The First World War and the Homefront in Canada: Broadening the Analysis

Abstract

The First World War and the Homefront in Canada: Broadening the Analysis Brad Shoebottom (bio) TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, WHILE I WAS A GRADUATE STUDENT of Canadian military history, a faculty member mentioned that historians faced difficulties selecting which histories to write given a vast potential list of topics and gave the example of the hypothetical local and rural “History of the Post Office in Gagetown, NB.” At the time, I could not have agreed more – being more interested in national-level questions – and I was unable to fathom that there would be enough interest in the operations of a village post office. However, after completing a thesis about a local New Brunswick entrepreneur and after the passage of 25 years, I have come to appreciate that a post office was one of the key hubs of small villages and rural Canada, lower in importance than only the church and the general store. Local community or institutional history, despite its amateur roots, was and still is incredibly popular history. And local history, in a time of war, offers a bottom-up approach to military history that offers a different home front perspective than the typical top-down national narratives about war. Local history – the study of social and cultural history in the local community – became more acceptable as an academic subject in the United Kingdom in the 1950s, when W.G. Hoskins made the case that the local perspective uncovers themes not always visible in a national narrative.1 John Beckett explained more recently that national and local history are both valid and can co-exist so long as both use rigorous analysis of sources.2 In Australia, Ian Willis argues that local history is a radical history as “local histories often look away from the histories of the elite to the experiences of the ordinary, the mundane, the intimate and the banal.”3 In the United States, Carol Kammen agreed with the broader history idea: “Local history is, despite its limited geographical focus, a broad field of inquiry: it is political, social, and economic [End Page 149] history of the community and it’s religious and intellectual history too. . . . Local history is the study of who remained in a community and who left – and why.”4 In Canada, Robert Rutherdale’s Hometown Horizon (2002) noted that the local history approach provides a first-hand experience on various Great War themes such as social conflict about enemy aliens, volunteering, the role of women, conscription, and returning soldiers based on analysis of gender, ethnicity, class, and age.5 Local history therefore offers an alternative approach to the study of history and, in this case, the impact of the First World War on Canada. Canadian military historians writing about the First World War spent much of the first 75 postwar years in a top-down, metanarrative approach debating three major questions: national unity, especially the impact of conscription on English and French relations and on urban and rural areas; the impact on national identity of the battlefield achievements of the Canadian Corps in France, especially the symbolism of the battle for Vimy Ridge in 1917 on the road to Canada’s nationhood; and the impact of the war on the industrialization of Canada.6 These themes help to explore why the war was necessary or to bring more meaning to the war. A more recent trend places less emphasis on overseas events and a military history methodology and more emphasis on a social history methodology to discuss the home front, historical memory, and gender and race issues.7 This is a new military history or, as some call it “war and society” history as pioneered by John Herd Thompson’s [End Page 150] The Harvests of War.8 As such, previously unheard voices have come to light. Typically, most locality-focused articles and books cover only a single subject like recruiting, conscription, women’s war work, race, industrialization, labour relations, or a disaster like the influenza in Winnipeg or the Halifax Explosion. Most of these local studies almost exclusively focus on a large urban centre (as in Montreal, Toronto, or Regina), or provinces (such as Quebec, Nova Scotia, or Ontario), or a...