National Network for Equitable Library Service

With her linen head scarf and white apron emblazoned with a red cross, the Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, or VAD, has become a romantic emblem of the Great War. This book tells the story of the nearly 2,000 women from Canada and Newfoundland who volunteered to “do their bit” overseas and at home. Well-educated and middle-class but largely untrained, VADs were excluded from Canadian military hospitals overseas (the realm of the professional nurse) but helped solve Britain’s nursing deficit.

Since 1970 in Quebec, there has been immense change for the Cree, who now live with the consequences of Quebec's massive development of the North. Home Is the Hunter presents the historical, environmental, and cultural context from which this recent story grows. Hans Carlson shows how the Cree view their lands as their home, their garden, and their memory of themselves as a people. By investigating the Cree's three hundred years of contact with outsiders, he illuminates the process of cultural negotiation at the foundation of ongoing political and environmental debates.

Between 1916 and 1918, Lance-Corporal George Timmins, a British-born soldier who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, wrote faithfully to his wife and children. Sixty-three letters and four fragments survived. These letters tell the compelling story of a man who, while helping his fellow Canadians make history, used letters home to remain a presence in the lives of his wife and children, and who drew strength from his family to appreciate life's simple pleasures.

In Sister Soldiers of the Great War, award-winning author Cynthia Toman recovers the long-lost history of Canada’s first women soldiers – nursing sisters who enlisted as officers with the Canadian Army Medical Corps. The nursing sisters had a mandate to salvage as many sick and wounded men as possible for return to the front lines. Nothing prepared them, however, for the poor living conditions, the scale of the casualties, or the type of wounds they encountered.

In 1943, General Harry Crerar noted that there was still much confusion as to “what constitutes an ‘Officer.’” His words reflected the preoccupation of army officials with inventing an ideal officer who would not only meet the demands of war but also conform to notions of social class and masculinity. Drawing on a wide range of sources and exploring the issue of leadership through new lenses, this book looks at how the army selected and trained its junior officers to embody the new ideal.

Non-lethal weapons take many forms – from rubber bullets to electroshock and long-range acoustic devices – which their proponents argue are ethical, legal, and humane. Social scientists, historians, legal scholars, and activists have long challenged the use of non-lethal weapons in policing and war. Until now, little scholarly attention has been paid to the social, historical, and legal relations that animate the concept of non-lethality, nor is there a comprehensive account of how the concept has achieved social and political acceptance.

This groundbreaking book brings to life a forgotten chapter in the history of Canada and Russia - the journey of 4,200 Canadian soldiers from Victoria to Vladivostok in 1918 to help defeat Bolshevism. Combining military and labour history with the social history of BC, Quebec, and Russia, Benjamin Isitt examines how the Siberian Expedition exacerbated tensions within Canadian society at a time when a radicalized working class, many French-Canadians, and even the soldiers themselves objected to a military adventure designed to counter the Russian Revolution.

Bilingualism has become a defining aspect of Canadian identity. But why don’t more English Canadians actually speak French? So They Want Us to Learn French explores the various ways in which bilingualism was promoted to English-speaking Canadians from the 1960s to the late 1990s. It analyzes the strategies and tactics employed by organizations on both sides of the bilingualism debate.

Throughout history, Western women have inhabited a conceptual space divorced from the world of business. But women have always engaged in business. Who were these women, and how were they able to justify their work outside the home? The Business of Women explores the world of those women who embraced British Columbia’s frontier ethos in the early twentieth-century.

Over the course of a century, the Canadian Prairies went from being the breadbasket of the world to but one of many grain-growing regions in a vast global agri-food system. Magnan traces the causes and consequences of this evolution, from the first transatlantic shipments of wheat to the controversial dismantling of the Canadian Wheat Board. When Wheat Was King reveals how farmers, governments, and consumers, over successive periods, responded to industrialization, international trade rules set by the US, the liberalization of global markets, and the consolidation of corporate power.