The Museum of Idaho welcomed researchers and volunteers from Utah State University on Saturday for a unique community event focused on preserving personal accounts of war through cherished family objects. The “Bringing War Home” project, a multi-year scholarly initiative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, invites residents to share photographs, medals, letters, uniforms, and other wartime memorabilia—while keeping ownership of the items themselves.
The roadshow brought together student documentation teams and photography stations where community members could register their artifacts and participate in recorded interviews. Rather than acquiring items for a museum collection, the project’s approach centers on preservation through digital archiving and narrative documentation. Participants could watch as their family heirlooms were photographed and cataloged for an online database accessible to the public through Utah State University’s library system.
Documenting Stories Across Generations
Molly Cannon, an assistant professor at Utah State University and co-director of the project, explained the mission drives at the heart of the initiative. “We’re aiming to document people’s experiences of war through the objects that they keep at home,” she said. The team recognizes that wartime artifacts often hold significance far beyond their material value—they anchor family narratives and connect individual experiences to broader historical contexts.
Among the items brought to the Idaho Falls roadshow were family photo albums, service medals, artwork, jewelry, dog tags, canteens, buttons, silk fabric, and notably, a fragment from a Japanese aircraft. These objects represent the kinds of tangible connections to history that families have preserved in homes across the region. The most frequently documented items so far have been photographs and letters from wartime periods, though the range of materials demonstrates how widely war’s imprint extends across domestic life.
Cannon emphasized the collaborative learning dimension of the endeavor: “People can learn from them not only from their own families, but what we’re gathering is this collective of stories from our community.” This approach transforms individual family histories into a shared regional archive, allowing descendants and neighbors alike to access stories they might never otherwise encounter.
Building a Regional and National Network
The “Bringing War Home” project has already hosted eleven events across Utah over the past few years. A traveling exhibit drawn from those earlier roadshows currently circulates around the state, and artifacts and stories were preserved at the Utah State Capitol as part of Utah’s 250th anniversary commemoration. Saturday’s event in Idaho Falls extends the project’s reach into neighboring regions and builds momentum for a larger vision.
The culminating assignment for students enrolled in Utah State University’s “Objects of War” course is to organize and execute a roadshow in their home communities. That classroom component transforms the project into a teaching tool, where undergraduates and graduate students gain hands-on experience in public history, oral history methodology, and archival practice—all while serving their communities.
Looking forward, project leaders plan to develop documentation kits designed for distribution nationwide. These kits would enable communities across the country to conduct their own roadshows and contribute to the growing digital archive, decentralizing the project’s reach and amplifying its impact as a preservation effort.
What Comes Next
The digital archive created through these roadshows remains freely accessible online through Utah State University’s library system, allowing researchers, educators, and family members to explore stories and view photographs of artifacts from their region. As the “Bringing War Home” project prepares to expand its documentation kits for national distribution, similar events may come to other communities across Idaho and the broader Mountain West region. Residents with wartime artifacts—whether from World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, or more recent conflicts—are encouraged to monitor the project’s website at usu.edu/mountainwest/bringing-war-home for information about future Bonneville County events or other ways to contribute their family’s stories to the archive.
For more context on community initiatives across the state, visit Idaho News or explore additional coverage through the Idaho News Network.