#explore1918 in 3 Easy Steps

One hundred years ago.

A century.

It sounds substantial. In terms of units of measurement, it has solid notoriety. I mean, it’s no milenia, but 100 years is a respectable chunk of time. For humans. Like us.

Personally, sometimes reaching Friday seems like an eternity. So a hundred years away is almost unfathomable. What will our planet look like in 100 years? How will we entertain ourselves? What will we eat? 2118 is weird even to type. Will I be a floating head in a jar, a la Futurama? Or will my memories be downloaded into an AI hardrive, a la Altered Carbon? A hundred years in the future is a vista with tea leaves. Yet, a hundred years in the past, that is knowable history. All those dissertations and PBS documentaries our culture has produced over the years makes 1918 almost feel like yesterday. Hindsight is more informative and comforting than futurist musings.

History is a curious thing, if ignored it gathers dust and loses meaning in the present. But if we can each find a personal angle, a way to relate to the past, then it can inform our present and help shape the future. And maybe, just maybe, that future won’t seem as scary.

So please join me as I #explore1918 over the next few months. I intend to follow these simple steps and: search, sort, and connect to info and fun facts connected to the year 1918.

Step 1: Search

How are the results different if we conduct the same search in Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo? Let’s find out! When searching for: “fun facts about 1918” in all three search engines the following results appeared:

• Google: The top result was: Onthisday.com
• Bing: The top result was: TopTenz.net
• DuckDuckGo: The top result was the same as Bing, however the second was not

Just a simple scratch of the surface of this topic yielded a great searchable database, a deepdive into the 1918 pandemic, and a wiki that includes maps and quizzes.

Step 2: Sort

This is probably the biggest time sucker of our three steps. Sorting through information can sometimes feel like an Indiana Jones adventure or a loop of Groundhog Day. To avoid drowning or getting lost, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Sort in chunks so the hose of information does not deluge. Limit the variables to balance the equation.

Step 3: Connect

This is the easiest step of the bunch. Look no further than your bookshelf, or Twitter feed or Facebook thread to find things from your every day that grab your attention. It can be a recent news item, or a recipe posted on a friends FB wall. But I bet something you find interesting there relates to something from the past, and in particular, 1918.

Exploring and connecting to history is easy once a process and structure is in place. Over the course of the next weeks I hope to continue to connect the dots back to 1918 and share some of the stories and characters from that year that still whisper to me a hundred years later.

At the end of this tour de force of public history I’ll take the post with the most upvotes and illustrate an aspect related to it. My hope is that if you take the time to peruse these words I’ll take the time to elaborate on the most engaging content you find intriguing.

Stay tuned~

^{100% of the SBD rewards from this #explore1918 post will support the Philadelphia History Initiative @phillyhistory. This crypto-experiment conducted by graduate courses at Temple University's Center for Public History and MLA Program, is exploring history and empowering education. Click here to learn more.}