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Hometown Horizons
In Hometown Horizons, Robert Rutherdale considers how people and communities on the Canadian home front perceived the Great War. Drawing on newspaper archives and organizational documents, he examines how farmers near Lethbridge, Alberta, shopkeepers in Guelph, Ontario, and civic workers in Trois-Rivières, Québec took part in local activities that connected their everyday lives to a tumultuous period in history. Many important debates in social and cultural history are addressed, including demonization of enemy aliens, gendered fields of wartime philanthropy, state authority and citizenship, and commemoration and social memory. The making of Canada’s home front, Rutherdale argues, was ex...
Bearers of Risk
The short story and the short story cycle have long been considered a marginal genre, free to make room for fresh or risk-taking voices. But in thematizing masculinity in crisis, the genre uses the premise of the marginal to elevate recuperative masculinity politics and nostalgia for traditional patriarchy. Despite the scholarly tendency to link marginal genres and marginalized voices, features of the CanLit infrastructure – including genre criticism and literary prize culture – are complicit in normalizing hegemonic masculinity and the Settler colonial project. Bearers of Risk examines how male Canadian writers mobilize the early twenty-first-century short story cycle as an illustration...
Creating Postwar Canada
Creating Postwar Canada showcases new research on this complex period, exploring postwar Canada's diverse symbols and battlegrounds. Contributors to the first half of the collection consider evolving definitions of the nation, examining the ways in which Canada was reimagined to include both the Canadian North and landscapes structured by trade and commerce. The essays in the latter half analyze debates on shopping hours, professional striptease, the "provider" role of fathers, interracial adoption, sexuality on campus, and illegal drug use, issues that shaped how the country defined itself in sociocultural and political terms. This collection contributes to the historiography of nationalism, gender and the family, consumer cultures, and countercultures.
The Patriotic Consensus
When the Second World War broke out, Winnipeg was Canada’s fourth-largest city, home to strong class and ethnic divisions, and marked by a vibrant tradition of political protest. Citizens demonstrated their support for the war effort through their wide commitment to initiatives such as Victory Loan campaigns or calls for voluntary community service. But given Winnipeg’s diversity, was the Second World War a unifying event for Winnipeg residents? In The Patriotic Consensus, Jody Perrun explores the wartime experience of ordinary Winnipeggers through their responses to recruiting, the treatment of minorities, and the adjustments made necessary by family separation.
This Small Army of Women
With her soft linen head scarf and white apron emblazoned with a red cross, the Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, or VAD, has become a romantic emblem of the First World War. This Small Army of Women draws on diaries, letters, and interviews to tell the forgotten story of the nearly two thousand women from Canada and Newfoundland who volunteered to “do their bit” at home and overseas. Middle-class and well-educated but largely untrained, VADs were excluded from Canadian military hospitals overseas (the realm of the professional nurse) but helped solve Britain’s nursing deficit and filled gaps in Canada’s domestic nursing ranks. Their dedication and struggle to secure a place at their brothers’ bedsides reveals much about women’s contributions to the war effort, the tensions between amateur and professional nurses, and women’s evolving role outside the home.
THE ONES WHO HAVE TO PAY
When war in Europe broke out in 1914, why did so many men from Victoria, BC, Canada, enlist enthusiastically? What did they feel about the war they were fighting? What were their personal values? Were they ever disillusioned in the trenches of the Western Front? To what extent did they enjoy combat? How did they regard the German enemy? And faced with artillery bombardment, execrable living conditions, and the fear of death or maiming, what helped them to carry on? In researching these questions, the author found that Victoria was a unique city in several ways and that some assumptions about Canadian soldiers’ trench experience may not apply to volunteers from that city. Moreover, the culture of the time was different from that of Canada today so that the enthusiasm for military life and for “the empire” may seem bizarre to young people. Ideals of masculinity may seem outdated, and the concepts of personal honor and duty, which these men supported, may be obsolete. This essay tries to understand the culture of Canada and especially that of Victoria, BC, a century ago, a pertinent exercise considering the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War.
Sister Soldiers of the Great War
“I am on night duty ... on what is supposed to be the ‘hopeless ward’ so you can imagine, or try to, just what I am doing. I know you cannot really have the faintest idea ...” In Sister Soldiers of the Great War, award-winning author Cynthia Toman recovers the long-lost history of Canada’s first women soldiers – nursing sisters who enlisted as officers with the Canadian Army Medical Corps. These experienced professional nurses left their friends, families, and jobs to enlist in the army. Granted relative rank and equal pay to men, they had a mandate to salvage as many sick and wounded men as possible for return to the front lines. Nothing prepared them for poor living conditions, the scale of casualties, or the type of wounds they encountered, but their letters and diaries reveal that they were determined to soldier on under all circumstances while still “living as well as possible.”
Fighting with the Empire
Canadians often characterize their military history as a march toward nationhood, but in the first eighty years of Confederation they were fighting for the British Empire. From 1867 to 1947, war or threat of war forced Canadians to define and redefine their relationship to Britain and to one another. As French Canadians, Indigenous peoples, and those with roots in Continental Europe and beyond mobilized in support of imperial war efforts, their participation challenged the imagined homogeneity of Canada as a British nation. From soldiers overseas to workers on the home front – and from the cultural ties of imperial pageantry to the bonds of race and class – Fighting with the Empire examines the paradox of a national contribution to an imperial war effort. This insightful collection of connected case studies explores the middle ground between narratives that celebrate the emergence of a nation through warfare and those that equate Canadian nationalism with British imperialism.
Filling the Ranks
Manpower is the lifeblood of armies regardless of time or place. In the First World War, much of Canada’s military effort went toward sustaining the Canadian Expeditionary Force, especially in France and Belgium. The job was not easy. The government and Department of Militia and Defence were tasked with recruiting and training hundreds of thousands of men, shipping them to England, and creating organizations on the continent meant to forward these men to their units. The first book to explore the issue of manpower in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, Filling the Ranks examines the administrative and organizational changes that fostered efficiency and sustained the army. Richard Holt descri...
For Home and Empire
For Home and Empire is the first book to compare voluntary wartime mobilization across the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand home fronts. As communities organized to raise recruits or donate funds, their efforts strengthened communal bonds, but they also reinforced class, race, and gender boundaries. Which jurisdiction should provide for a soldier’s wife if she moved from Hobart to northern Tasmania? Should Welsh women in Vancouver purchase comforts for local soldiers or for Welsh soldiers in the British Army? Should Māori volunteers enlist with their home regiment or with a separate battalion? Voluntary efforts reflected how community members understood their relationship to one another, to their dominion, and to the Empire. Steve Marti examines the motives and actions of those involved in the voluntary war effort, applying the framework of settler colonialism to reveal the geographical and social divides that separated communities as they organized for war.
