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On the morning of April 9, 1917, troops of the Canadian Corps under General Julian Byng attacked the formidable German defences of Vimy Ridge. Since then, generations of Canadians have shared a deep emotional attachment to the battle, inspired partly by the spectacular memorial on the battlefield. Although the event is considered central in Canadian military history, most people know very little about what happened during that memorable Easter in northern France. Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment draws on the work of a new generation of scholars who explore the battle from three perspectives. The first assesses the Canadian Corps within the wider context of the Western Front in 1917. The s...
The story of the bloody 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge is, according to many of today’s tellings, a heroic founding moment for Canada. This noble, birth-of-a-nation narrative is regularly applied to the Great War in general. Yet this mythical tale is rather new. “Vimyism”— today’s official story of glorious, martial patriotism—contrasts sharply with the complex ways in which veterans, artists, clerics, and even politicians who had supported the war interpreted its meaning over the decades. Was the Great War a futile imperial debacle? A proud, nation-building milestone? Contending Great War memories have helped to shape how later wars were imagined. The Vimy Trap provides a powerful probe of commemoration cultures. This subtle, fast-paced work of public history—combining scholarly insight with sharp-eyed journalism, and based on primary sources and school textbooks, battlefield visits and war art—explains both how and why peace and war remain contested terrain in ever-changing landscapes of Canadian memory.
Why does the Great War seem part of modern memory when its rituals of mourning and remembrance were traditional, romantic, even classical? In this highly original history of memory, David Williams shows how classic Great War literature, including work by Remarque, Owen, Sassoon, and Harrison, was symptomatic of a cultural crisis brought on by the advent of cinema. He argues that images from Geoffrey Malins' hugely popular war film The Battle of the Somme (1916) collapsed social, temporal, and spatial boundaries, giving film a new cultural legitimacy, while the appearance of writings based on cinematic forms of remembering marked a crucial transition from a verbal to a visual culture. By cont...
A comparative study of how museum exhibitions in Britain, Canada and Australia were used to depict the First World War.
The rural post office was once a vibrant institution of sociability and communication in Canada. Country Post strives to recreate the postal world of 1880 – 1945 through extensive research and the recollections of twenty-eight postmasters from all regions of Canada.
The twentieth century has been called a century of horror. Proof of that, designation can be found in the vast and ever-increasing volume of scholarly work on violence, trauma, memory, and history across diverse academic disciplines. This book demonstrates not only the ways in which the wars of the twentieth century have altered theological engagement and religious practice, but also the degree to which religious ways of thinking have shaped the way we construct historical narratives. Drawing on diverse sources - from the Hebrew Bible to Commonwealth war graves, from Greek tragedy to post-Holocaust theology - Alana M. Vincent probes the intersections between past and present, memory and identity, religion and nationality. The result is a book that defiescategorization and offers no easy answers, but instead pursues an agenda of theological realism, holding out continued hope for the restoration of the world.
Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies is a collection of interdisciplinary essays that examine the various contexts—political, social, and cultural—that have shaped the study of Canadian literature and the role it plays in our understanding of the Canadian nation-state. The essays are tied together as instances of critical practices that reveal the relations and exchanges that take place between the categories of the literary and the nation, as well as between the disciplinary sites of critical discourses and the porous boundaries of their methods. They are concerned with the material effects of the imperial and colonial logics that have fashioned Canada, as well as with the p...
The toppling of monuments globally in the last few years has highlighted the potency of monuments as dynamic and affectively loaded participants in society. In the context of Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, monuments inspire colonial and imperial nostalgia, compelling visitors to consistently re-imagine Canada as a white, Anglophone nation, built through the labour of white men: politicians, soldiers, and businessmen. At the same time, Ottawa monuments allow for dominant affective relationships to the nation to be challenged, demonstrated through subtle and explicit forms of defacement and other interactions that compel us to remember colonial violence, pacifism, violence against women, rac...
Examining their social, political, and economic contexts, McKay shows how the murals of this period glorified Canada as a modern nation state, extolled the virtues of commerce and industry, inculcated conventions of gender and race, and shared the intensity of nationalistic sentiment that led to the work of the more renowned painters of Toronto's Group of Seven. Bringing together for the first time a body of Canadian work - civic, commercial, religious, and private - that has been largely ignored by art historians, A National Soul challenges previous histories of Canadian painting. This generously illustrated book reproduces seldom-seen works from across the country, many of which have been moved or destroyed, and includes a comprehensive listing of all works from the period, their original and present locations, and their state of preservation.
The classical revival style of architecture made famous by the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago left its mark on one of the most sustained classical building movements in American architectural history: the Christian Science church building movement. By 1920 every major American city and many smaller towns contained an example of this architecture, financed by the followers of Mary Baker Eddy, the church's founder. These buildings represented a new, burgeoning American institution that appealed to business people and to young men and women working to succeed. Characterized by middle-class congregations that in the early part of the century were over 75 percent women, Christian Sc...