Podcasts
The On War & Society podcast features interviews with the most prominent historians of war and society. Guests discuss their cutting-edge research, the challenges associated with doing history, and life ‘behind the book.’
On War & Society E46: Oh What a Visual War with Beatriz Pichel
The First World War was a literary conflict producing some of the most memorable poems, novels and plays of the twentieth century. While the Second World War left behind a striking visual record, including famous pictures such as Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima and Wait...
On War & Society E45: The American War in Vietnam with Robert Thompson
In 1965, in the coastal province of Phú Yên, US Armed Forces embarked on an effort to pacify one of the least-secured regions of South Vietnam. Often described as the “other war” to win the “Hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese, pacification was, in reality, a...
On War & Society E44: In the Path of War with David Borys
Canada’s military history in Northwest Europe has been told many times. On 6 June 1944, Canadian forces landed on Juno Beach as part of Operation Overlord, before quickly establishing a bridgehead and moving inland where they encountered, but ultimately overcame,...
Great Battles in History: The Battle of Agincourt
The first five parts of an all-new episode of Professor Darryl Dee’s Great Battles in History podcast has been released. In previous episodes, Professor Dee examined the Battle of Thermopylae and its legacy, followed by the bloody Battle of...
On War & Society E43: Broken Promises with Christopher Capozzola
The United States and the Philippines have been intimately bound by conflict. A US colony from 1898 to 1946, it remained an important US ally in the Pacific. In that time, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos fought and died for...
On War & Society E42: A Curious Case of Shell Shock with Joy Porter
In April 1918, Canadian soldier Frank "Toronto" Prewett was buried alive on the Western Front. Managing to claw his way out of the earth, Prewett was reborn but with a lasting trauma that manifested in a curious way. While recuperating alongside Siegfried Sassoon and...
On War & Society E41: A War of Emotions with Lucy Noakes
The first half of Britain’s twentieth century was shaped by death. Between 1914 and 1918, over 700,000 men died in the First World War, followed by another 250,000 between 1918 and 1919 from the influenza pandemic. Over three decades later, another 380,000 were killed...
On War & Society E40: The Great War at Home with Martha Hanna
For a long time historians studying the First World War had to rely on the memoirs of soldiers, but over the last several decades, more and more letters have made their way into the archives as family members inherit and donate the written material of their relatives....
Great Battles in History: The Battle of Hattin
The first four parts of an all-new episode of Professor Darryl Dee’s Great Battles in History podcast has been released. In the inaugural episode, Professor Dee examined the Battle of Thermopylae and its legacy, followed by the bloody Battle of Cannae during the...
On War & Society E39: Biodefense and the War on Terror with Gwen D’Arcangelis
In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, five people were killed and another seventeen were injured from anthrax spores as part of a deliberate attack against members of the US media and Senate. Fears quickly spread that this was another incident of...
On War & Society E38: Disaster in Halifax, 1917 with Roger Sarty
On the morning of 6 December 1917 two cargo vessells, the SS Mant Blanc and SS Imo collided in Halifax Harbour. The resulting catastrophic explosion occurred thousands of miles away from the Western Front but it was a direct result of the First World War. The war was...
On War & Society E37: Reclaiming Canada’s Second World War with Tim Cook
In his new book The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering and Remaking Canada’s Second World War, Tim Cook reminds us that "if we do not tell our own stories, no one else will." But the ways in which Canadians have chosen to remember the Second...
On War & Society E36: The Black Watch Snipers with David O’Keefe
David O’Keefe is the author of One Day in August: The Untold Story Behind Canada’s Tragedy at Dieppe and his most recent book, Seven Days in Hell: Canada’s Battle for Normandy and the Rise of the Black Watch Snipers. Never one to shy away from public...
On War & Society Special Video Edition, Part 2: Edward Cecil-Smith and the Spanish Civil War with Tyler Wentzell
Edward Cecil-Smith was a Christian, journalist, playwright, member of the Communist Party of Canada and a volunteer in the Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion, where he served alongside 17,000 other Canadians and 45,000 internationals. Why did he and other Canadians fight in...
On War & Society E35: Writing Public History with Tim Cook
Tim Cook is a former archivist at the National Archives of Canada and currently a historian at the Canadian War Museum. He is the curator of over a dozen permanent, temporary, travelling, and digital exhibitions. He is also the author of 12 books, over 80...
Great Battles in History: The Battle of Cannae
An all-new episode of Professor Darryl Dee's Great Battles in History podcast has been released. In the inaugural episode, Professor Dee examined the Battle of Thermopylae, its origins and its legacy, now he sets his sights on The Battle of Cannae: On August 2, 216...
On War & Society Special Video Edition, Part I: War Junk with Alex Souchen
During the Second World War the Allies, including Canada, produced a tremendous amount of war material. But what happened to these objects after the war? As Canada transitioned from a war-time to peace-time economy, the War...
On War & Society E34: The Medic’s Tale with Ted Barris
At the age of 13, Ted Barris asked his father a common question: “Dad what did you do in the war?” This began a fifty-seven-year investigation into his father’s war experiences as a sergeant medic in the US Army during its bloodiest campaign during the liberation of...
On War & Society E33: Voicing Dissent during the First World War with Geoff Keelan
Henri Bourassa was a French Canadian nationalist, politician, journalist, and “one of the most…vocal voices of dissent in Canada during the First World War.” Despite Bourassa’s significance on the Canadian home front and within the international pacifist movement, his...
On War & Society E32: The American Civil War: Under the Knife with Shauna Devine
Approximately 750,000 people were killed over four years during the American Civil War, two-thirds of these fatalities were caused by disease. This staggering death count was a shock to American physicians who were unregulated, undertrained and operating in the dark....
On War & Society Episode E31: Haunted by Hitler with Robert Teigrob
In the summer of 1937, Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King spent four days in Berlin. He arrived at Friedrichstrasse Station, home of the impressive U-bahn subway which was built in preparation for the 1936 Berlin Olympics; a year later this same...
On War & Society E30: Malplaquet: The Myth of Decisive Battle with Darryl Dee
Bankruptcy, famine in the countryside, and a starving army were just some of the crises facing Louis XIV in 1709. Eight years into the War of the Spanish Succession, the allied armies led by the Duke of Marlborough, had also managed to breach the French defences on...
On War & Society E29: Making a Historian
On this month's episode Of On War and Society, Kyle Pritchard sits down with Dr Roger Sarty to discuss the life and career of C.P. Stacey. Sarty explains how Stacey went from being a young student with no interest in research to the founding father of Canadian...
On War & Society E28: The Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists
As Canadians, there is a sense that international collaboration has acted and continues to act as a positive force in the world today. Yet certain events serve as a reminder that the foundations of our international relationships have sometimes developed not out of...
On War & Society E27: Assault on the Winter Line
The Italian Campaign during the Second World War remains a subject of controversy—whether it was “Normandy’s Long Right Flank” or a costly stalemate continues to be debated by historians to modern day. Terry Copp, director emeritus of the Laurier Centre for Military...
On War & Society E26: Nazis, Canadian Jews and the Second World War
Jewish people are traditionally depicted as victims in the Second World War literature. This should come as no surprise, as six million Jews were killed at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust. Ellin Bessner, in her new book Double Threat, insists that at least...
On War & Society E25: Ted Barris and the Dam Busters
Sometimes we find Canadians in the most unlikely of places. During the Second World War, within the crews of airmen responsible for breaching the Ruhr dams of Nazi Germany, there were thirty Canadians. In 1943, these men, along with about a hundred others, took to the...
On War & Society Special: D-Day in 14 Stories with Elliot Halpern
As the Second World War fades from living memory, D-Day, the Allied operation whose success led to the liberation of France and the rest of Western Europe from Axis forces, continues to serve as a microcosm for the preservation of democratic values in the world today....
On War & Society E24: Ambitions Unrealized with Linda Quiney
The contribution of nurses to attend to the wounded was essential to military care and recovery during the First World War. Less noted is the role of the middle class and educated, though largely unqualified, women who assisted in filling in the gaps at overburdened...
On War & Society E23: Stalin’s Gulag
Sometimes we forget that the field of war and society encompasses so much more than Canada. Many of the guests we've had on our show study the history of war and society in Canada, but in this episode, Wilson Bell speaks about the Soviet Gulag system during the Second...
On War & Society E22: Shell Shock with Mark Humphries
Shell shock has become a stand-in for the experience of all soldiers of the First World War. And it has also become one of the most popular topics of inquiry for historians of the First World War. Mark Humphries, associate professor history at Wilfrid Laurier...
On War & Society E21: Rural Canada at War with Jonathan Vance
We know a lot about the urban experience during the First World War in Canada but far less about the rural equivalent. Canadian historians sometimes assume––and quite wrongly––that the urban Canadian experience of the war can stand in for the rural. But it can't....
On War & Society E20: Uncovering the Secret History of Soldiers
Since the late 1990s, Canadian historian Tim Cook has carved out a niche in the field of First World War history. In his two-volume social history of the war, he spoke of a soldiers’ culture, which bound Canadians together on the battlefields and helped them cope with...
On War & Society E19: How to Write 7,000 Words in a Week, with Tim Cook
Tim Cook loves to write. As many Canadian historians will attest, Tim is one of the most prolific writers in the profession––both in terms of volume and content. Since 1998, Tim has published a dozen books on the First and Second World Wars, greatly advancing our...
On War & Society E18: Why Military Families Matter, Part II
Military families are essential to the care of veterans in both the past and present. Yet current veteran policies and programs do not fully provide the necessary services military families require for the process of healing and recovery. For the final episode of our...
On War & Society E17: Why Military Families Matter, Part I
Soldiers returning from the battlefield rarely return unscathed. Yet veterans’ families continue to be inadequately prepared for the difficulties of military life. For episode three of four on the past and present experiences of veterans in Canada, two scholars and...
On War & Society E16: Unpacking the Trauma Kit, Part II
Wars often time come home. Reintegration into civilian life comes with a whole new set of challenges for veterans. For the second part of our four-part series on the past and present experiences of veterans in Canada, two historians and two veterans discuss the...
On War & Society E15: Unpacking the Trauma Kit, Part I
Too often we forget the casualties of war. Whether on film, in novels and even in writing history, scenes of soldiering and warfare pervade while the aftermath is ignored. Nationalism is deeply intertwined with many twenty and twenty-first century wars, making it...
On War & Society E14: Rewriting the Great War
Since 2014, there has been an outpouring of literature on the First World War that has moved the field in exciting new directions. Over thirty books have been released by Canadian academic presses over the past almost four years, including titles on conscription,...
On War & Society E13: Family at the Front
Nearly 660,000 bags of mail were sent to Canada from soldiers in France and Belgium during the First World War. In this episode, Dr. Kristine Alexander sits down with Kyle Pritchard to discuss her research on the topic of families, children, and letter-writing during...
On War & Society E12: A Microhistory of an Ace
Billy Bishop is one of the most recognizable names in the military history of Canada. He was Canada’s top ace during the First World War, credited with over seventy victories during his career as a pilot with Royal Flying Corps. But there were many other pilots whose...
On War & Society E11: Civil War and Identity with Alec Maavara
Discussions of the First World War in Europe are dominated by the events that transpired in France, Great Britain and Germany. But on the periphery of Europe, fascinating local, regional, national and international conflicts were also at play. The Finnish Civil War...
On War & Society Podcast E10: Destruction and Dissent in the Marshall Islands with Dr. Martha Smith-Norris
The image of the mushroom cloud, commonly associated with a nuclear explosion, provides a stark reminder of the power and devastation of the atomic age. Aware of the horrible circumstances involving Hiroshima and Nagasaki, few may realize the full extent of nuclear...
On War & Society E9: Treating Wounds of the Mind with Meghan Fitzpatrick
Post-traumatic stress order (or PTSD) remains a prominent issue within the Canadian military and has affected thousands of veterans who returned home. At the end of 2017, the Nova Scotia government announced that an inquiry will be made after a veteran shot and killed...
On War & Society E8: In Search of the Canadian Officer with Dr. Geoff Hayes
Many have fallen down the rabbit hole of over-researching. Telling the entire story is tempting, but it is an unattainable standard. Reconstructing the past out a series of texts simply cannot measure up to the multifaceted and dynamic realities of an all-encompassing...
On War & Society E7: The Conscripted
The Conscription Crisis was the central political conflict of the First World War, affecting not only the Canadian government but having an immediate impact on over 400,000 Canadians who were registered for conscription with the intention of being sent overseas....
On War & Society E6: Dunkirk
Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk hit theatres this past summer. It was met with critical acclaim and made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. It is arguably one of the greatest war films Hollywood has ever produced and certainly gave its viewers an...
On War & Society E5: Did You Fall Into the Vimy Trap?
The Battle of Vimy Ridge was fought in April 1917 during the First World War. Four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force attacked the German stronghold of Hill 145 on the morning of 9 April, and three days later, had successfully pushed the German army off of...
On War & Society E4: Canada’s Arctic Laboratory
Dr. Matthew Wiseman just finished his Ph.D. on Canadian science during the early Cold War. And he is a bit concerned about the developing nuclear crisis between the United States and North Korea, as many of us are too. President Donald Trump’s fiery rhetoric has...
On War & Society E3: Complicating History
Who is Wilfrid Laurier University’s Cleghorn Fellow in War and Society? Mary Chaktsiris dropped by the studio this month to talk about her new position, teaching in a different environment, and her research into Toronto and the Great War. Mary became the Cleghorn...
On War & Society E2: Somewhere Between War and Society
What happened to Montreal during the Great War? For the past three years, distinguished military historian Terry Copp has been researching Canada’s metropolis––Montreal––from 1914 to 1918. In our conversation, Terry discusses the various social, religious and...
On War & Society E1: The War Junk Historian
Eric Story sits down with Dr. Alex Souchen, a post-doctoral fellow at the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies in Waterloo, ON, to discuss his research on munitions dumping in Canada during the 1940s. Alex helps explain the destructive...