I love this!! What a great idea, and I love how you compare it to President Wilson's speech.
I agree it would be interesting to see how your analysis would change based on different resources -- my immediate thought is a newspaper, but I've also had trouble OCR-ing them. My other thought would be diaries, but I'm not sure how well those would act as a broad overview similar to the SOTU...
RE: How do we remember 1918?