In communities and classrooms around the country, Western history professor Jonathan Vance’s First World War postcard project is teaching a new generation about the everyday people who fought in one of the world’s deadliest wars.
Vance completed the first round of the project last year, sending more than 400 replicas of postcards sent by Canadian soldiers during the First World War to the original Canadian addresses that received them.
But many smaller communities did not have modern addresses that matched the postcards’ original destinations. During that era, many small towns did not have street names with numbered addresses as they do today.
Vance came up with the idea to create educational packets to send to schools in these areas.
“The idea is to help teachers foster an understanding in their students of the connections between the First World War and our modern times,” said Vance.
More than 10,000 replica postcards …