Bats Along the Border: Sport, Festivals, and Culture in an International Community during the First World War

Abstract

To date most of the work on Canadian national identity and the Great War has focused on military accomplishments or purely domestic affairs. This article takes a different approach. It examines the war's impact on national and local identities by examining relations between Canadian and US boundary neighbors St. Stephen (New Brunswick) and Calais (Maine), small lumbering towns separated only by the narrow St. Croix River. Here, locals gave the border little thought as they crossed from one side to the other for sports events, festivals, and national holiday celebrations. An analysis of these communities and their interaction at the social level reveals that despite American neutrality from 1914 through 1917 and heavy patriotism in Canada throughout the war, nationalism was not incompatible with long-standing local pride in the permeability of the area known as the St. Croix Valley.