Paper Nations: A WWI Puppet Show

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Why did World War I start? This is a question that has troubled even renound historians for a long time, as it is an incredibly complex question with arguments possible for multiple answers.

To answer the question, we (being myself, Cashel, and, Tom) looked at multiple theories of some different historians and created a thesis statement on what we thought to be true. That is that World War One started because of unrestrained nationalism in Serbia, Germany, and Great Britain. Serbia and Germany both seeked expansion and to create global colonies while Great Britain wanted to maintain their pre- existing colonies. The friction created when these nations collided resulted in the world’s first total war. Our theory on the start of the war is very similar to that of Richard J. Evans who also believed nationalism was a major cause.

With this answer in mind we started to write the script of the puppet show. We decided to make a puppet show because, to explain our answer we thought it would be a good idea to represent it in the form of a story that ends with the start of World War I.  We had a script pretty quickly since we were comfortable with our information. The hard part was to visually represent it through the form of puppets. You will see in the show that we decided to use countries as the characters instead of individuals, and since flags alone would be boring we made them some things that represent the countries they’re from.

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Britain and France puppets

Now that we’re finished I think we’re  left with what is actually a pretty high caliber puppet show, we even have lighting, and a puppet theatre, both things increasing the production quality, but keep in mind this is my first puppet show.

 

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