Tim Cook

In October 1774, the First Continental Congress, gathered in Philadelphia, approved an open letter to Canadians. “You are a small people, compared to those who with open arms invite you into a fellowship,” it read. “A moment’s reflection should convince you which will be most for your interest and happiness, to have all the rest of North-America your unalterable…

As Guy Plamondon, the Canadian cultural affairs consul in New York City, told the Ottawa Citizen, “Americans don’t know us as well as we know them.” Plamondon made the seemingly obvious remark in April 1981 as he launched a new initiative in the Lower Manhattan neighbourhood of SoHo. Known as 49th Parallel, the federally funded centre would feature experimental…

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…

The Canadian civilian-soldiers of the two world wars went overseas by the hundreds of thousands to protect the British Empire and Canada from Germany and its allies. As men and women from the northern Dominion, they already had a reputation as rough-and-tumble colonials, which was cultivated through plays, poems and public perception. The Canadians saw themselves as unique compared to the…