This website aims to provide a glimpse of what life was like in Sarasota, Florida during the Great War.

Through extensive archival research, the website’s creators have divided content into three key sections:  the war effort, wartime economic development, and social life on the homefront. Also included is a section on influenza. There is a large amount of overlap between the sections; many topics covered on the site could fit into more than one of these categories. In particular, the Great War had an impact that extended well beyond the war effort itself. Hopefully visitors will leave this site having learned more about Sarasota’s history, and with a better understanding of what the Great War did and did not leave untouched.  

The creation of this website is part of the Century America distance mentoring class, sponsored by the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges and underwritten by the Teagle Foundation. 

For the second year in a row, Professors Ellen Holmes Pearson of the University of North Carolina Asheville and Jeffrey McClurken of the University of Mary Washington have taught this course to students at multiple COPLAC institutions via distance mentoring. This year, students from six different member schools participated. With an emphasis on digital humanities and primary source research, the course’s students have created websites about the experience of their campus and community during the Great War. The creators of this website attend New College of Florida, which was founded in 1960, many years after the Great War. Thus, the website focuses solely on New College’s home, the city of Sarasota.  

The header text “Welcome Buddies” refers to the greeting written in the road of downtown Sarasota on Armistice Day, 1919, welcoming the parade of Sarasota’s Great War veterans.