Participants in this workshop should broaden their perspectives on the events of 1919 in World and US History classes by learning about how activists from many communities around the world used the post-World War One peace process to advance their claims for more rights. Participants also learn how to engage students in close reading of primary sources that uncover the global nature of the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Versailles. Click here for that lesson plan.
My work on this topic is deeply indebted to the work of Erez Manela and Mona Siegel. When I noted this on Twitter prior to History Fest 2019, Manela graciously responded with more wise words. Siegel’s book came out in December 2019, available here, and deeply influenced this project. I’m looking forward to Mathieu’s forthcoming book on Black soldiers in World War One.
Thanks @ERBeckman for the kind words. It's a great time to be teaching about the Global 1919 esp. with exciting new work on the period forthcoming from @mona_siegel, Saje Mathieu (a fellow Minnesotan) and others
— Erez Manela (@erezmanela) August 6, 2019
Resources
Slides for classroom, paired texts lesson
Primary Sources
Folder with primary source documents
India
- India Home Rule League’s London Office, Self Determination for India, 1918
Ireland
Pan African Congress
- Resolution of the 1919 Pan-African Conference (scroll down to “Enclosure”)
- “Opinion of W.E.B. DuBois,” The Crisis, Vol. 18-No. 1, May, 1919.
Egypt
- Huda Sharaawi, Egyptian Feminist and Nationalist, on demonstrating in 1919 from her autobiography
- Quotations from Egypt during the “Wilsonian Moment”
Korea: March 1st Movement
- Korean Declaration of Independence, March 1st, 1919, at Asia for Educators
- “Overlooked No More,” New York Times, March 28, 2018. Includes quotations from Yu Gwan-sun
Women
- “Women’s Petitions to Leagues Framers,” New York Times, April 13, 1919. Mona L. Siegel notes that this article was written by Constance Drexel of the Chicago Tribune. Drexel was also a feminist activist
- Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Resolutions from 1st Congress, Zurich, May 1915. WILPF adopted that name at the 2nd Congress. This document probably shaped Wilson’s 14 Points.
- Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Resolutions from 2nd Congress, Zurich, May 1919
China: May 4th Movement
The Philippines
Vietnam
- “Claims of the Annamite People“, author later known as Ho Chi Minh
Additional Sources
- Library of Congress: Newspapers 1919
- “100 Years Ago in Photos: A Look Back at 1919,” The Atlantic
- China, India, and Korea quotations via Erez Manela
- Japanese documents: Japanese Racial Equality Proposal, Twenty-One Demands, dispatch from Japanese government to Paris
- Treaty of Versailles,
- Covenant of the League of Nations: Articles 1-26, also at The Avalon Project
- Mandate system: Article 22
- German sphere in China: Articles 156-158
- Woodrow Wilson’s “14 Points”
- Excerpt text and commentary from Our Documents.gov
- Full text of Wilson’s address to congress as published at the time.
- Images of Wilson’s shorthand notes for the “14
Points ” speech
Secondary Sources
- “1919: Repression, Riots, and Revolution,” Imperial & Global Forum.
- Interview with Jeremy Adelman, “1919 was ‘year zero’ for internationalism,” Humanitarian Alternatives
- Beth Barton, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics, University of California Press, 2007.
- Strongly recommended by MCCS Conference participant.
- Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism, Cambridge University Press, 2015.
- Podcast episode: Dr. Goebel on Historias, from SE Council for Latin American Studies
- Daly, Mary. “First meeting of Dáil Éireann ‘would have done credit to the British House of Commons’,” Irish Times.
- Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines, 2006. 382–88
- Michele Louro, Comrades Against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism, 2018
- Erez Manela, “Asia in the Global 1919: Reimagining Territory, Identity, and Solidarity,” The Journal of Asian Studies, May 2019.
- Erez Manela , “Woodrow Wilson and ‘the Ugliest of Treacheries,” New York Times, March 9, 2019. Focuses on Egypt
- Erez Manela. The Wilsonian Moment, 2007 Google book.
- Erez Manela, Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East-West Harmony and the Revolt against Empire in 1919, The American Historical Review, Volume 111, Issue 5, December 2006, 1327–1351
- 1914-1919 Online, “Postwar Military Action and Violence in East and Central Europe.”
- Women Vote Peace. Zurich Congress 1919. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, May 2019
- World History Bulletin, XXXV, no. 1, Spring 2019.
- Especially: Linda Black, “Setting the Stage: The Global Impact of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference,” 22-23.
- And: Mona L. Siegal, “Global Feminists and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919: A Historical and Teaching Note,” 18-21.
- Xu Guoqi, Asia and the Great War: A Shared History, Oxford University Press, 2017.
Presentations
I presented versions of this at Minnesota History Fest (2019)—click here for slides—at Minnesota Council for the Social Studies (2020)—slides here— and National Council for the Social Studie. Both presentations grew my 2018 History Fest presentation: Putting the World in World War One. Work on these presentations led to a paired texts lesson for students on Global 1919 and a visual contextualization lesson on the global dimensions of World War One.