While Your Hearts Are Yearning: Popular Songs of the Great War

Popular music of WWI; concert & lecture

A Long, Long Way: Echoes of the Great War The First World War – the “Great War,” as an earlier generation knew it – changed everything about our world. It brought mighty empires crashing down and redefined the conventions of civilization. In the space of four years, it all but destroyed an entire generation of young men. It was a war of firsts: the first industrialized, “mass-production” war, the first war that demanded toil and sacrifice from entire populations, the first war to see deliberate, regular, calculated attacks on civilians. The unprecedented and everyday horrors of the war led those who witnessed them to question the basic values of Western civilization. The Second World War would kill more victims and destroy more cities, but the World War that came before was the greater shock. The legacy of the First World War would make the Second possible; the destruction of the First World War would make the Second conceivable.

2014-18 marks the centenary of the Great War, and Wright State University will commemorate the occasion with the CELIA project A Long, Long Way: Echoes of the Great War. The project brings together a group of scholars from several departments in the College of Liberal Arts, including Dr. Hank Dahlman (Department of Music and Director, CELIA), Dr. Paul Lockhart (Professor of History and Senior CELIA Fellow for 2013-14), Dr. Barry Milligan (Professor of English and CELIA Fellow for 2014), and Dr. Christopher Oldstone-Moore (Senior Lecturer in History and CELIA Fellow for 2014). A Long, Long Way will explore the broader impact of the First World War through music, verse, lectures, film, and exhibits.