Episodes
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The First World War was a literary conflict producing some of the most memorable poems, novels and plays of the twentieth century. While the Second World War left behind a striking visual record, including famous pictures such as Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima and Wait for Me Daddy, the First World War is not generally remembered as a visual conflict. But the war’s visual record is massive. States promoted the use of photography at the front for their historical and propaganda value. Kodak’s portable pocket vest camera was promoted to soldiers, whose private albums took on greater meaning after the war as tokens of remembrance and objects of mourning. Often treated as mere visual representations of the war’s textual record, historians are also now considering the history of the photographs themselves. Who took them and for what purpose? What did the photographer leave out of the image and why? As material objects, what did they mean to the owner and how they remembered their war experiences? In this episode of On War & Society, Dr. Beatriz Pichel, author of the new book Picturing the Western Front: Photography, Practices and Experiences in First World War France discusses the visual legacy of the First World War, the importance of treating photographs as primary sources, the controversies over colourisation and the future of photographic history in an age of visual abundance.
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In 1965, in the coastal province of Phú Yên, US Armed Forces embarked on an effort to pacify one of the least-secured regions of South Vietnam. Often described as the “other war” to win the “Hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese, pacification was, in reality, a destructive process that relied on the means of conventional warfare to succeed. Clearing, holding, and destroying communist incursions in the provinces would win the loyalty of the South Vietnamese and therefore the war. Nearly a decade later, US Armed Forces were gone and, Phú Yên, like many other provinces, was under Hanoi’s control, not Saigon’s. For these reasons, historians have taken a greater interest in how pacification was conducted on the ground. In this episode, Dr. Robert Thompson explains the significance of pacification to America’s defeat, his thoughts on Ken Burn’s popular documentary, and some of the myths that have shaped our understandings of America’s War in Vietnam.
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Canada’s military history in Northwest Europe has been told many times. On 6 June 1944, Canadian forces landed on Juno Beach as part of Operation Overlord, before quickly establishing a bridgehead and moving inland where they encountered, but ultimately overcame, stiff resistance. As the German Reich shrunk in the face of the Allied advance, the Canadians were tasked with liberating the Netherlands. Images of jubilant crowds greeting the Canadians have been seared in the collective memory. If you visit Normandy today, you will find tokens of thanks in the monuments and local traditions that scatter the Norman coast. But liberation was not achieved simply through tanks, bombs, and bullets. At the sharp end were not just German forces but also civilians who found themselves caught in the path of war. Their presence presented several military and humanitarian problems. Liberation was a messy business. David Borys, producer of the Cool Canadian History podcast and author of the new book, Civilians at the Sharp End: First Canadian Army Civil Affairs in Northwest Europe, joins our program to discuss the monumental task facing Civilian Affairs, their crucial role in military operations and humanitarian aid, and the myths and realities behind the liberation of Northwest Europe.
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The United States and the Philippines have been intimately bound by conflict. A US colony from 1898 to 1946, it remained an important US ally in the Pacific. In that time, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos fought and died for the United States, including against fellow Filipinos who opposed their US colonizers and against the Japanese occupation. Filipino immigrants also enlisted to serve on the Western Front in 1917, joined the US Navy in the 1920s, and served in American regiments during the Second World War. Despite these sacrifices, in 1946, US Congress passed the Rescission Act, retroactively barring these veterans from American citizenship and the benefits to which they were legally entitled.
Christopher Capozzola, Professor of History at MIT and author of Bound by War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America’ First Pacific Century, recently joined our program to discuss his new book, the colonization of archives, memory and forgetting, and the efforts of Filipino-American veterans to undo the broken promises of the past.
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In April 1918, Canadian soldier Frank Toronto Prewett was buried alive on the Western Front. Managing to claw his way out of the earth, Prewett was reborn but with a lasting trauma that manifested in a curious way. while recuperating alongside Siegfried Sassoon and W.H.R. Rivers at Lennel House, Prewett started to act and identify as an Iroquois man. A gifted poet, his writing attracted the attention of some of the greatest literary figures of the war generation, including Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, and Virginia Woolf among many others. But while these literary giants have stood the test of time, Prewett's work has only endured in a handful of anthologies devoted to North American Indigenous poets. His confusing and self-proclaimed postwar identity was only put to rest by a family member's DNA report indicating he had no indigenous ancestry. In this episode of On War & Society, Professor Joy Porter author of the new book Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War: The Making of Frank Prewett, discusses Pretwett's life and legacy, cultural appropriation, and the challenges of writing difficult histories.
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The first half of Britain’s twentieth century was shaped by death. Between 1914 and 1918, over 700,000 men died in the First World War, followed by another 250,000 between 1918 and 1919 from the influenza pandemic. Over three decades later, another 380,000 were killed fighting in the Second World War as well over 60,000 civilians from German air raids. The shockingly high death toll of the Great War has often overshadowed that of the Second. Tales of hardships and tragedies left in the wake of German bombs were discouraged from the outset, and the stiff upper lip of the Blitz spirit has come to dominate popular myth. Perhaps for these reasons, scholars have been more reticent about writing an emotional history of death in Britain during the Second World War. In this episode, Lucy Noakes, Professor of History at the University of Essex discusses the reasons for this imbalance, the truths and falsities behind the myths, and the methods that make such a study possible. Whether Britons confronted loss with a quiet stoicism, utilitarian memorials or personalised inscriptions on headstones, the Second World War was nevertheless a war of emotions.
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For a long time historians studying the First World War had to rely on the memoirs of soldiers, but over the last several decades, more and more letters have made their way into the archives as family members inherit and donate the written material of their relatives. These sources have initiated a new wave of scholarship devoted to identifying how civilian relationships were maintained, nurtured and interrupted by the war. But much remains to be learned. While we have long wondered about the psychological effects that war had on fighting men, what about their loved ones at home? After all, a significant number of soldiers left behind a spouse. In Canada alone, over 80,000 women were married to soldiers serving overseas. In this episode of On War & Society, Martha Hanna author of Anxious Days and Tearful Nights: Canadian War Wives during the Great War, discusses the challenges and ethics of working with private correspondence as well as the differences between how Canadian and European wives experienced the Great War at home.
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In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, five people were killed and another seventeen were injured from anthrax spores as part of a deliberate attack against members of the US media and Senate. Fears quickly spread that this was another incident of Islamic terrorism. As part of the US-led War on Terror, large sums of money and resources were mobilized in the name of biodefense and security, altering the ways in which medicine was practised on a domestic and global scale. However, it was quickly concluded that these spores originated in US labs, and the prime suspects were white male American scientists. In this episode, Professor Gwen D'Arcangelis observes how the anthrax scare and the current COVID-19 pandemic are part of a broader and ongoing history of American bio-imperialism.
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On the morning of 6 December 1917 two cargo vessells, the SS Mant Blanc and SS Imo collided in Halifax Harbour. The resulting catastrophic explosion occurred thousands of miles away from the Western Front but it was a direct result of the First World War. The war was also essential for what followed. Of the 3000 troop garrison located at Halifax, 1500 were awaiting transport to Europe and provided vital support and resources in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. In this episode, Professor Roger Sarty, a leading Canadian Naval and military historian discusses the late T. Joseph Scanlon's book Catastrophe: Stories and Lessons from the Halifax Explosion and the military history of the disaster in Halifax.
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In his new book The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering and Remaking Canada’s Second World War, Tim Cook reminds us that "if we do not tell our own stories, no one else will." But the ways in which Canadians have chosen to remember the Second World War has been far from consistent. Once viewed as the necessary war, the country quickly put the conflict behind itself. Cenotaphs built in the shadow of the Great War were simply given an addendum. There was no national Second World War memorial; no major monument to commemorate victories in Normandy or the Netherlands. For many years, when Canadians spoke of the war they spoke of tragedy, blunders and mistakes. But in the twenty-first century, Canadians and veterans have since reclaimed the legacy of the war. As veterans dwindle and historians open up new avenues for understanding this contentious past, Tim Cook joins us once again to make a plea to fellow Canadians to continue the fight for their history.
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David O’Keefe is the author of One Day in August: The Untold Story Behind Canada’s Tragedy at Dieppe and his most recent book, Seven Days in Hell: Canada’s Battle for Normandy and the Rise of the Black Watch Snipers. Never one to shy away from public exposure, O’Keefe has also been prolific in film and television, creating and collaborating in more than fifteen documentaries. In this wide-ranging interview, O’Keefe discusses the thirty-year journey behind his research into the Black Watch snipers, the benefits and challenges of doing history on film and television and the impact that the pandemic has had on research and public outreach.
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Tim Cook is a historian at the Canadian War Museum a two-time winner of the CP Stacey Award for the best book in the field of Canadian history, the 2009 winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, the 2013 winner of the Pierre Berton Award for popularizing Canadian history and a member of the Order of Canada. With such a long list of public and academic honours, Tim is that rare historian who has managed to find success both within and beyond the academy. With a scarcity of academic jobs and a new generation of historians embracing digital outlets to disseminate their work, Kyle Falcon discusses with Tim the importance and challenges of writing public history.
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At the age of 13, Ted Barris asked his father a common question: “Dad what did you do in the war?” This began a fifty-seven-year investigation into his father’s war experiences as a sergeant medic in the US Army during its bloodiest campaign during the liberation of Europe. The book that grew out of this question: Rush To Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire shares stories of combat medics from the American Civil War to more recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I sat down with Ted to discuss his book and the one burning question that he never had a chance to ask his father: what motivates medics to rush into danger?
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Henri Bourassa was a French Canadian nationalist, politician, journalist, and “one of the most…vocal voices of dissent in Canada during the First World War.” Despite Bourassa’s significance on the Canadian home front and within the international pacifist movement, his story is little-known outside of Quebec. Geoff Keelan sits down with Kyle Falcon to discuss Bourassa’s life and legacy, and how the methods of biography can help us appreciate this uniquely Canadian figure’s place amongst an international community of dissent during the First World War.
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Approximately 750,000 people were killed over four years during the American Civil War, two-thirds of these fatalities were caused by disease. This staggering death count was a shock to American physicians who were unregulated, undertrained and operating in the dark. But the war also offered opportunities. In the laboratory of the battlefield, medical practitioners gained access to an abundance of cadavers as well as demand for more efficient structures of organisation and dissemination of knowledge. Historians have debated the extent that war alters medicine. In her book, Learning from the Wounded, historian Shauna Devine argues that in the case of the American Civil War, the violence had a profound and lasting influence on American medical science and practice. In this episode of On War and Society, Devine speaks with Kyle Falcon about historical myths, the politics of the body and the lessons that can be learned for new generations of medical practitioners when we place the American Civil War under the knife.
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In the summer of 1937, Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King spent four days in Berlin. He arrived at Friedrichstrasse Station, home of the impressive U-bahn subway which was built in preparation for the 1936 Berlin Olympics; a year later this same station would transport Jewish children to Britain. During his time in Berlin, King visited a Hitler Youth Camp, which was later absorbed into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Before he returned to Canada, King sat face to face with Adolf Hitler at the Reich Presidential Palace. “My sizing up of the man as I sat and talked with him,” King later reflected, “was that he is one who truly loves his fellow-men, and his country, and would make any sacrifices for their good.” When King returned to Berlin in 1946, those sites that so impressed him nine years earlier were now in ruins. Today they are marked with memorials to the victims of Nazism. In his new book, Four Days in Hitler’s Germany: MacKenzie King’s Mission to Avert a Second World War, Robert Teigrob of Ryerson University, shares King’s travels through a history of Berlin before, during and after Nazi rule. In this episode of On War and Society, Teigrob sits down with Kyle Falcon to discuss McKenzie King’s four days in Berlin and the complicated moral questions that it raises about present-day diplomacy and historical commemoration.
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Bankruptcy, famine in the countryside, and a starving army were just some of the crises facing Louis XIV in 1709. Eight years into the War of the Spanish Succession, the allied armies led by the Duke of Marlborough, had also managed to breach the French defences on the Flanders frontier. Threatened with the prospect of invasion, Marshal Villars and his French forces met Marlborough in the field resulting in the climactic Battle of Malplaquet, halting the allied advance and changing the course of the war. Or so this is how the battle if often remembered. Darryl Dee is not so sure. His research questions the idea that the Battle of Malplaquet, and battles in general, can ever be so decisive. In this episode of On War & Society, Darryl Dee and Kyle Falcon discuss researching and teaching the great battles in history.
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On this month's episode Of On War and Society, Kyle Pritchard sits down with Dr Roger Sarty to discuss the life and career of CP Stacey. Sarty explains how CP Stacey went from being a young student with no interest in research to the founding father of Canadian military history. Throughout his career Stacey faced considerable set backs in the form of limited finances, a tight job market, a public initially hostile to his work and personal tragedy. But through his own hard work and the considerable of help from his family and fellow historians, Stacey was able to make a career as a historian, first in the army as historical officer and later as a university based historian. As a historian Stacey displayed a rare gift for understanding the demands of war, a gift which earned him the admiration of the Canadian Military. But despite his success Stacey remained a humble and deeply generous man who helped start the career of some of Canada's greatest historians.
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As Canadians, there is a sense that international collaboration has acted and continues to act as a positive force in the world today. Yet certain events serve as a reminder that the foundations of our international relationships have sometimes developed not out of cooperation, but out of aggression and intervention. The Boxer Rebellion unfolded during the high tide of imperialism at the turn of the 20th century. In response to pressure from foreign diplomatic and religious influences, the Boxers, or the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, rose as an anti-foreign Buddhist sect, taking control over large swaths of Northern China resulting in the deaths of some 200 Western missionaries and over 2000 Chinese Christian converts. The international involvement to put down the Boxer Rebellion, through an eight nation alliance which occupied and divided Beijing, not only provides a litmus test to measure the imperial ambitions of Western nations, but also speaks to what happens when our communications have broken down and civil methods for resolving international crises have been exhausted. In this episode, Kyle Pritchard sits down with Blaine Chiasson about the historical importance of the rebellion and how questions around war and empire continue to shape multilateral relations today.
Blaine Chiasson is an associate professor in Chinese History at Wilfrid Laurier University with a specialization in the history of colonization in Northeastern China. He is currently working on a history of the occupation of Beijing and Tianjin by the Eight Nation Alliance during and after the Boxer Rebellion.
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The Italian Campaign during the Second World War remains a subject of controversy—whether it was “Normandy’s Long Right Flank” or a costly stalemate continues to be debated by historians to modern day. Terry Copp, director emeritus of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies, believes he has found a new multinational approach to studying the Italian Campaign as he zeroes in on the late 1943/early 1944 Allied assault on the Axis Winter Line. The Winter Line was the site of many famous battles that have since become important national icons, including Ortona, Orsogna, the Rapido River and Monte Cassino. Terry insists to properly comprehend the campaign historians should look passed the national narratives and address the combat operations across the entire peninsula.
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