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Reviewed by:
  • For All That We Have and Are: Regina and the Experience of the Great War
  • Serge Marc Durflinger
For All That We Have and Are: Regina and the Experience of the Great War. James M. Pitsula. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2008. Pp. 276, $26.50

There is growing academic interest in Canadian wartime home-front histories, especially those based in local or community studies. Depending on the characteristics of the locale being studied (and the availability of meaningful sources), different means and levels of interpretation can be applied to determine the impact of war on the community and to adequately gauge local responses. James Pitsula’s examination of Regina during the First World War is one of the latest additions to the field. Yet, notwithstanding the academic veneer of this work, its overwhelmingly descriptive approach, the absence of any interpretive framework or argument, a lacklustre research effort, and the superficial quality of the writing combine to guarantee its limited impact on our deeper understanding of Regina’s war.

Pitsula’s introduction surveys the pre-1914 history of Saskatchewan and Regina but fails to inform readers of the book’s purpose and, by not providing a review of the relevant literature or even of the principal sources consulted, the author is unable to place his work in a scholarly or historiographical setting. At the time, Regina was barely removed from its frontier origins and peopled by thousands of recent immigrants from all over Europe, and its ethnic, class, gender, and political experiences could yield much of significance in understanding western Canadian local dynamics at a time of deep crisis and national urgency. Occasional insightful flashes on fascinating sociocultural representations, perhaps unique to Regina, whet the historical appetite but do not satiate it. For example, Pitsula’s description of Reginians’ reactions to and dealings with the city’s Germantown neighbourhood is important to understanding wartime ethnic animosities, yet the neighbourhood itself is never properly described.

The author’s use of evidence is the book’s fundamental and fatal flaw. His research is drawn overwhelmingly from newspapers, almost [End Page 583] exclusively the Regina Leader. The bulk of the remaining sources cited are secondary, some much overused. A close reading of Pitsula’s endnotes reveals a shocking paucity of archival references, except in chapter 5, about Saskatchewan Premier Walter Scott’s political fortunes. Where are the municipal archives, of which almost no use is made? Or those of local institutions? What role did Mayor W.D. Cowan and the city administrators play? Instead, one 1915 parade is revisited (67), down to the details of every band and float, because it was thus described in the Leader.

Still, there is at least some interesting socio-economic context to show what the war meant to the family and region. But it is hard to find: in his descriptions of Reginians’ first year of the war, Pitsula offers readers lengthy stretches of material having nothing to do with the conflict. Just because something took place during the war does not mean it is relevant to our understanding of the war’s impact on local society. The digressive chapter 4 on schooling only tangentially shows how school reformers used wartime circumstances to further the assimilation of immigrant children of non-British stock. Similarly, chapter 5, detailing Scott’s bitter conflict with Reverend Murdoch Mackinnon, has precious little to do with Regina’s war per se. Wartime here is a temporal backdrop against which political dramas unfolded; Regina, the capital, just happened to be the venue. Pitsula would have done better to look at municipal elections to gain insight into wartime’s impact on local dynamics. Chapter 10, on religion and social reform, likewise provides little insight on Regina at war.

War is fundamentally a human story, about people’s lives and deaths. Chapter 6, ‘News from the Front,’ usefully details the community’s manpower losses and provides many personal details of the men overseas, especially those who did not return. Again, there is an over-reliance on the Leader, the information derived from which the author generally reports uncritically. The men’s personnel files at Library and Archives Canada are ignored. Besides, most of...

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