National Network for Equitable Library Service

When Great Britain and its dominions declared war on Germany in August 1914, they were faced with the formidable challenge of transforming masses of untrained citizen-soldiers at home and abroad into competent, coordinated fighting divisions. The Empire on the Western Front focuses on the development of two units, Britain's 62nd (2nd West Riding) Division and the Canadian 4th Division, to show how the British Expeditionary Force rose to this challenge.

From their everyday work in kitchens and gardens to the solemn work of laying out the dead, the Anglican women of mid-twentieth-century Conception Bay, Newfoundland, understood and expressed Christianity through their experience as labourers within the family economy. Women's work in the region included outdoor agricultural labour, housekeeping, childbirth, mortuary services, food preparation, caring for the sick, and textile production. Ordinary Saints explores how religious belief shaped the meaning of this work, and how women lived their Christian faith through the work they did.

In 1770, the priest Nicolas Vernier was accused of neglecting church services, inappropriate behaviour in the confessional, financial improprieties, and affairs with the village schoolmistresses. In a contentious church court case, parishioners described all of their priest's wrongdoings, and in turn, he detailed many of theirs. Ultimately, Vernier finished his career as a cathedral canon in another diocese. Scandal in the Parish recounts Vernier's story and many similar eighteenth-century cases.

The 1960s were a victorious decade for francophones in New Brunswick, who witnessed the election of the first Acadian premier and the opening of a French-language university. But in 1968, students took to the streets, demanding further concessions. Belliveau debunks the idea that students were simply heirs to a long line of nationalists seeking more rights for francophones. The student movement emerged in the late 1950s as an expression of the province's changing youth culture and then evolved as students drew inspiration from the New Left.

Most Canadians know little, if anything at all, about the role of the Canadian Air Force in the 1999 Kosovo Air War. Yet lives were at put at stake as mission dedication and military skill were pushed to the limit. Some of Canada's most prominent journalists attempted to report on the war, but came away virtually empty handed. Daily briefings given at the National Defence Headquarters provided so little information most Ottawa journalists simply stopped going.

What was the First World War really like for Maritimers overseas? This epistolary book, edited by historian Ross Hebb, contains the letters home of three Maritimers with distinct wartime experiences: a front-line soldier from Nova Scotia, a nurse from New Brunswick, and a conscripted fisherman from Prince Edward Island. Up until now, these complete sets of handwritten letters have remained with the families who agreed to share them in time for the one-hundredth anniversary of the Great War's end in 2018.

In the decade of economic expansion following the Second World War, many ordinary Americans travelled abroad for the first time. Those who visited Britain were surprised to find that the people they encountered were not the aristocrats or working-class ciphers they knew from Hollywood movies. Britons' views of Americans were likewise informed by films and by encounters with the American military during the war.

Established narratives portray Indigenous unity as emerging solely in response to the political agenda of the settler state. But unity has long shaped the modern Indigenous political movement. With Indigenous perspectives in the foreground, Assembling Unity explores the relationship between global political ideologies and pan-Indigenous politics in British Columbia through a detailed history of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs.

Dr Wilfred Grenfell, physician and folk hero, recruited thousands of volunteer workers for his Newfoundland and Labrador seamen's mission, many of them Americans from Ivy League institutions. As the medical mission grew to become the International Grenfell Association, establishing institutions along the Labrador and northern Newfoundland coasts, Americans also became resident staff leaders in the region, and Grenfell himself married an American, Anne MacClanahan, who led mission activities.

In 1867, Canada's federal government became responsible for the education of Indigenous peoples: Status Indians and some Métis would attend schools on reserves; non-Status Indians and some Métis would attend provincial schools. The chapters in this collection - some reflective, some piercing, all of them insightful - show that this system set the stage for decades of broken promises and misguided experiments that are only now being rectified in the spirit of truth and reconciliation.