Living with War: Twentieth-Century Conflict in Canadian and American History and Memory

In Living with War, Robert Teigrob challenges predominant English Canadian viewpoints on Canada's military history and memory. These perspectives postulate that the national military past has been a unifying force in the country's history, that Canada is a more peaceable nation than the United States of America, and (paradoxically) that Canada's war efforts have been more noble than those of its southern neighbor, where the glorification of war goes hand-in-hand with being American. Teigrob uses a transnational, comparative approach to Canada-U.S. relations, war and memory, and the nature of international conflict to argue that although Canada and the United States share a “synchronicity of twentieth-century experiences” that contribute “to national cultures which are given to celebrate rather than regret war” (p. 16), English Canadians have had the greater inclination to venerate rather than critique military actions. By contrast, in the United States there is “a powerful current of self-censure”...