History 355H Discussion Questions
January 22, 2020
- According to James Walker, ” Canada shared the Western ideology of ‘race’ and…even when called upon, members of Canada’s ‘visible’ minorities were accompanied overseas by a set of presumptions about their abilities which dictated the role they were to play and which limited the rewards they were to derive.” Based on specific examples, what were those presumptions and how did those presumptions shape the nature of the war experience for each of the minorities.
- When quoting Major Harold Matthew’s account of the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, Terry Copp says that “Matthew’s emphasis on duty of resisting may strike modern observers as strange, but his contemporaries understood him well enough.” What do you think Copp means by this? If this is true, then how can historians ninety years later hope to understand such events?
- What is revisionist history? What would be an example of it regarding WWI?
- What does Copp mean when he says that “the events of the spring of 1915 transformed the war from a great adventure to a great crusade.”
- Copp describes the Canadian victory at Vimy as “…an important local victory…” and that “the success of the Canadian Corps has given rise to a peculiar myth, which relates the capture of Vimy Ridge to the emergence of Canada as a nation. This is a theme requiring analysis of the construction of post-war memory rather than reflecting the actual events of April 1917.” What is meant by that?
- To what degree did Canadians have control over the organization and deployment of its forces during the war? How did that change, and why?