This book is a Festschrift for Robert Craig Brown. It sprang from two relatively simple ideas: first, that a book on Canada and the Great War would be a fitting tribute to a historian who has contributed so much to our present understanding of that experience and, second, that such a book could make a contribution to the on-going re-examination of Canada’s experiences during the First World War. It has been a quarter of a century since Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook’s Canada: A Nation Transformed first appeared, and since that time a new generation of historians and scholars has examined and challenged the way we think about the Great War. New territory has been explored and new questions have been asked about the past, and we believe that the time is right to bring together a collection of essays on Canada and the Great War that reflects the changing times. We all agreed that this is the best way to honour Craig and to acknowledge his contribution to the study of Canadian history.
We are taking a different approach to the Festschrift. Rather than the usual collection of disparate essays, in Canada and the Great War each author was assigned a specific topic on Canada and the war and given enough freedom to explore what he or she believes to be important for the subject. Together, the chapters constitute a broad history of Canada’s experience in the First World War while honouring someone who has made a significant contribution to the study of history in Canada. The fifteen authors represent a cross-section of Craig’s friends, colleagues, contemporaries, and former students. As individuals they have won virtually every major regional, national, academic, and non-academic book prize, and together they represent the leading scholars on Canada and the Great War, a subject that was, and still is, the focus for much of Craig Brown’s scholarship. These authors were selected because of their scholarship as historians and as specialists in the field and, by focusing on one subject of broad interest to Canadians, we hope to have produced a book with a longer shelf life than the usual Festschrift.
The different contributors to this book examine how Canadians experienced the Great War and how their experiences were shaped by region, politics, economics, gender, class, ethnicity, and nationalism. In different ways the writers look at the impact of the war on Canadians, at the tensions and fractures in Canadian society, at the upheaval and death, and at the way some attitudes and perceptions about the country changed while others remained the same.
Many people need to be thanked for their help in seeing this book through to publication. First, I must thank all of the contributors for devoting so much time and effort to their chapters over the past few years. In particular, I would like to thank Donald Avery for agreeing to contribute a chapter on western Canada to this project at the last minute. On very short notice, Don graciously agreed to take a chapter from his book Dangerous Foreigners and to update, revise, and shape it into a new chapter that fits so well into this volume.
Len Husband, of the University of Toronto Press, has guided this book through the various stages of publication, and this final product would not have been possible without his effort and his support. For that I am most grateful. Thanks also to Jill McConkey of the University of Toronto Press for her help at the beginning of this project. I would also like to thank Frances Mundy of the University of Toronto Press, Catherine Frost for copy-editing the manuscript, and Anita Levin for her work in preparing the index. This work has been supported in part by a manuscript preparation grant from Ryerson University.
My friends Patrice Dutil and Paul Litt, who evolved as advisers and contributors, provided feedback and humour over the duration of this project. They were always forthcoming with their views, and their support made the work that much easier – although our discussions of things historical can hardly be called work. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Terry, and daughters, Claire and Beth, for their help, patience, and advice as this project evolved slowly from a nice idea into this book.