A Persistent Myth

Military history is hugely popular in Canada. Wherever Canadian military history is taught, enrolments are very good. There are lineups at the University of New Brunswick, at Wilfrid Laurier University, at the University of Western Ontario and at the University of Calgary, to cite by name only a few. Moreover, while astonishingly little of note is being published in most areas of Canadian history, there are more books being published than ever before in military history, more, I believe, than in any other area. The University of British Columbia Press leads the field, but McGill-Queen’s University Press, University of Toronto Press, Robin Brass Studio, Douglas and McIntyre, Vanwell Publishing, the Dundurn Group and the Canadian Defence Academy, based at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, all turn out first-class material. Very simply, there is a flood of good scholarly and popular military history coming from trade and university presses. Most is on...