Ian McKay

Jamie Swift

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.

or, How We Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Great War

The Vimy Trap

Robin Bates

Nova Scotia's captivating natural beauty and important place in the history of North America and the Atlantic world make it a premier tourist destination for visitors from around the world. From re-enactments at the Halifax Citadel, monuments to the Explosion of 1917 and Pier 21 and postcards of Peggy's Cove and Cape Breton, the province has cultivated a thriving tourism industry that relies on constructing and marketing the history of the area. In the Province of History studies Nova Scotia's long-standing initiatives to attract visitors, the ways in which the region's history has been presented and misrepresented, and the extent to which even the province's residents have become tourists in their own lives and towns. Using archival sources, novels, government reports, and works on tourism and heritage, Ian McKay and Robin Bates look at how state planners, key politicians, and cultural figures such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, long-time premier Angus L. Macdonald, and novelist Thomas Raddall were all instrumental in forming "tourism/history." The authors argue that Longfellow's 1847 poem Evangeline – on the brutal British expulsion of Acadians from Nova Scotia – became a template a new kind of profit-making history that exalted whiteness and excluded ethnic minorities, women, and working class movements. A remarkable look at the intersection of politics, leisure and the presentation of public history, In the Province of History is a revealing account of how a region has both used and distorted its own past.

The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia

In the Province of History

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

Warrior Nation

Using archival sources, novels, government reports, and works on tourism and heritage, Ian McKay and Robin Bates look at how state planners, key politicians, and cultural figures such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, long-time premier Angus L. Macdonald, and novelist Thomas Raddall were all instrumental in forming "tourism/history." The authors argue that Longfellow's 1847 poem Evangeline - on the brutal British expulsion of Acadians from Nova Scotia - became a template a new kind of profit-making history that exalted whiteness and excluded ethnic minorities, women, and working class movements. A remarkable look at the intersection of politics, leisure, and the presentation of public history, In the Province of History is a revealing account of how a region has both used and distorted its own past.

Argues that the popular conception of Nova Scotians as a pure, simple, idyllic people is false. This title shows how the province's tourism industry and cultural producers manipulated and refashioned the cultural identity of the region and its people to project traditional folk values. It examines how Nova Scotia's cultural history was rewritten.

Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia

Quest of the Folk

Once known for peacekeeping, Canada is becoming a militarized nation whose apostles—the New Warriors—are fighting to shift public opinion. New Warrior zealots seek to transform postwar CanadaÍs central myth-symbols. Peaceable kingdom. Just society. Multicultural tolerance. Reasoned public debate. Their replacements? A warrior nation. Authoritarian leadership. Permanent political polarization. The tales cast a vivid light on a story that is crucial to Canada's future; yet they are also compelling history. Swashbuckling marauder William Stairs, the Royal Military College graduate who helped make the Congo safe for European pillage. Vimy Ridge veteran and Second World War general Tommy Burns, leader of the UN's first big peacekeeping operation, a soldier who would come to call imperialism 'the monster of the age.' Governor General John Buchan, a concentration camp developer and race theorist who is exalted in the Harper government's new Citizenship Guide. And that uniquely Canadian paradox, Lester Pearson. Warrior Nation is an essential read for those concerned by the relentless effort to conscript Canadian history.

Ian McKay

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