Review of For All We Have and Are: Regina and the Experience of the Great War by James M. Pitsula

Authors

Brandon Dimmel, University of Western Ontario

Date of this Version

2010

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 30:1 (Winter 2010)

Comments

Copyright 2013 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

The Great War touched many places in Canada, but James M. Pistula's book is the first to examine closely its impact on a distinctly agrarian and western community. Regina, Saskatchewan, was, like many towns in the Canadian prairies after the turn of the century, dependent on agriculture, ethnically diverse, and led by an Anglophile majority that viewed the war as an ideological clash between the democratic British Empire and the despotic German autocracy. That way of thinking made the city of 30,000 a veritable battleground between "Germantown," the "alien" immigrant district, and its English-speaking majority, who through assimilative social reform campaigns crusaded to make Regina a uniformly Anglicized city. The war changed the way Reginans identified with their countrymen, conceptualized their agrarian heritage, and set about improving their lives on the Canadian prairies.