The role of Canadian universities in selecting and training officers for the armed forces is an important yet overlooked chapter in the history of higher education in Canada. For more than fifty years, the University of Toronto supported the largest and most active contingent of the Canadian Officers' Training Corps (COTC), which sent thousands of officer candidates into the regular and reserve forces. Based on the rich fund of documents housed in the university archives, Varsity's Soldiers offers the first full-length history of military training in Toronto. Beginning with the formation of a student rifle company in 1861, and focusing on the story of the COTC from 1914 to 1968, author Eric McGeer seeks to enlarge appreciation of the university's remarkable contribution to the defence of Canada, the place of military education in an academic setting, and the experience of the students who embodied the ideal of service to alma mater and to country.

As intellectual engines of the university, professors hold considerable authority and play an important role in society. By nature of their occupation, they are agents of intellectual culture in Canada. Historical Identities is a new collection of essays examining the history of the professoriate in Canada. Framing the volume with the question, 'What was it like to be a professor?' editors Paul Stortz and E. Lisa Panayotidis, along with an esteemed group of Canadian historians, strive to uncover and analyze variables and contexts - such as background, education, economics, politics, gender, and ethnicity - in the lives of academics throughout Canada's history. The contributors take an in-depth approach to topics such as academic freedom, professors and the state, faculty development, discipline construction and academic cultures, religion, biography, gender and faculty wives, images of professors, and background and childhood experiences. Including the best and most recent critical research in the field of the social history of higher education and professors, Historical Identities examines fundamental and challenging topics, issues, and arguments on the role and nature of intellectualism in Canada.

The story of the teachers who came by the thousands, from near and far, to join the British war effort. August 1914: Flags waved, people cheered, and armies mobilized. Millions throughout Britain responded to the call to arms. War fever was contagious. In the far reaches of empire, young men also pledged their allegiance and prepared to serve the king and his empire. Among the patriots who joined the colors were thousands of schoolmasters and trainee teachers. In London, students and alumni from the London Day Training College left their classrooms and took the king’s shilling. In the dominions, hundreds of their professional counterparts in Perth, Auckland, and Toronto similarly reported to the military training grounds, donned uniforms, and embarked for the “old country” in its hour of need. This book tells their story. It recalls the decisions made by men who were united by their training, occupation, and imperial connections, but divided by social and geographical contexts and personal beliefs. It follows these teacher-soldiers as they landed on the beaches of Gallipoli, attacked across no man’s land in Flanders, on the Somme, and at Passchendaele, and finally broke through the Hindenburg Line and secured victory. Many did not survive the carnage of what became known as the Great War. And for those who did, men who’d been proud to call themselves Tommies, Anzacs, Enzeds, and Canucks, coming home would present even more challenges and adjustments. “Highly recommended for . . . those who wish to learn more about the social and educational make up of British and Commonwealth forces in the Great War.” —Argunners

Contributing to the social, intellectual, and academic history of universities, the collection provides rich approaches to integral issues at the intersection of higher education and wartime, including academic freedom, gender, peace and activism on campus, and the challenges of ethnic diversity. The contributors place the historical university in several contexts, not the least of which is the university's substantial power to construct and transform intellectual discourse and promote efforts for change both on- and off-campus.

A captivating account of the formative years of one of Canada’s best-known artists, Jackson’s Wars follows A.Y. Jackson’s education and progress as a painter before he was a well-known artist and his time on the battlefield in Europe, before he cast his lot in with a group of like-minded Toronto artists. Jackson fought many battles: he was a feisty and opinionated combatant when he crossed swords with critics, collectors, museums, galleries, and fellow painters as an emerging artist. Moving from Montreal to Toronto in 1913, he became a key figure in a landscape movement that was determined to depict Canada in a bold new way, only to have a war dash the group's collective ambitions. Alone among his close associates, Jackson enlisted to fight with the 60th Infantry Battalion. Wounded at Sanctuary Wood in 1916, he returned to the field of combat as an official war artist – the first Canadian artist appointed, the only infantryman in the program – and militated for other Canadian appointments to what is now a storied moment of creation for such artists as F.H. Varley and Arthur Lismer. Jackson produced some of Canada’s most memorable depictions of the world’s first industrial-scale conflict, even as he reckoned with the anguish caused by the mysterious death of his close friend Tom Thomson. A life-changing event for soldiers, families, and nations alike, the First World War has been understood as a moment of stasis in the visual arts in Canada – the dead ground from which the Group of Seven emerged in the early 1920s. Douglas Hunter shows how Jackson’s war was a moment of intense transformation and artistic development on the canvas as well as an experience that tempered a young man into a constructive elder statesman for Canadian art. On his return home he was not only instrumental in the formation of the Group of Seven in Toronto, but a key figure for the Beaver Hall Group in Montreal. Jackson’s Wars is a story of brotherhoods of painters and soldiers, shot through with inspiration, ambition, trauma, and loss, on the home front as well as on the battlefield. Hunter widens and deepens A.Y. Jackson’s world of friends, family, and colleagues to capture the life of a complex man and the crucial events and relationships behind the creation of Canada’s best-known art collective.