Tim Cook

The Second World War forever transformed Canada. With 1.1 million in uniform and more than 3 million working in related industry, the country was engaged in a total war. Once mobilized against the fascist threat, Canadians were fighting around the world: on the seas, in land campaigns, and in the air. Even traditionally marginalized groups, such as recent Eastern European immigrants and Indigenous…

America’s war in Vietnam left deep scars, after the United States poured blood and treasure into the struggle against the North Vietnamese. Victory proved elusive, as some 60,000 Americans were killed in the defeat. Many more were wounded in body and spirit. The conflict exacerbated deep racial and class rifts in the U.S., and its dark shadow continues to lie across a divided…

December 7, 1941, remains, as Franklin Roosevelt described it, a “date which will live in infamy.” The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, now more than eighty years ago,  shocked the United States to its core, revealing military vulnerability and firing up a thirst for retribution. Americans were never the same. The event quickly led to Washington’s declaration of war against Japan…

The labyrinth-like trenches of the Western Front loom large in our collective memory of Canada’s Great War. Those underground cities, teeming with citizen soldiers living in mud and filth, were relentlessly pounded by high explosive shells, raked by machine-gun fire and corrupted by lung-searing chemical clouds. The wartime poetry and prose, along with post-war cultural products such as…