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 ...

The Great War: From Memory to History offers a new look at the multiple ways the Great War has been remembered and commemorated through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Drawing on contributions from history, cultural studies, film, and literary studies this collection offers fresh perspectives on the Great War and its legacy at the local, national, and international levels. More importantly, it showcases exciting new research on the experiences and memories of “for...

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 W...

Excerpted from Niall Ferguson’s sprawling bestseller The War of the World, The Abyss now stands on its own as one of the most thrilling short histories of World War I ever written. This is not a conventional military history about battles and generals. Rather, The Abyss examines how World War I saw the birth of total war—fought between societies as much as armies—and must therefore be understood in terms of the financial crises it unleashed, the multinational emp...

From a bestselling historian, a daringly revisionist history of World War I.“A rich and provocative book, evocative and heartbreaking.” — AtlanticThe Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England’s fault. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims, thereby transforming a Continental co...

**Winner of the 2014 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for the Best Work of History"Brilliant…the most challenging and intelligent book on the Great War and our perceptions of it that any of us will read." —John Charley, The Times [London]**One of the most violent conflicts in the history of civilization, World War I has been strangely forgotten in American culture. It has become a ghostly war fought in a haze of memory, often seen merely as a distant preamble to World War...

Originally published in 1962, The Silence on the Shore is considered by many critics to be Hugh Garners best, most ambitious novel. Truly, in the person of Grace Hill, the landlady of the Toronto rooming house where most of the books events take place, Garner has created a fictional character never to be forgotten. Grace is a middle-aged snoop and an overweight nudist whose sexual release comes from watching wrestling matches at a hockey arena that is a thinly disguised Maple Leaf...

Boys and Girls in No Man's Land examines how the First World War entered the lives and imaginations of Canadian children. Drawing on educational materials, textbooks, adventure tales, plays, and Sunday-school papers, this study explores the role of children in the nation's war effort.Susan R. Fisher also considers how the representation of the war has changed in Canadian children's literature. During the war, the conflict was invariably presented as noble and thrilling, bu...

Is there a 'Western way of war' which pursues battles of annihilation and single-minded military victory? Is warfare on a path to ever greater destructive force? This magisterial 2010 account answers these questions by tracing the history of Western thinking about strategy - the employment of military force as a political instrument - from antiquity to the present day. Assessing sources from Vegetius to contemporary America, and with a particular focus on strategy since the Napoleonic Wars...

In late 2007 and early 2008, world-renowned historians gathered in Kansas City for a series of public forums on World War I. Each of the five events focused on a particular topic and featured spirited dialogue between its prominent participants.In spontaneous exchanges, the eminent scholars probed each other’s arguments, learned from each other, and provided insights not just into history but also into the way scholars think about their subject alongside and at times in conflict wi...

Karl von Clausewitz's study On War was described by the American strategic thinker Bernard Brodie as 'not simply the greatest, but the only great book about war'. It is hard to disagree. Even though he wrote his only major work at a time when the range of firearms was fifty yards, much of what he had to say remains relevant today. Michael Howard explains Clausewitz's ideas in terms both of his experiences as a professional soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, and of theintellectual background o...

The First World War has been described as the "primordial catastrophe of the twentieth century." Arguably, Italian Fascism, German National Socialism and Soviet Leninism and Stalinism would not have emerged without the cultural and political shock of World War I. The question why this catastrophe happened therefore preoccupies historians to this day. The focus of this volume is not on the consequences, but rather on the connection between the Great War and the long 19th century, the short-...