Book Description
During the First World War Clare Gass spent four years as a lieutenant and nursing sister in the medical corps of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. The War Diary of Clare Gass documents her daily experiences, from the beginning of her military training in 1915 to her return from Europe in 1918. Gass records the sights and sounds and smells of war as well as quoting the then-unknown "In Flanders' Fields," written by her colleague Dr John McCrae. Well aware that her work was an exceptional experience for a woman, she made the most of her time, whether nursing, exploring the countryside around the hospital, or taking photographs. Her lively personality and passion for her work shine through the diary and offer a unique perspective on the Canadian contribution to the war effort. The diary reveals a woman who took it for granted that she should do everything possible to aid the war effort and details her care of the sick and wounded at No. 3 Canadian General Hospital (McGill), forty miles behind the trenches, as well as at No. 2 Canadian Casualty Clearing Station, where she was within range of the shells. Combined with Susan Mann's sensitive and thoughtful introduction, the Gass diary provides a fresh look at Canadian participation in the First World War. It will appeal to a wide range of readers with an interest in military history, women's history, medical history, gender and war, diaries, and the history of nursing.
Author: Francis M. Wafer Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP ISBN: 0773577289 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 271
Book Description
Cheryl Wells provides an edited and fully annotated collection of Wafer's diary entries during the war, his letters home, and the memoirs he wrote after returning to Canada. Wafer's writings are a fascinating and deeply personal account of the actions, duties, feelings, and perceptions of a noncombatant who experienced the thick of battle and its grave consequences.
Author: Peter Farrugia Publisher: UBC Press ISBN: 077486494X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 330
Book Description
All Canadians are taught about Vimy Ridge. But that celebrated victory was just one battle among many to shape the country’s experience of the First World War. Portraits of Battle brings together biography, battle accounts, and historiographical analysis to examine the lives of a cross-section of Canadians who served in the war. Contributors to this thoughtful collection consider the range of Canadians touched by war – soldiers and their loved ones, deserters, nurses, Indigenous people, those injured in body or mind – raising fundamental questions about the nature of conflict and memory. These portraits of the formerly faceless men and women honoured on war memorials fill in what is often missing from accounts of the Great War. In the process, they provide a more nuanced perspective on the complex legacy of that war in Canadian history.
Author: Anna Branach-Kallas Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443883387 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 410
Book Description
In the Preface to his ground-breaking The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell claimed that “the dynamics and iconography of the Great War have proved crucial political, rhetorical, and artistic determinants on subsequent life.” Forty years after the publication of Fussell’s study, the contributors to this volume reconsider whether the myth generated by World War I is still “part of the fiber of [people’s] lives” in English-speaking countries. What is the place of the First World War in cultural memory today? How have the literary means for remembering the war changed since the war? Can anything new be learned from the effort to re-imagine the First World War after other bloody conflicts of the 20th century? A variety of answers to these questions are provided in Re-Imagining the First World War: New Perspectives in Anglophone Literature and Culture, which explores the Great War in British, Irish, Canadian, Australian, and (post)colonial contexts. The contributors to this collection write about the war from a literary perspective, reinterpreting poetry, fiction, letters, and essays created during or shortly after the war, exploring contemporary discourses of commemoration, and presenting in-depth studies of complex conceptual issues, such as gender and citizenship. Re-Imagining the First World War also includes historical, philosophical and sociological investigations of the first industrialised conflict of the 20th century, which focus on responses to the Great War in political discourse, life writing, music, and film: from the experience of missionaries isolated during the war in the Arctic and Asia, through colonial encounters, exploring the role of Irish, Chinese and Canadian First Nations soldiers during the war, to the representation of war in the world-famous series Downton Abbey and the 2013 album released by contemporary Scottish rock singer Fish. The variety of themes covered by the essays here not only confirms the significance of the First World War in memory today, but also illustrates the necessity of developing new approaches to the first global conflict, and of commemorating “new” victims and agents of war. If modes of remembrance have changed with the postmodern ethical shift in historiography and cultural studies, which encourages the exploration of “other” subjectivities in war, so-far concealed affinities and reverberations are still being discovered, on the macro- and micro-historical levels, the Western and other fronts, the battlefield, and the home front. Although it has been a hundred years since the outbreak of hostilities, there is a need for increased sensitivity to the tension between commemoration and contestation, and to re-member, re-conceptualise and re-imagine the Great War.
Author: Bruce Cane Publisher: Dundurn ISBN: 1459712609 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 323
Book Description
"We took our positions, five kneeling and five standing ... we got the order to fire. One blank and nine live rounds ... I did not have the blank." That is the voice of Deward Barnes, an unwilling but dutiful member of the firing squad that shot Harold Lodge, one of 25 Canadians executed during the First World War. In this diary we hear something that is otherwise gone forever: the authentic voice of the First World War soldier, Everyman in khaki. Fully annontated so that everyone today can understand the nuance of each entry, the Barnes diary takes us into the trenches and the firing lines of the Western Front like no other first-hand Canadian account of that terrible war can. Like any trained infantryman, Deward could tell the kick of a live round from a blank one, and that kick he bestows on us with each turn of the page.
Author: Cynthia Toman Publisher: UBC Press ISBN: 0774858168 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 274
Book Description
During the Second World War, more than 4,000 civilian nurses enlisted as Nursing Sisters, a specially created all-female officers' rank of the Canadian Armed Forces. They served in all three armed force branches and all the major theatres of war, yet nursing as a form of war work has long been under-explored. An Officer and a Lady fills that gap. Cynthia Toman analyzes how gender, war, and medical technology intersected to create a legitimate role for women in the masculine environment of the military and explores the incongruous expectations placed on military nurses as "officers and ladies."
Author: Susan Mann Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP ISBN: 0773573267 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
During an era of separate spheres for men and women, Margaret Macdonald used her nurse's training to gain access to the military and a life of work, travel, and adventure. In 1906, she was one of the first two nurses to receive a permanent appointment to the Canadian Army Medical Corps. She became matron-in-chief of Canada's overseas nursing service during World War I with the rank of major - the first such appointment for a woman in the British Empire. Macdonald also served as a nurse in the military during the Spanish-American and Boer Wars and in Panama during the construction of the canal. Margaret Macdonald traces the life and work of this extraordinary woman from rural Nova Scotia whose sense of duty and ambition found an outlet in the imperialism of Great Britain and the US. Susan Mann weaves the threads of character, ideology, and opportunity into a vivid portrait of Macdonald and her impact on the professionalization of military nursing.
Author: Steven High Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP ISBN: 0773581103 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
In January 1941, the hulking twenty-one thousand ton troopship Edmund B. Alexander docked in St John's harbor, carrying a thousand American soldiers sent to join the thousands of Canadian troops protecting Newfoundland against attack by Germany. France had fallen, Great Britain was fighting for its survival, and Newfoundland - then a dominion of Britain - was North America's first line of defence. Although the German invasion never came, St John's found itself occupied by both Allied Canadian and American forces.
Author: Clare Gass
Author: Clare Gass
Author: Clare Gass
Author: Francis M. Wafer
Author: Peter Farrugia
Author: Anna Branach-Kallas
Author: Bruce Cane
Author: Cynthia Toman
Author: Susan Mann
Author: Steven High