Webinar today. The Fight for History: 75 Yrs of Forgetting, Remembering, and Remaking Canada's WW"

Via a WFA email and this webinar is tonight, broadcast from Canada at 7pm (UK time is 5hrs ahead).

Registration is free and no Zoom account is needed: Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: The Fight for History Book Launch. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

The email states:

 

Thanks for the info. I registered for this webinar and ordered the book. Sounds very interesting.

Have a nice day,

 

I listened to about 45 mins of the webinar and enjoyed it (but had other things I wanted to do). I will at least get the book from the library.

I think Tim raised many good points, some of which were --

- the important Canadian generals did not write memoirs, nor did many soldiers[1]
- despite two attempts, no separate memorial was raised for those who fell in WW2 (there were memorial parks and arenas created, but these did not become, as he called it, "sacred spaces"), in part because of the large space occupied by the Great War in Canadian "consciousness" (my term)
- Tim described how in the early 90s in a university survey history course, the coverage of WW2 was: the conscription crisis, Dieppe, and the internment of Japanese Canadians. I didn't take such a course but what I remember from high schools in the 80s is basically that - or maybe we only got the conscription crisis and Dieppe. My thought - more about the failures than the successes?

Tim talked about the delays in the publication of our official history but looking at the dates of the various British official histories, the military ones at least, they seem to range from 1952 to 1988! I'm not sure if we did so badly in that regard (1955-1960).

[1] I wonder if this partly has to do with the miserable state of Canadian publishing in the 50s, but I really do wonder why.