Season 5, Episode 6: “Does It Matter?”: Legacies of the First World War

Nationalism. Emerging technology. Militarization. Destroyed bodies. Total war. In this episode, three historians reconsider the dominant themes of the First World War—which are as relevant today as they were a century ago.

Nationalism. Emerging technology. Militarization. Destroyed bodies. Total war. In this episode, three historians reconsider the dominant themes of the First World War—which are as relevant today as they were a century ago.

Cheyenne Pettit studies Canadian and British conflicts over the treatment of venereal disease during World War One. Matthew Hershey‘s research explores meanings and experiences of soldiers’ suicide in the First World War. And Lediona Shahollari focuses on the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange during the partition of those two states in the aftermath of the Great War. Join them in a conversation reflecting on the legacy of that conflict.

View the full episode transcript.

Historian Biographies

Matthew Hershey completed his PhD in history at the University of Michigan in May 2024. His dissertation, “Inclination toward Death: Suicide, Sacrifice, and State Collapse in First World War Germany,” situates the history of wartime self-destruction within the context of Germans’ dynamic socio-cultural, moral, and emotional experiences with death, violence, and killing, and charts the effects of these experiences on the ultimate collapse of the Imperial German state in 1918. Now an independent historian and research contractor, he is currently contributing to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945.

Cheyenne Pettit is a seventh-year PhD candidate in history and science, technology, and society at the University of Michigan. She is a medical historian of the British Empire with a special interest in Canadian and Dominion history. Her research focuses on the intersections of medicine, law, and policing. Her dissertation, “Tempting the Nation: Imperial Belonging and the Politics of Syphilis in Canada’s Great War, 1914-1920,” uses controversies over the wartime treatment of venereal disease in the metropole to interrogate the nature, scope, and limits of the British Empire. Her project grounds shifts in the body politic in a new history of public health. As the Gerald Saxon Brown Digital Skills Fellow, Cheyenne will produce the 2024-25 season Reverb Effect.

Lediona Shahollari is a seventh-year PhD candidate in history at the University of Michigan. She is a historian of Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, with a focus on Albania and Albanian-speaking refugees. Her research focuses on questions of displacement, citizenship, resettlement, and the Ottoman imperial legacy in the Balkans. Her dissertation traces the broader regional impacts of the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange and how the mass displacement and movement shaped the formation of Albania’s early citizenship and migration regime.

Production Credits

Episode Producers:  Matthew Hershey, Paige Newhouse, Cheyenne Pettit, Lediona Shahollari

Host and Season Producer: Paige Newhouse

Executive Producer: Gregory Parker

Editorial Board: Henry Cowles, Enrieth Martinez Palacios, Talitha Pam, Cheyenne Pettit, Sophie Wunderlich

Voice Actor: Kat Brausch

Music: Eguana, “Wind In Wheat Fields” (Endless Quest Media)

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