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Indigenous veterans have been celebrated for their achievements in the two world wars, adding needed texture to Canada's half-century at war. However, Indigenous peoples on the home front have remained periphery to the study of Indigenous peoples' experiences of the world wars, leaving veterans and military eligible men as the main protagonists in the story. Those individuals left on reserve experienced the conditions of war, the mobilization of the Canadian state for war, and the enlistment of Indigenous men into the army differently than enlisted men. Analyzing Indigenous petitioners' political advocacy during the First World War and the Second World War offers a more textured and complex representation of Indigenous peoples' experiences during the world wars. By negotiating their place within the settler Canadian state, while also clearly defining their sovereignty and distinct political cultures, Indigenous peoples remained active participants in the political arena during the period from 1914 to 1945. Rather than "awakening" politically on the return of veterans in response to broken promises, Indigenous peoples on the home front deployed and evolved existing political tools and strategies to articulate their responses to wartime policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prime Minister Robert Borden created the Wartime Elections Act in September 1917 – a move that granted temporary voting rights to women who had close relatives serving in the military. Their votes were positioned as key to winning the war because it was assumed that newly enfranchised wives and mothers would support Borden's controversial conscription plans to reinforce their husbands and sons at the front. Suffragists across the country were divided by the act's limited enfranchisement and its connection to conscription. This turmoil reached its pinnacle in Montreal, a city that was at the centre of nationalistic and ethnic strife caused by the war, and triggered rifts within the city's largest Anglophone women's organization, the Montreal Council of Women. One result of this tension was the impeachment trial of the council's long-time president, Dr Grace Ritchie-England, for her criticism of the Wartime Elections Act and conscription during the 1917 federal election. Calling attention to the resistance of and conflicts between middle-class club women who were normally viewed as hegemonically supportive of the war effort widens our understanding of women's disparate opinions and activism during the First World War and the fragile nature of suffragists" political unity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First World War inflicted suffering upon hundreds of thousands of Canadian families between 1914 and 1918. In response, the state modernized its pension system to partially alleviate the postwar suffering of these families, reflecting the changing role of government in the lives of Canadians. To receive a pension after the war, Canadian veterans and dependants had to prove their postwar suffering arose directly from the battlefield, yet not all who qualified were accorded the same treatment. Unlike their non-Indigenous counterparts, external administrators were appointed to oversee the expenditure of pensions given to Indigenous veterans and dependants to ensure they were spent responsibly. Disabled Indigenous veterans and dependants recognized this as a profoundly discriminatory system – reducing them to their "Indian" identity – and drew from the nineteenth-century language of imperial nationalism and patriotism to demand equitable compensation and treatment from the state. Understanding the experiences of death and disability as intimately as the racist discrimination they faced, they envisioned their place as equals within the larger community of Canadian war casualties even though settlers and the state refused to recognize them as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Talbot Mercer Papineau's letter to Henri Bourassa and Papineau's impact on Canadian cultural mobilization and its war culture. European historians of the First World War have used the concept of cultural mobilization to understand the lines that connected battlefront and home front and their impact. As evidenced by the recent historiographical review of First World War literature in the pages of the Canadian Historical Review, Canadian scholars ought to adopt a similar framework to unite two literatures that separately focus on the military history and social history of the war. Papineau's 1916 letter provides a glimpse into how a soldier expressed his perspective of the war from the frontlines and participated in the mobilization of Canada's war culture. His writing was a result of his war experience, but Papineau wrote it for a Canadian audience at home, and its wide publication exposed his views to millions across Canada and Britain. Papineau urged Canadian citizens (specifically French Canadians) to support the purpose and value of the war as understood by Canadian soldiers. This article offers Papineau as a case study to encourage a new direction for the Canadian history of the First World War and further work on cultural mobilization and war culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enlistment of francophones in the Canadian Expeditionary Force has always been estimated between 20,000 and 35,000 by historians. Unfortunately, these evaluations were not based on any reliable data. This articles tries to show that these figures are largely under-estimated, and that the involvement of francophones was probably almost twice as much as the perception that has prevailed for more than a century. In the absence of any accurate count of enlisted francophones, we will demonstrate that (1) it is impossible that Quebec contributed more than a relatively small proportion of anglophone soldiers and (2) that a far greater number of francophone soldiers than has generally been estimated came from outside Quebec. Through examination of the files of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, we will also see that more than 3,000 francophone soldiers lost their lives in France and Belgium during the war, which leads us to believe that about twenty times more may have worn the uniform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This fall marks 100 years since the First Canadian Contingent sailed for Europe. In anticipation of the anniversary of the First World War, the Canadian Historical Review prepared two special features to highlight past and current thinking about the war and its place in the journal and in Canadian history generally. The first, published in March, is a bibliography of the more than three-dozen articles directly related to the war that have appeared in the chr since it began publication in 1920, less than two years after the armistice. Each article in the bibliography will remain Open Access. You will find the bibliography complete with hyperlinks on our website at http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.1.97. To continue this impressive tradition of scholarship and prompt new and equally diverse work on the war and related themes in its pages, the chr is pleased to publish the second special feature in this issue. Three scholars actively engaged in the study of the war were asked to contribute interpretative and broad, but unavoidably selective, reflections on how historians have written about Canada and the war. We invited a fourth to comment on these historiographic pieces and a fifth to help frame our readers' reflections on the commemorative and other public initiatives that have already begun and will intensify in the coming months. We are delighted that our authors accepted the challenge and trust our readers will find their work as useful and stimulating as we and our peer-reviewers have. This special feature also marks the inauguration of a new section of the chr, Historical Perspectives. This occasional section will showcase discussion among multiple scholars of important topics and historiographies. Mark Osborne Humphries opens with 'Between Commemoration and History: The Historiography of the Canadian Corps and Military Overseas,' focusing on the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) and the relationship between historians writing on the military overseas and those analyzing the home front (http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.3.384. Amy Shaw then examines how historians have understood the contribution of nurses and other women, motherhood and family, and aspects of mourning in her 'Expanding the Narrative: A First World War with Women, Children, and Grief' (http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.3.398). Mourad Djebabla's 'Historiographie francophone de la Première Guerre mondiale: écrire la Grande Guerre de 1914-1918 en français au Canada et au Québec' discusses French-language scholarship as related to the war, especially concerning Quebec (http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.3.407). Tim Cook's wide-ranging 'Battles of the Imagined Past: Canada's Great War and Memory' reflects on the topics of the initial three contributors and considers four possible narratives: the war as a terrific and useless slaughter, nation-building tool, divisive event, and absent event http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.3.417. Like Cook, Christopher Moore's thought-provoking '1914 in 2014' considers the collective memory of the war and historians' contribution to it, asking 'What we commemorate when we commemorate the First World War?' What might a counter-narrative to the dominant view of Canada's decision to enter the war in 1914 as natural and nationalizing contribute? (http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.3.427) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews websites related to the anniversary of World War I in Canada which includes the Dictionary of Canadian Bibliography available at http://www.biographi.ca/en/theme_ first_world_war.html and open access articles on topics of World War I published in the journal "Canadian Historical Review" available at http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.1.97.

The parliamentary debates on the Income War Tax in the summer of 1917 were marked by fierce criticisms from Liberal members who argued that the tax measure fell short of the ideal of 'conscription of wealth' that had been in wide circulation in the months leading up to the debate. Scholars have repeatedly pointed out that 'conscription of wealth' rhetoric, which attempted to link the unfair sacrifices of the war effort to the need for income taxation, and revealed a rapidly polarizing political climate at the end of the war, was the key inspiration for the introduction of the Income War Tax. However, the use of similar rhetoric by parliamentarians, and the call for 'radical' taxation across political differences, suggests that something else - a shared desire for a modernist 'break from the past' - was at work in the debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For much of the twentieth century, military commemoration operated in a context of pan-Canadian remembrance. This emphasis overlooked the groups outside the mainstream that pursued their own goals through military service and commemoration, which sometimes differed from and challenged the hegemony of national collective memory. A case in point is the Japanese Canadian War Memorial in Vancouver and its intersections with the military service of Masumi Mitsui and other Japanese-Canadian soldiers of the First World War. After the war, the Japanese-Canadian veterans fought for the right to vote in provincial elections, which they eventually secured in 1931, thereby becoming the first Asian Canadians to attain the franchise in British Columbia. The veterans' wartime service could not prevent anti-Japanese-Canadian sentiment before and during the Second World War, leading to the seizure of their properties and their forced removal from the coast. The article foregrounds Mitsui's return to Vancouver in 1985 as the honoured guest in a ceremony to relight the lantern at the Japanese Canadian War Memorial. Drawing on insights of the philosopher of history Walter Benjamin, this history is approached in light of Benjamin's account of storytelling traditions and the ‘now-time’ of historical agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prime Minister Robert Borden created the Wartime Elections Act in September 1917 – a move that granted temporary voting rights to women who had close relatives serving in the military. Their votes were positioned as key to winning the war because it was assumed that newly enfranchised wives and mothers would support Borden's controversial conscription plans to reinforce their husbands and sons at the front. Suffragists across the country were divided by the act's limited enfranchisement and its connection to conscription. This turmoil reached its pinnacle in Montreal, a city that was at the centre of nationalistic and ethnic strife caused by the war, and triggered rifts within the city's largest Anglophone women's organization, the Montreal Council of Women. One result of this tension was the impeachment trial of the council's long-time president, Dr Grace Ritchie-England, for her criticism of the Wartime Elections Act and conscription during the 1917 federal election. Calling attention to the resistance of and conflicts between middle-class club women who were normally viewed as hegemonically supportive of the war effort widens our understanding of women's disparate opinions and activism during the First World War and the fragile nature of suffragists’ political unity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the Canadian government's use of military force to suppress the anti-conscription Easter Riots that occurred in Quebec City between 28 March and 1 April 1918. The riots demonstrated French-Canadian dissatisfaction with the national war effort and the introduction of conscription, and exacerbated nationwide fears that a state of rebellion existed in the French-speaking province of Quebec. The Canadian government's reaction was immediate and firm; martial law was proclaimed, habeas corpus was suspended, and over six thousand English-speaking soldiers were deployed to Quebec during and after the riots to maintain order and enforce conscription, the last of these troops leaving the province in early 1919. The Easter Riots were extremely violent, causing important destruction of property and over 150 civilian and military casualties, including at least four dead when soldiers opened fire on rioters. This article will demonstrate the extent to which the Canadian government apprehended insurrection in Quebec during the First World War and how determined it was under difficult wartime conditions to prevent the rise of a major national crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]