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The Vimy Trap

Author: Ian McKay

Publisher: Between the Lines

Published: 2017-03-16

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1771132760

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.

Vimy

Author: Tim Cook

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 0735233179

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#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER Winner of the 2018 JW Dafoe Book Prize Longlisted for British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction 2018 Runner-up for the 2018 Templer Medal Book Prize Finalist for the 2018 Ottawa Book Awards A bold new telling of the defining battle of the Great War, and how it came to signify and solidify Canada’s national identity Why does Vimy matter? How did a four-day battle at the midpoint of the Great War, a clash that had little strategic impact on the larger Allied war effort, become elevated to a national symbol of Canadian identity? Tim Cook, Canada’s foremost military historian and a Charles Taylor Prize winner, examines the Battle of Vimy Ridge and the way the memory of it has evolved over 100 years. The operation that began April 9, 1917, was the first time the four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together. More than 10,000 Canadian soldiers were killed or injured over four days—twice the casualty rate of the Dieppe Raid in August 1942. The Corps’ victory solidified its reputation among allies and opponents as an elite fighting force. In the wars’ aftermath, Vimy was chosen as the site for the country’s strikingly beautiful monument to mark Canadian sacrifice and service. Over time, the legend of Vimy took on new meaning, with some calling it the “birth of the nation.” The remarkable story of Vimy is a layered skein of facts, myths, wishful thinking, and conflicting narratives. Award-winning writer Tim Cook explores why the battle continues to resonate with Canadians a century later. He has uncovered fresh material and photographs from official archives and private collections across Canada and from around the world. On the 100th anniversary of the event, and as Canada celebrates 150 years as a country, Vimy is a fitting tribute to those who fought the country’s defining battle. It is also a stirring account of Canadian identity and memory, told by a masterful storyteller.

Vimy

Author: Pierre Berton

Publisher: Pen and Sword

Published: 2012-11-19

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1783037237

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The bestselling, award-winning author of The American Invasion of Canada “has given great drama and immediacy to that turning point in Canadian history” (Maclean’s). On Easter Monday 1917 with a blizzard blowing in their faces, the four divisions of the Canadian Corps in France seized and held the best-defended German bastion on the Western Front—the muddy scarp of Vimy Ridge. The British had failed to take the Ridge, and so had the French who had lost 150,000 men in the attempt. Yet these magnificent colonial troops did so in a morning at the cost of only 10,000 casualties. The author recounts this remarkable feat of arms with both pace and style. He has gathered many personal accounts from soldiers who fought at Vimy. He describes the commanders and the men, the organization and the training, and above all notes the thorough preparation for the attack from which the British General Staff could have learned much. The action is placed within the context both of the Battle of Arras, of which this attack was part, and as a milestone in the development of Canada as a nation. “This wonderful book brings to life the amazing men who came across the Atlantic nearly a century ago and won a famous victory which helped change a nation forever . . . the wonderful prose of Pierre Berton is all from the heart and you should share in it.” —War History Online “The cinematic writing plunks the reader in the midst of the actual battle, and a judicious use of quotes from soldiers’ diaries and letters helps provide a ground-level perspective.” —Quill & Quire

Warrior Nation

Author: Ian McKay

Publisher: Between the Lines

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 517

ISBN-13: 1926662776

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Explores the ominous campaign to change a nation's definition of itself

War Junk

Author: Alex Souchen

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2020-04-15

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0774862955

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During the Second World War, Canadian factories produced mountains of munitions and supplies, including some 800 ships, 16,000 aircraft, 800,000 vehicles, and over 4.6 billion rounds of ammunition and artillery shells. However, the end of hostilities in 1945 turned the leftover assets into peacetime liabilities. Alex Souchen provides a definitive account of the disposal crisis triggered by Allied victory and shows how Canadians responded to the unprecedented divestment of public property by reusing and recycling military surpluses to improve their postwar lives. War Junk recounts the complex political, economic, social, and environmental legacies of munitions disposal in Canada by revealing how the tools of war became integral to the making of postwar Canada.

The Case for Basic Income

Author: Jamie Swift

Publisher: Between the Lines

Published: 2021-05-03

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1771135484

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Inequality is up. Decent work is down. Free market fundamentalism has been exposed as a tragic failure. In a job market upended by COVID-19—with Canadians caught in the grip of precarious labour, stagnant wages, a climate crisis, and the steady creep of automation—an ever-louder chorus of voices calls for a liveable and obligation-free basic income. Could a basic income guarantee be the way forward to democratize security and intervene where the market economy and social programs fail? Jamie Swift and Elaine Power scrutinize the politics and the potential behind a radical proposal in a post-pandemic world: that wealth should be built by a society, not individuals. And that we all have an unconditional right to a fair share. In these pages, Swift and Power bring to the forefront the deeply personal stories of Canadians who participated in the 2017–2019 Ontario Basic Income Pilot; examine the essential literature and history behind the movement; and answer basic income’s critics from both the right and left.

Reasoning Otherwise

Author: Ian McKay

Publisher: Between the Lines

Published: 2008-11-15

Total Pages: 733

ISBN-13: 1926662334

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In Reasoning Otherwise, author Ian McKay returns to the concepts and methods of “reconnaissance” first outlined in Rebels, Reds, Radicals to examine the people and events that led to the rise of the left in Canada from 1890 to 1920. Reasoning Otherwise highlights how a new way of looking at the world based on theories of evolution transformed struggles around class, religion, gender, and race, and culminates in a new interpretation of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. As McKay demonstrated in Rebels, Reds, Radicals, the Canadian left is alive and flourishing, and has shaped the Canadian experience in subtle and powerful ways. Reasoning Otherwise continues this tradition of offering important new insight into the deep roots of leftism in Canada.

Once They Were Hats

Author: Frances Backhouse

Publisher: ECW/ORIM

Published: 2015-10-01

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1770907556

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“Unexpectedly delightful reading—there is much to learn from the buck-toothed rodents of yore” (National Post). Beavers, those icons of industriousness, have been gnawing down trees, building dams, shaping the land, and creating critical habitat in North America for at least a million years. Once one of the continent’s most ubiquitous mammals, they ranged from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Rio Grande to the edge of the northern tundra. Wherever there was wood and water, there were beavers—sixty million, or more—and wherever there were beavers, there were intricate natural communities that depended on their activities. Then the European fur traders arrived. Once They Were Hats examines humanity’s fifteen-thousand–year relationship with Castor canadensis, and the beaver’s even older relationship with North American landscapes and ecosystems. From the waterlogged environs of the Beaver Capital of Canada to the wilderness cabin that controversial conservationist Grey Owl shared with pet beavers; from a bustling workshop where craftsmen make beaver-felt cowboy hats using century-old tools to a tidal marsh where an almost-lost link between beavers and salmon was recently found, it’s a journey of discovery to find out what happened after we nearly wiped this essential animal off the map, and how we can learn to live with beavers now that they’re returning. “Fascinating and smartly written.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

Disarming Conflict

Author: Ernie Regehr

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2015-10-15

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1783603577

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In the past quarter century our world has hosted ninety-nine wars, twenty-nine of these are ongoing. The bill for maintaining huge stores of weapons and some 70 million people in uniform currently stands at $1.7 trillion a year. Of these wars, over 85 percent are not settled on the battlefield; they are fought to desperately hurting stalemates, eventually being turned over to diplomats and politicians who go in search of whatever face-saving outcomes may still be available. And yet, abandoning the conference table in favour of the battlefield is still justified when viewed as a last resort. In this brave and discerning book, Ernie Regehr, OC, explains the approaches and initiatives needed to steer away from the futility of global military effort. Combining four decades of experience in conflict zones, advising and leading diplomacy efforts, building NGOs and contributing to the adoption of the Responsibility to Protect Act by the World Assembly, Regehr boldly shows that political stability will never be issued from the barrel of a gun.

At the Bridge

Author: Wendy C. Wickwire

Publisher: University of British Columbia Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780774861519

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"Every once in a while, an important historical figure makes an appearance, makes a difference, and then disappears from the public record. James Teit (1864-1922) was such a figure. A prolific ethnographer and tireless Indian rights activist, Teit spent four decades helping British Columbia's Indigenous peoples in their challenge of the settler-colonial assault on their lives and territories. Yet his story is little known. At the Bridge chronicles Teit's fascinating story. From his base at Spences Bridge, British Columbia, Teit practised a participant- and place-based anthropology - an anthropology of belonging - that covered much of BC and northern Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Whereas his contemporaries, including famed anthropologist Franz Boas, studied Indigenous peoples as the last survivors of "dying cultures" in need of preservation in metropolitan museums, Teit worked with them as members of living cultures actively asserting jurisdiction over their lives and lands. Whether recording stories and songs, mapping place-names, or participating in the chiefs' fight for fair treatment, he made their objectives his own. With his allies, he produced copious, meticulous records; an army of anthropologists could not have achieved a fraction of what Teit achieved in his short life. Wendy Wickwire's beautifully crafted narrative accords Teit the status he deserves. At the Bridge serves as a long-overdue corrective, consolidating Teit's place as a leading and innovative anthropologist in his own right."--