Found on the Web: The Sinking of the Lusitania

As often as possible, I want my students to read information in their textbook or other sources, hear it from me in class, and see it on screen. So whenever I prepare a lesson these days in any of my subjects, I poke around YouTube to see if I can find any interesting and relevant videos, and quite often I come up with unexpected gems. I like to mix up documentary footage, bits of dramatizations, videos created expressly for the Web, other students' posted projects, humorous takes, musical takes, older educational productions (which now have a period charm(, cartoons, materials in Spanish, and so on.

In the midst of my prep for teaching World War I, I discovered an incredible documentary/propaganda short created in 1918 by the great cartoonist and experimental animator Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland), based on The Sinking of the Lusitania by a German U boat in May 1915 - one of those events that pushed the United States a little closer to entering the Great War on the Allied side, which it eventually did do in April, 1917. McCay and his assistants drew 25,000 cels for this unusual and beautiful piece.