Hometown Horizons: Local Responses to Canada’s Great War

Robert Rutherdale considers how people and communities on the Canadian home front perceived the Great War. Drawing on newspaper archives and organizational documents, he examines how farmers near Lethbridge, Alberta, shopkeepers in Guelph, Ontario, and civic workers in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec took part in local activities that connected their everyday lives to a tumultuous period in history.The making of Canada’s home front, Rutherdale argues, was experienced fundamentally through local means. Hometown Horizons challenges historians to consider the place of everyday modes of communication in forming collective understandings of world events.