C.P. Stacey Award

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Nominations for 2025

The Laurier Centre for the Study of Canada (LCSC) and the awards committee is currently collecting books for consideration in the 2025 C.P. Stacey Award, awarded to the best book in the field of Canadian military history, broadly defined, including the study of war and society. It honours one of Canada’s foremost scholars, Charles Perry Stacey, the author of landmark studies of military history, Canada’s wars, and foreign policy. The aim of the award is to call attention to an outstanding original work in the fields of Canadian history that Stacey helped pioneer.

Academically rigorous and/or peer-reviewed monographs (single authored or co-authored, but not edited collections of papers or primary sources) on war and society in Canada from any time period are eligible for consideration.

Submissions are now open if your press has published a book or books during the 2025 calendar year that meet the criteria and you wish to be considered for the award. Publishers can submit as many titles as may merit consideration for the award. Please mail three (3) copies of each title under consideration to the below address as soon as possible. The deadline to receive all nominated titles is 27 February 2026.

C.P. Stacey Award

LCSC, Wilfrid Laurier University

75 University Avenue West

Waterloo, ON, Canada

N2L 3C5

If you have any questions please contact bookreviews@studyofcanada.ca.

About the C.P. Stacey Award

The C.P. Stacey Award is named in honour of Charles Perry Stacey, historical officer to the Canadian Army during the Second World War and a longtime professor of history at the University of Toronto.

The award is presented annually to the best book in the field of Canadian military history, broadly defined, including the study of war and society. The award winner receives a $1,000 prize, made possible through the generous support of John and Pattie Cleghorn and family and the Department of History at Wilfrid Laurier University. The LCSC took over administration of the award in 2018 from the Canadian Committee for the History of the Second World War.

The 2023 C.P. Stacey Award Committee consisted of Kevin Spooner (Wilfrid Laurier University; director, LCSC), Yves Tremblay (Directorate of History and Heritage, National Defence Headquarters, Ottawa), and Lee Windsor (University of New Brunswick). To learn more, visit LCSC’s War and Society research cluster online.

Past Winners

2023  |  David Roberts, Boosters and Barkers: Financing Canada’s Involvement in the First World War (UBC Press)

2022  |  David A. Wilson, Canadian Spy Story: Irish Revolutionaries and the Secret Police (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

2020-21   |   Irene Gammel, I Can Only Paint: The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

2019   |   Bob Bergen, Scattering Chaff: Canadian Air Power and Censorship During the Kosovo War (University of Calgary Press)

2018   |   Jonathan F. Vance, A Township at War (Wilfrid Laurier University Press)

2017   |   Geoffrey Hayes, Crerar’s Lieutenants: Inventing the Canadian Junior Army Officer, 1939-45 (UBC Press)

2016   |   Brock Millman, Polarity, Patriotism and Dissent in Great War Canada, 1914-1919 (University of Toronto Press)

2015   |   Norman Hillmer, O.D. Skelton: A Portrait of Canadian Ambition (University of Toronto Press)

2014   |   Tim Cook, The Necessary War, Volume I: Canadians Fighting The Second World War: 1939-1943 (Allen Lane)

2014   |   Richard M. Reid, African Canadians in Union Blue: Volunteering for the Cause in the Civil War (UBC Press)

2013   |   Teresa Iacobelli, Death or Deliverance: Canadian Courts Martial in the Great War (UBC Press)

2012   |   Andrew Burtch, Give Me Shelter: The Failure of Canada’s Cold War Civil Defence (UBC Press)

2011   |   Dean Frederick Oliver and Jack Granatstein, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Military History (Oxford University Press)

2010   |   Carman Miller, A Knight in Politics: A Biography of Sir Frederick Borden (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

2009   |   Kevin Spooner, Canada, The Congo Crisis and U.N. Peacekeeping 1960-64 (UBC Press)

2008   |   Paul Douglas Dickson: A Thoroughly Canadian General: A Biography of General H.D.G. Crerar (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

2008   |   Stephen Brumwell, Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

2006   |   Douglas Delaney, Bert Hoffmeister: The Soldier’s General (UBC Press)

2004   |   Béatrice Richard, La mémoire de Dieppe: Radioscopie d’un mythe (VLB éditeur)

2004   |   Marc Milner, Battle of the Atlantic (Vanwell Publishing Ltd.)

2002   |   Brian Tennyson and Roger Sarty, Guardian of the Gulf: Sydney, Cape Breton and the Atlantic Wars (University of Toronto Press)

2000   |   Tim Cook, No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the First World War (UBC Press)

1998   |   Jonathan Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War (UBC Press)

1996   |   George Blackburn, The Guns of Victory (McClelland & Stewart)

1994   |   Desmond Morton, When Your Number’s Up: The Canadian Soldier in the First World War (Vintage Canada)

1992   |   Bill McAndrew and Terry Copp, Battle Exhaustion: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Canadian Army, 1939-1945 (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

1990   |   Robert Vogel and Terry Copp, Maple Leaf Route

1988   |   Norman Hillmer and W. A. B. Douglas, The Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force, Volume II: The Creation of a National Air Force (University of Toronto Press)