Toronto Between The Wars

Winner of Heritage Toronto's Award of Excellence, Book category in 2005. The pace of life in Toronto picked up after 1919 and never slowed down again. During the 1920s and '30s, Toronto went through massive changes that affected the physical and the social life of the city. In these two decades between World War I and World War II, Toronto was finding its place in the swiftly changing world of the twentieth century. Toronto Between the Wars features 180 archival photographs of Toronto during this fascinating period. Each picture is accompanied by a captivating story about some aspect of life in the city. During this period, cars became commonplace, the downtown skyline changed as new skyscrapers were built, and women's roles changed dramatically. Then the Depression sent the economy into a tailspin, unemployment became rampant and poverty took its toll. People struggled to afford the basic necessities and lived under the shadow of a growing threat of another war in Europe. The text reveals little known facts, such as how a leading retail family kept their interest in a major downtown property secret for twenty years. Photographs capture unguarded moments with startling immediacy: a tired but happy group of disheveled merrymakers waiting for a bus; two women in flouncy bridesmaid dresses; an old man cleaning the statue of Queen Victoria; and children buying fish from an itinerant fishmonger. With intriguing pictures and absorbing text, Toronto Between the Wars offers a rare opportunity to observe life in Toronto during a critical time in its history.

The First and Second World Wars were two of the most momentous events of the twentieth century. In Canada, they claimed 110,000 lives and altered both the country’s domestic life and its international position. A Nation in Conflict is a concise, comparative overview of the Canadian national experience in the two world wars that transformed the nation and its people. With each chapter, military historians Jeffrey A. Keshen and Andrew Iarocci address Canada’s contribution to the war and its consequences. Integrating the latest research in military, social, political, and gender history, they examine everything from the front lines to the home front. Was conscription necessary? Did the conflicts change the status of Canadian women? Was Canada’s commitment worth the cost? Written both for classroom use and for the general reader, A Nation in Conflict is an accessible introduction to the complexities of Canada’s involvement in the twentieth century’s most important conflicts.

This essay collection traces the sustained work over the past fifty years of the foremost historian of Canadian politics in the era of the two world wars.

Foreword by His Royal Highness Charles, Prince of Wales Hospital ships filled the harbour of Le Havre as the 75th Mississauga Battalion arrived on 13 August 1916. Those soldiers who survived would spend almost three years in a tiny corner of northeastern France and northwestern Belgium (Flanders), where many of their comrades still lie. And they would serve in many of the most horrific battles of that long, bloody conflict—Saint Eloi, the Somme, Arras, Vimy, Hill 70, Lens, Passchendaele, Amiens, Drocourt-Quéant, Canal du Nord, Cambrai, and Valenciennes. This book tells the story of the 75th Battalion (later the Toronto Scottish Regiment) and the five thousand men who formed it—most from Toronto—from all walks of life. They included professionals, university graduates, white- and blue-collar workers, labourers, and the unemployed, some illiterate. They left a comfortable existence in the prosperous, strongly pro-British provincial capital for life in the trenches of France and Flanders. Tommy Church, mayor of Toronto from 1915 to 1921, sought to include his city’s name in the unit’s name because of the many city officials and local residents who served in it. Three years later Church accepted the 75th’s now heavily emblazoned colours for safekeeping at City Hall from Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Harbottle, who returned with his bloodied but successful survivors. The author pulls no punches in recounting their labours, triumphs, and travails. Timothy J. Stewart undertook exhaustive research for this first-ever history of the 75th, drawing from archival sources (focusing on critical decisions by Brigadier Victor Oldum, General Officer Commanding 11th Brigade), diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, and interviews.

Between 1914 and 1954, the Ukrainian-speaking territories in East Central Europe suffered almost 15 million “excess deaths” as well as numerous large-scale evacuations and forced population transfers. These losses were the devastating consequences of the two world wars, revolutions, famines, genocidal campaigns, and purges that wracked Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and spread new ideas, created new political and economic systems, and crafted new identities. In Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914–1954, George O. Liber argues that the continuous violence of the world wars and interwar years transformed the Ukrainian-speaking population of East Central Europe into self-conscious Ukrainians. Wars, mass killings, and forced modernization drives made and re-made Ukraine’s boundaries, institutionalized its national identities, and pruned its population according to various state-sponsored political, racial, and social ideologies. In short, the two world wars, the Holodomor, and the Holocaust played critical roles in forming today’s Ukraine. A landmark study of the terrifying scope and paradoxical consequences of mass violence in Europe’s bloodlands, Liber’s book will transform our understanding of the entangled histories of Ukraine, the USSR, Germany, and East Central Europe in the twentieth century.

Robert Ross, a sensitive nineteen-year-old Canadian officer, went to war--The War to End All Wars. He found himself in the nightmare world of trench warfare, of mud and smoke, of chlorine gas and rotting corpses. In this world gone mad, Robert Ross performed a last desperate act to declare his commitment to life in the midst of death.

The First World War was the cause of dramatic changes in every Canadian community. What it meant to daily life becomes clear in this book about the war years in Guelph, Ontario. The first months were the easiest, as young men rushed to enlist. Once news of casualties and deaths started arriving, the atmosphere changed drastically. Mothers dreaded the arrival of the telegraph boy. Newspapers published fulsome obituaries which could not obscure the tragedy of their deaths. Tensions emerged — one compelling example being a secret military and police night-time raid on a Catholic seminary just outside the town, looking for young men hiding from conscription. With these stories, Edward Butts offers a compelling portrait of people trying to make sense of a war with little evident logic. His account helps explain why the cause of the League of Nations and efforts to ensure peace in the 1920s and 1930s were so powerful amongst Canadians who had learned about the real impact of wartime on ordinary people. Through the use of primary resources including articles from the local press, letters from overseas, and newsreels in the cinema, Butts captures the reality of the First World War for Canadians at home.

In 1915, Robert Ross, a young Canadian, enlists in the army as an officer. His experiences of life in a training camp, of the trenches in Europe, and with death, are vividly told. Some strong language amd explicit descriptions of sex. Winner of the 1977 Governor General's Award for Fiction. 1977.