“Documenting Shell Shock”: LAURE Research Story Essay

Abstract

Since the fall of my junior year here at Miami, I have spent much of my time devoted to studying the topic of shell shock in the United States, specifically examining the ways in which newspapers facilitated the spread of information— and misinformation— about the diagnosis during the World War I years. My research journey began in Dr. Andrew Offenburger’s course “Raiders of the Lost Archive”, where we were tasked with locating a research topic of our choice using the online newspaper repository Chronicling America as our main source base. Fascinated by the idea of how wars can produce a sense of collective national trauma— a topic introduced to me in the “History of the World Wars” course I took the previous year with Dr. Stephen Norris— I decided to explore the relationship between the collective trauma of modern warfare and the psychological trauma of shell shock. This project has since evolved into my undergraduate thesis for the History Honors Program, titled “Documenting Shell Shock: Developments in the Public Perception of Psychological Trauma in the United States, 1915-1922.” The thesis provides a chronological examination of shell shock in the United States through newspapers, beginning with the earliest reports out of Great Britain in 1915 and continuing into the interwar period to examine the lasting effects of wartime trauma on American recovery efforts. The first two chapters are included in my submission.