Photographs, letters, maps, and other relevant documents were displayed while professor Ian Isherwood talked about his newest book in Musselman Library. (Nathaniel Swindell/The Gettysburgian)
By Nathaniel Swindell, Staff Writer
On Friday, history professor Ian Isherwood ’00 presented his latest book, “The Battalion,” to the campus community in the Musselman Library.
The book catalogs the service of the British 8th Queen’s Battalion during World War I, with a specific focus on a soldier named Jack Peirs. Isherwood spoke about the battles Peirs and his battalion fought and explained how their experience changed them after the war’s conclusion.
His new book originally began as a digital history project which Isherwood converted into a book with the help of others.
“The College received a collection of primary source documents related to the unit that I wrote the book about and I received them from a former student of mine,” said Isherwood. “When we received those documents, we created a digital history project around them, and as we were doing the project, I realized there was a bigger story that could be told about that particular unit. So I took the digital history project and I adapted it into a book.”
The front cover of Professor Ian Isherwood’s newest book, “The Battalion: Citizen Soldiers at War on the Western Front.”
Isherwood also mentioned that after having initially published the digital history project, various relatives of soldiers in the Queen’s Battalion have reached out to him, offering further information and sources of the events that occurred.
“The most rewarding part has been hearing from family members of the unit,” said Isherwood. “Over the course of the past ten years, since we did the digital history project, people have reached out to us to share information about their relatives. That’s been a really rewarding part because I’ve approached this subject like a dutiful historian who’s trying to tell the story the right way, but it’s also been a journey of discovery, of men’s stories that have mostly been forgotten by history.”
One of the main points of the book was to offer a new perspective on the First World War and demonstrate to readers that the soldiers who fought and died were once common civilians like anyone else.
“I want [readers] to understand that the First World War was a conflict in which real human beings, real flesh and blood human beings, had to adapt to a horrific environment. They were civilians before they were soldiers,” said Isherwood.
Isherwood plans to release more books in the future but expects that it will be a while before they are ready to be published.
“I’m contracted to write a book called ‘Remembering America’s Wars,’ and in theory, I’m writing it right now, but it’s gonna take quite a bit of time,” he said.
