Born in 1934, Peter Gzowski covered most of the last half of the century as a journalist and interviewer. This biography, the most comprehensive and definitive yet published, is also a portrait of Canada during those decades, beginning with Gzowski’s days at the University of Toronto’s The Varsity in the mid 1950s, through his years as the youngest-ever managing editor of Maclean’s in the 1960s and his tremendous success on CBC’s Morningside in the 1980s and 1990...

For anyone interested in the history of the Scottish people, in Scotland and North America, this book is essential reading. In Canada and the United States today there are tens of thousands of descendants of Highland Scots who left Lochaber around 1800 to settle in Glengarry County. This book deals with the conditions in Scotland before migration, settlement experiences in Glengarry, and the spread of these Scots-Canadians from Glengarry to the American and Canadian wests. There are fur tr...

The Wartime Letters of Leslie and Cecil Frost, 1915–1919 brings to light the correspondence between two officer brothers and their family at home from 1915 to 1919. Despite wartime censorship, Leslie and Cecil wrote frank and forthright letters that show how the young men viewed the war, as well as what they observed both during training and from the trenches in some of the war’s bloodiest battles. The letters also deal with the war’s political context, including conscription and ...

On December 6, 1917, the French munitions ship Mont Blanc and the Norwegian war-relief vessel Imo collided in the harbour at Halifax, Nova Scotia. That accident sparked a fire and an apocalyptic explosion that was the largest man-made blast prior to the 1945 dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Together with the killer tsunami that followed, the explosion devastated the entire city in the wink of an eye and instantly killed more than two thousand people.While...

A bold new telling of the defining battle of the Great War, and how it came to signify and solidify Canada's national identity.Why does Vimy loom so large in Canada's identity—and should it? Tim Cook, Canada's foremost military historian and a RBC Taylor Prize winner, examines the battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917 and the way the memory of it has evolved over a hundred years. Vimy is unlike any other battle in Canadian history: it has been described as the "birth ...

Jeremy Paxman's magnificent history of the First World War tells the entire story of the war in one gripping narrative from the point of view of the British people.***We may think we know about it, but what was life really like for the British people during the First World War?The well-known images - the pointing finger of Lord Kitchener; a Tommy buried in the mud of the Western Front; the memorial poppies of Remembrance Day - all reinforce the idea...

For thousands of young British girls, the influx of Canadian soldiers conscripted to Britain during the Second World War meant throngs of handsome young men. The result was over 48,000 marriages to Canadian soldiers alone, and a mass emigration of British women to North America and around the world in the 1940's.For many brides, the decision to leave their family and home to move to a country thousands of miles away with a man they hardly knew brought forth ensuing happiness. For o...

The Damned tells the largely unknown saga of Canada’s first land battle of the Second World War—fought in the hills and valleys of Hong Kong in December 1941—and the terrible years the survivors of the battle spent as slave labourers for the Empire of Japan. Their story begins in the fall of 1941, when almost 2,000 members of the Royal Rifles and the Winnipeg Grenadiers were sent to bolster the British garrison at Hong Kong. In the seventeen-day battle for the colony following the...

Between 15,000 and 20,000 underage youths, some as young as ten, signed up to fight in Canada's armed forces in the First World War. They served in the trenches alongside their elders, and fought in all the major battles: Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele, Vimy Ridge, and the rest. Many were injured or suffered psychological wounds. Many died. This is the first book to tell their story.Some boys joined up to escape unhappy homes and workplaces. Others went with their parents' blessin...

The story of the bloody 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge is, according to many of today’s tellings, a heroic founding moment for Canada. This noble, birth-of-a-nation narrative is regularly applied to the Great War in general. Yet this mythical tale is rather new. “Vimyism”— today’s official story of glorious, martial patriotism—contrasts sharply with the complex ways in which veterans, artists, clerics, and even politicians who had supported the war interpreted its meaning over the decades....

In this groundbreaking narrative, historian, investigative journalist and filmmaker Peter Vronsky uncovers the hidden history of the Battle of Ridgeway and explores its significance to Canada’s nation-building myths and traditions. On June 1, 1866, more than 1,000 Fenian insurgents invaded Canada across the Niagara River from Buffalo, N.Y. The Fenians were mostly battle-hardened Civil War veterans; the Canadian troops sent to fight them came from a generation that had not seen combat at ho...

Francis Pegahmagabow was a remarkable aboriginal leader who served his nation in time of war and his people in time of peacefighting. In wartime he volunteered to be a warrior. In peacetime he had no option. His life reveals how uncaring Canada was about those to whom this land had always been home.A member of the Parry Island band (now Wasauksing First Nation) near Parry Sound, Ontario, Francis served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Belgium and France for almost the entir...