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 experienced fundamentally through local means. City parades, military send-offs, public school events, women’s war relief efforts, and many other public exercises became the parochial lenses through which a distant war was viewed. Like no other book before it, this work argues that these experiences were the true "realities" of war, and that the old maxim that truth is war’s first victim needs to be understood, even in the international and imperialistic Great War, as a profoundly local phenomenon. Hometown Horizons contributes to a growing body of work on the social and cultural histories of the First World War, and challenges historians to consider the place of everyday modes of communication in forming collective understandings of world events. This history of a war imagined will find an eager readership among social and military historians, cultural studies scholars, and anyone with an interest in wartime Canada.
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 experienced fundamentally through local means. City parades, military send-offs, public school events, women’s war relief efforts, and many other public exercises became the parochial lenses through which a distant war was viewed. Like no other book before it, this work argues that these experiences were the true "realities" of war, and that the old maxim that truth is war’s first victim needs to be understood, even in the international and imperialistic Great War, as a profoundly local phenomenon. Hometown Horizons contributes to a growing body of work on the social and cultural histories of the First World War, and challenges historians to consider the place of everyday modes of communication in forming collective understandings of world events. This history of a war imagined will find an eager readership among social and military historians, cultural studies scholars, and anyone with an interest in wartime Canada.
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.
Canada and the First World War is a tribute to esteemed University of Toronto historian Robert Craig Brown, one of Canada's greatest authorities on World War One, and the contributors include a cross-section of his friends, colleagues, contemporaries, and former students.
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