World War One Digital Humanities Project Begins

Alonzo Earl Foringer, The Greatest Mother in the World, color lithograph, 1918. Library Company of Philadelphia.

The Library Company has recently become a participant in the Great War in the Delaware Valley Project, a digital humanities collaboration currently existing between Villanova University, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Union League, Independence Seaport Museum, the German Society of Pennsylvania, and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. An online World War One exhibition will be created highlighting the resources in the area available for study of the war and its aftermath as we approach the event’s centennial anniversary.

The Print Department will be contributing from our holdings of approximately 350 World War One posters encouraging military recruitment, the purchase of liberty bonds, support for the Red Cross, and home front frugality and our nearly 100 photographs of the Philadelphia Navy Yard and patriotic parades and rallies held around the city. Through the work of project interns, our collections will be inventoried and digitized for inclusion in the online exhibition. That exhibition is scheduled to launch in early fall 2014 and will be ongoing for the duration of the anniversary of the conflict (2014-2018). We are excited to be part of a project that will let the public know about one of the Library Company’s underutilized, but significant, collections.

For sneak previews of the graphics to be included, please follow our progress through Twitter, #lcpprints.