The Great War: 2-Day WWI Symposium

THE GREAT WAR: 2-DAY WWI SYMPOSIUM | THURSDAY & FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9-10, 2017

Purchase as a package and attend all for lectures at special pricing!
Reserved Seating  $200/Package   |   General Admission  $150/Package

Individual lecture ticket pricing: 
Reserved Seating  $60/Lecture      |   General Admission  $45/Lecture 

WWI SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE – THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2017

Margaret MacMillan, 10:30am – The War That Ended Peace

From the bestselling and award-winning author of Paris 1919 comes a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, a fascinating portrait of Europe from 1900 up to the outbreak of World War I. 

The century since the end of the Napoleonic wars had been the most peaceful era Europe had known since the fall of the Roman Empire. In the first years of the twentieth century, Europe believed it was marching to a golden, happy, and prosperous future. But instead, complex personalities and rivalries, colonialism and ethnic nationalisms, and shifting alliances helped to bring about the failure of the long peace and the outbreak of a war that transformed Europe and the world. 

Jay Winter, 4:00pm – “What Americans Should Know about the Great War”

2017 marks the 100th anniversary of America’s entry into the Great War, which by then had been raging for three years on the European Continent.  Jay Winter, professor emeritus at Yale, is widely regarded as an expert on World War I and its impact on culture and society.  He will give us a front-row seat to America’s role in the war that made the United States the dominant world power.  His insights into the war are guaranteed to change the way you think about one of the most pivotal episodes in world history.

 Cocktail Reception for Sponsors, 6:00pm – Boca Bay Pass Club

Sponsors will enjoy refreshments in the Sunset Room of the Pass Club while getting to know our distinguished guests and hearing about their experiences.

WWI SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE – FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2017

Julian Keevil, 10:30am – Poetry Reading: In Flanders Fields

In Flanders Fields is a war poem in the form of a Rondeau, written during the First World War by Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. He was inspired to write it on May 3, 1915, after presiding over the funeral of friend and fellow soldier Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, who died in the Second Battle of Ypres. According to legend, fellow soldiers retrieved the poem after McCrae, initially dissatisfied with his work, discarded it. “In Flanders Fields” was first published on December 8 of that year in the London-based magazine Punch.

Jay Winter, 10:35am – Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995)

Jay Winter’s powerful study of the ‘collective remembrance’ of the Great War offers a major reassessment of one of the critical episodes in the cultural history of the twentieth century. Dr Winter looks anew at the culture of commemoration and the ways in which communities endeavoured to find collective solace after 1918. Taking issue with the prevailing ‘modernist’ interpretation of the European reaction to the appalling events of 1914-18, Dr Winter instead argues that what characterized that reaction was, rather, the attempt to interpret the Great War within traditional frames of reference. Tensions arose inevitably. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning is a profound and moving book of seminal importance for the attempt to understand the course of European history during the first half of the twentieth century. Winter will also discuss how WWI is commemorated in the United States, including the proposed new WWI memorial, just steps away from the White House.

Margaret MacMillan, 4:00pm – Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World 

For six months in 1919, after the end of “the war to end all wars,” the Big Three—President Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French premier Georges Clemenceau—met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmark work of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which saw new political entities—Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them—born out of the ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern world redrawn.