited the community to bring in objects from the war that we would digitally record, we would photograph them, and we would take down some basic information about them.
Thanks to Molly's training and knowledge, they told us how to do that, and we had no idea if anyone was going to show up or what they would bring. And one of the gentlemen who showed up had a piece of trench art, and I had seen that in museums. I had read about this, but just watching my students hold the shell that had been the shell casing that had been transformed.
And there was an etching of the Statue of Liberty on one side of it, and just like watching that moment of connection, that this object, keeping this family for generations, you know, it had meaning as a piece of history, as something that connected us to this far away, you know, over 100 years of history, but also this family and this family story.
And it had been preserved. And that was just amazing. So we we did that event, and then it sort of stopped or we, we collected these things, but there's no place to put them. So we started having conversations, Molly and myself, about, wow, what if we could preserve these and share them? What if we could build a digital archive that would not only take these objects and preserve them digitally, because we were not taking them away from anyone?
They're really important pieces of family history. But that experience of like, could you bring this in to other classrooms and help other students and educators have access to that? So we started to have this idea of like, oh, what if we tried to build that? And we expanded it not just to this war, but to all kinds of other experiences that American families have had with modern conflict?
So that's kind of the origins of the idea. And then we started looking around for places that might fund it. And the National Endowment for the Humanities has this really cool program called Dialogs on the Experiences of War. Maybe it's the experience of war, I should get that right. and they, are specifically designed to use human resources to engage with veteran communities.
So we looked at the parameters of that, realized that they had done a lot of very cool things, but nothing that was really object centered, nothing that was about building a digital archive, nothing that, was quite the skill that we sort of thought that we we decided that maybe they take a chance on us and, and think that, we could do something and then I'm happy to turn it over to Molly to talk about what we've done.
What's our result.
Dr. Molly Cannon: Yes. With the funding from the National Endowment of the Humanities, we originally proposed to host three of these roadshows. building off that initial sort of pilot event, so we had partners, with Hill Aerospace Museum, Fort Douglas Military Museum and Salt Lake City and, the Hyrum City Museum here in Cache Valley. Those were our original partners for the project, where we wanted to host three additional roadshow events, to invite the community to, to share their share their stories.
And in particular, we were interested in focusing on the First World War, and the Vietnam War. And that's really due to the, the parameters of the grant asking us to, to select, a modern war or a more recent war, along with some with a, a more distant war. And, we wanted to focus on, on the Vietnam era, because many of those, those veterans and, and we're, we're losing many of those stories.
so to be able to talk with those veterans now, to be able to record those stories now was was important to us. and then the First World War. really, what is left are the artifacts and the the memories and the oral traditions from that war. and so it made for a nice comparison. and of course, what we've found is that people want to talk about all experiences.
And so our roadshows have now evolved to 11 roadshows, all across the state. And I think we have material objects documented from the civil war up through Iraq and Afghanistan complex.
Johanna Bringhurst: That's amazing. From three roadshows to 11. And I understand you're considering expanding beyond Utah also to incorporate other Western states.
Dr. Susan Grayzel: We would we would welcome that opportunity. We we realized that geographically, what one of the you know, I teach a standalone course in the First World War, I teach a course in the Second World War. one of the things we proposed in our grant and did connected to our first road show in Cache Valley is as you with the grant is we co-teach a class now called Objects of War, which trains our students to think about material culture and how material culture saturates, military history.
But usually it gets put in museums as just here's an example of something without the meaning that these objects that are carried to war, from war that civilians use to help, you know themselves also be resilient in these times of enormous stress and disturbance and grief. And so a lot of the questions that we've developed to ask about the objects that people bring in that you're recording, that are actually our students are part of this amazing, team of students, volunteerism or interns with the projects.
And they're taking our class who are really engaged in it. They helped us come up with the questions. I mean, this is a very, you know, kind of wonderful experience as an educator to help students. And we work with them to develop. What questions do we want to know about these objects that are bringing in? I have academic questions.
They're very human questions. Many of them are future secondary school educators, and not all of them are from Utah. Right. So not all of our students are many, most, but not all. And some of the people who come, to speak with us, you know, had formative experience with the military or are from military families. So they're not Utah based right there.
They've had lots of different experiences that have resonated, but the sort of mountain west, the rural interior of America is underrepresented in the histories of these wars. I think we tend to focus on, I like to say, you know, we know a lot about generals thought about, their military encounters. We know very little still about the sort of more everyday, experiences.
And we feel like these are opportunities to preserve history for educators, for students, but also for communities. And that's that's the that's the kind of overarching aim. So we would love to cross the border. It's not very far from us as the crow flies and and go into Idaho and talk to folks here, we have we are pretty nimble and, efficient.
And we welcome any community that is interested in, you know, helping to preserve these stories, because as a historian who is primarily focused on something where there are no living witnesses, there's something quite extraordinary about being able to talk to people and to ask the follow up questions and to, you know, ask some questions that I can ask and vice horses, because people at the time weren't that interested or people thought, well, that's not important.
And and so we lose things and, and we lose part of all of our collective history.
Johanna Bringhurst: Why is it important to the families that you're meeting that you are collecting and documenting these objects?
Dr. Molly Cannon: Well, Johanna, one thing that comes to mind was how you started at the beginning of of the introduction here. not all museums will accept these objects. Not all objects belong in museums either. and so I think this particular project has, this ingenious way of capturing information, capturing stories and emotions and experiences, that can be shared.
And I think I think many people want their family histories, preserved. They want those to be available for, future generations. But I think they also want to share and connect those stories with their neighbors, with communities around the state. I think they want to see those experiences and how they connect, with others across the country.
the stories were getting are global though, too. So I think, you know, maybe I'm dreaming too much, but I think it's an archive that will connect, families across certainly across Utah, certainly across the Mountain West. But I think larger than that to.
Johanna Bringhurst: What is the value of objects like this and the stories that you're collecting for historians and anthropologists who might use this material down the road?
Dr. Susan Grayzel: Again, when you teach certain kinds of classes, someone will come up and say, you know, my grandfather was in World War two and I have this thing that was his his jacket or, this flag that he brought back. Do you think I could bring it into class? And my usual sponsors, of course. And then I think, well, this class of students has the opportunity to hear about this family connection and to see in the case, you know, touch.
And that's the amazing thing about the kind of three dimensionality of these of these objects in the way they sort of elicit memory and stories, but then they're sort of gone. And so what I think is wonderful about building this public accessible digital archive is that every class is going to be able to hear that story in some cases from the voice of the person who was the participant, as well as what it means for a family member to have inherited, these objects, to preserve them, to feel that kind of connection.
Many of the things that we're collecting aren't quote unquote valuable, right? In and of themselves. Right. but they're priceless, because of the meaning and the memories that they hold. And it's, it's that tension that I think is so important for historians to sort of ignore, which, I think there's a lot that I've learned as a historian who was not trained to analyze material objects or to think about those things.
So my colleagues in anthropology and the kind of way that I've learned to think about them, but also, again, that moment of watching my students connect with these objects in these road shows, of thinking about my own, you know, family, because one of the questions is, oh, alone is anything very interesting or, I don't know, anything very exciting or I mean, very important or and I and I again, this is the part of me that so we're as historians as what your grandmother did in order to this probably really interesting like lots of value, her ration books or her recipe books trying to make do with different kinds of shortages or, you know, the ways
that her life had to change. those are really significant. Those and those are, again, things that don't always appear in the kind of big stories of these conflicts, but are so important for what I think are one of the vital lessons to learn from studying history, particularly the history of conflict, which is it's about resilience and hope as much as is about the human capacity.
First, look at violence and destruction.
Johanna Bringhurst: In my own family history, I know that service members have felt reluctant to talk about their experiences in war and conflict, in particular the Vietnam War. It feels like there is a lot of pressure because the war was unpopular when servicemen came home to not talk about it and not share. Are you seeing that families getting to connect with objects is maybe helping those stories come out, or helping them to understand better what their family's experience was?
Dr. Molly Cannon: Yeah, there is something powerful about an object. it, it it can kind of buffer a conversation. but it also can draw people together in a conversation. So by, by asking, people to come in with their objects, we don't have to ask directly about an experience. We can say, what did you bring in today? And what do you want to tell us about this object?
And from that, the stories just evolve. and, and pretty soon the object is, yes, it's still there and it's so part of that story, but it's taken on so much more. that's been my experience anyway, at the roadshow events.
Dr. Susan Grayzel: It's interesting. We we've both had, you know, conversations with Vietnam veterans themselves, who again, are telling us that they have not really spoken about this. We one of the things about this project is, is they have control over questions they want to answer or not answer what they want to talk about. They, you know, it's this their story about, about the object.
But some of the things that veterans have preserved, you know, one of the things that, I mean, everything is surprising, right? Just to say it's like, especially surprising. But we had a Vietnam veteran who brought with him a notebook that would have belonged to being a news which school child that he had preserved for 50 plus years.
And written in that notebook were some passages from Buddhist teachings and the story that unfolded was of his friendship with a Buddhist monk that he met, during his time serving there, and so much so that he visited, amongst family and community and at the end of his time this was given to him by the monk, and he made this, point of telling us that he carried in his ammo case, that it helped preserve it.
so think about all the other things that would be there, and then this, you know, quite slim notebook. So there's there's a whole movement of human connection that's there, the preservation of that object over all of these years, you know, paper is not the most durable of substances. And so it is been maintained and just the story that unfolded around it was was really powerful.
But the object itself, right. Again, if we just seen that in the museum, right. You might ask some questions about why there is great, you know, passages in this, but the fact that it's also this personal connection across this cultural divide, is, is really quite extraordinary. And so you just never, we, we have learned, I don't know that I had expectations to begin with, but there's just something quite amazing about each time you start with.
And the question is, why did you bring us, not tell us about your war experience, which I think is it is a different kind of question. Right. What did you bring us in? Why is it important to you? Is a very, open ended question that can lead to conversations that are about military experiences, but they're also about memory, and they're also about family.
They're also about connections that are, where the the kind of larger, element of it gets it happening and full scale war is, is context rather. And the most important thing about if that makes sense.
Johanna Bringhurst: Absolutely. I so I am really curious what kinds of objects are people bringing, which ones really have stood out to and been interesting to you? I know this is.
Dr. Molly Cannon: Well, we're of we're getting a full range of objects from, certainly photographs and letters like you might expect. but we, we those photographs and letters are curated also. So they're often in scrapbooks, they're in binders with newspaper clippings. And so part of the documentation of that is not just the individual letter or the individual photograph, but the collection of them and the and how and what that says about the experience and the memory that the that families are preserving.
we've had letters from, brothers who served overseas. one particular family their, their brother served as a Comanche code talker during the Second World War in Europe. and he brought in letters that he had written home to the family, to their mother. And, he was quite a bit older than than the gentleman who visited with us.
And so he he would write funny things to his little brother. Right. And so these letters served as a way for, for them to, to kind of remember that, that sibling relationship, even when he was, deployed overseas and stationed so far away, let's see, we've had.
Maybe two. Do you want to share the example of the dress that, that, I mean, the favorite objects.
Dr. Susan Grayzel: Obviously, but Vietnam era, objects. So, a woman brought in a dress that was made from the silk that her father had brought home from Vietnam, for her mother. And and then and then her mother made it into this dress and again, both of her parents have passed away. And so this dress is this, like, moment of connection, moment connection to that story.
But then the story also had this incredible turn, which I sort of felt like I could either say spoiler alert or, you know, you should read the archive when it comes out, but it but it ended up unfolding as this other sort of family history that connected her to, in different ways to, to the, to the war experience so that, you know, that was that was absolutely beautiful.
just as, as a material object to sort of sit there. But then the kind of story in the way, it connected to the experience of women in war, I was, you know, one of the things that, she really wanted to emphasize, I've also been, you know, sort of further back in time. I mean, when we started this project, we thought we would be very lucky and grateful to be talking to veterans and those who lived through the American Vietnam War.
We didn't think we'd be talking to actual veterans of the Second World War. So the hat has been pretty extraordinary. not just to talk to the children of, Second World War participants we thought we might do. But, at our world show in Hyrum City, we spoke to someone who was, and we, I mean, like, I got to eavesdrop as my students conducted this amazing conversation with someone who had been on a boat off of the Normandy beaches on D-Day and, and had his, had his hat and, his uppercut and, stripped.
That was a flag. And so, so that sort of objects were again incidental to this sort of story, but another second World War story, which is also just to me, that one of the kind of poignant moments of human connection was a very small, handmade French flag that a young girl gave to this American soldier who was helping to liberate her village in France and handed it to him and asked him to put it on his rifle and, you know, and again, one of our questions is, how long have you had this object?
And it's just incredibly well preserved and so rich and sort of hitting that moment. And he's like, well, we lost it a time or two, right? You know, as things would, would do over the years. But, but, but found again and now, you know, I, I just feel so privileged that included in this, digital archives that we're building is going to be this flag in all of its dimensions, but also the story of that, that encounter, and then the story that his, his children who came with him help tell about a journey back to France, you know, many years later, I'm forgetting the exact amount, to try to find her.
and, and the little girl who said, you know, grew into adulthood, but but but but had passed away. But the entire village came out to kind of celebrate the fact that he he'd returned to that space. So, again, so many things that I think we as students of history can learn from that moment, right, about the power of of memory.
But the object of listening that the preserving that memory so that, you know, he he he had the name, he remembered the name of the and membered the name of the place. And, you know, at the end, you know, as you're, as you're thinking back on this formative experiences in your life, what what what resonates, right, that, you know, beyond the kind of geopolitics and the things, as I say, that that end up in the big narratives of history, you know, wars are experienced at the level of the human.
And I think that's one of the really powerful themes that these objects are helping us understand.
Dr. Molly Cannon: And I would also say in both of those cases, the conversation was facilitated between family members, which was incredibly impactful. And to see how these experiences are shared across the generations is also, I think, a very important part of of the archive.
Johanna Bringhurst: I'm wanting to know, how big is your archive now and what are you expecting for the size and and access to from the public to this archive?
Dr. Molly Cannon: So currently we have documented a little over 200 objects, and collected stories about them from 72 participants. And in terms of where we want it to go, you know, we want this to be a living archive. So we hope it just continues to grow, by, continuing with roadshow events but also encouraging people to record their own stories and connect with us so that we can include them into the archive.
there's ways perhaps to do some, training to host your own event. in your community, we'd be thrilled to try and experiment on how we can help, bring stories from all around into the archive.
Dr. Susan Grayzel: And, and I would add that, you know, that feels like a lot. But then I also think that we really started this in 2022. So this is, you know, that spring were our first. We had some in the fall. We had some this past spring. We are we are quickly realizing that we need to be in communities, but also we need to empower members of community groups for their own stories and and and hopefully share them with us.
So we're working on kits that could be, sort of sent out that we would again, happy to, modern technology to have a full color zoom conversation, and talk to them about this. We are, one of the advantages of being at a university is that it has some stability in terms of keeping up to date with technology.
So using, the digital initiatives, at USU's libraries, they're public. There's not a fee to use them. You can you can just access them. So we are hiring students this year to help us transfer all of those others photos and recordings. So this will be an archive that has images and sound and transcripts and, you know, just basic information, how how people can look up certain things.
They're curious about the First World War, they're curious about a particular, people from a particular place in the Mountain West or Utah, go to a certain other place so the, the idea is that by the spring, we're very much hoping to have a version of this archive that's available that we think will encourage people, we hope, to want to contribute. Because it's all about preservation and sharing and making our community's history accessible to the community.
Johanna Bringhurst: If any of our listeners here in Idaho have something that they want to share, or are interested in being involved in your project. Where can they go? For more information.
Dr. Molly Cannon: They can go to our website. And I don't know what the best way I could read it off. Or we could send that information to you.
Johanna Bringhurst: include that in our show description so that people can access it easily.
Dr. Molly Cannon: But they can also just contact us directly. And, my email is molly.cannon@usu.edu.
Dr. Susan Grayzel: s.grayzel@usu.edu. If you Google Bringing War Home USU, you it will take you to our landing page. One of our really wonderful partners is Utah Public Radio and they have been doing, interviews and editing. There's a really wonderful student intern who's been editing some of the interviews for Soundclips to play on, you know, in between stories and also as part of their programming, you we, we want this every time we finish one of these events.
I'm like, that was amazing. What else is out there? who else might be interested in participating? What other, you know, context can we make. We just feel that I mean, I just feel grateful all the time that I've been able to be part of this and to have heard some of these stories and to have seen some of these objects.
I can't wait for other people to to have that experience, and I really do. I really do hope it keeps growing.
Johanna Bringhurst: Wonderful. Thank you so much. I have to say, this is only one of the amazing, incredible initiatives and projects happening at Utah State University. Go, Aggies go! As an alum, I have to get my Aggies cheer in there. Thank you so much, Molly and Susan for being with us today. What an incredible project, and I hope that some of our listeners will reach out to you, and we'll be sure to connect them with more information.
Thank you for being here today. I really appreciate talking to both of you.
Dr. Susan Grayzel: Thank you so much for having us.
Dr. Molly Cannon: As thank you.