Date: Thursday, May 21, 2026
Location:  The Newberry Library
Time: 5:30pm – 7:00 pm CT
Title: “Our 3 Majors Killed Here”: Public and Private Maps of World War I 
Speaker: John Scheckter 
Abstract: After the Australian Imperial Force evacuated Gallipoli in 1915, Major R. F. Fitz-Gerald acquired a souvenir map of the battle zone, and marked it with symbols and captions to show his own experience there. We will look closely at this map, its origins and purposes, and at Fitz-Gerald’s continued practice of overwriting and annotating documents, as he transformed mass-produced, often banal, public records of war into meaningful, even therapeutic, personal memoranda of survival. 
Bio: John Scheckter is a retired Professor of English and the author of Major Fitz-Gerald and the Matter of War: An Anzac Archive (2021).