Museum of Idaho hosts “Bringing War Home” Project from Utah State University
Hadley Bodell
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho (KIFI) – As part of a multi-year project called “Bringing War Home,” professors and students from Utah State University partnered with the Museum of Idaho to host a roadshow on Saturday, July 11 to find wartime artifacts in the community.
The project is funded through the National Endowment for the Humanities in their dialogs on the experiences of war. Organizers say it’s a community-facing project that has traveled around the state of Utah, and now, Idaho.
“We’re aiming to document people’s experiences of war through the objects that they keep at home,” said Molly Cannon, assistant professor at USU and co-director of the “Bringing War Home” project. “Today, we’ve seen family photo albums, medals and various artwork that hangs on walls.”
The organizers also had someone bring in a fragment of a Japanese aircraft that had been shot down by an ancestor. The team doesn’t take the objects from the owners, rather takes photos of them and interviews the people who bring them in. With the interviews, the stories behind the items are preserved in the exhibitions.
“We archive them in a publicly accessible digital archive through our library at Utah State University,” Cannon said. “Through the 11 events we’ve hosted over the last few years in Utah, we’ve curated a traveling exhibit that currently travels around Utah.”
This year, as part of the Utah 250, some of the stories and artifacts were preserved at the Utah State Capitol. Organizers said they were excited to see what the community of Idaho Falls could bring to the collection. If you participate in a road show, you’ll find different stations to attend.
“You’re greeted at the registration desk, then students will meet with you to learn more about the objects you’ve brought in,” Cannon explained. “They’ll document all the information about the object, and then at the final station we photograph them.”
The benefits of the project go far beyond the exhibitions. Students use the artifacts for research papers, teachers use them for lessons in their classrooms, and families find a place where a piece of their history, as well as the country’s history, is preserved.
Cannon said she is most looking forward to the next stage of the project where they’re beginning to share the curation with exhibitions and Utah Public Radio stories. At the same time, they’re still documenting hundreds of artifacts from communities across state lines.
“I’m looking forward to working with teachers to really get this curriculum into their classrooms,” she said. “Our project has a website which directs you to the current digital archive.”
Cannon said the most common items so far have been photographs and letters from wartime. They also get random objects like service medals, dog tags, canteens, uniforms, buttons and commemorative gifts like silk fabric and jewelry. Mainly, families want the stories connected to these items preserved.
“People can learn from them not only from their own families, but what we’re gathering is this collective of stories from our community. So we get to understand a whole community’s experience of and legacy of these conflicts,” Cannon said.
The culminating assignment for the “Objects of War” class at Utah State University is to host a road show in Logan, just a short trip down from locals in Eastern Idaho, and Cannon said everyone is welcome to come with their historic items. The hope is to one have documenting kits to send countrywide for people to document their own artifacts to add to the collection.
The website for the project is https://www.usu.edu/mountainwest/bringing-war-home/ for more information and to view artifact stories.