The First and Second World Wars were two of the most momentous events of the twentieth century. In Canada, they claimed 110,000 lives and altered both the country's domestic life and its international position. A Nation in Conflict is a concise, comparative overview of the Canadian national experience in the two world wars that transformed the nation and its people. With each chapter, military historians Jeffrey A. Keshen and Andrew Iarocci address Canada's contribution to the war and its consequences. Integrating the latest research in military, social, political, and gender history, they examine everything from the front lines to the home front. Was conscription necessary? Did the conflicts change the status of Canadian women? Was Canada's commitment worth the cost? Written both for classroom use and for the general reader, A Nation in Conflict is an accessible introduction to the complexities of Canada's involvement in the twentieth century's most important conflicts.

The Great War was a pivotal experience for twentieth-century Canada. Shoestring Soldiers is the first scholarly study since 1938 to focus exclusively on Canada's initial overseas experience from late 1914 to the end of 1915. In this exciting new work, Andrew Iarocci challenges the dominant view that the 1st Canadian Division was poorly prepared for war in 1914, and less than effective during battles in 1915. He examines the first generations of men to serve overseas with the division: their training, leadership, morale, and combat operations from Salisbury Plain to the Ypres Salient, from the La Bassee Canal to Ploegsteert Wood. Iarocci contends that setbacks and high losses in battle were not so much the products of poor training and weak leadership as they were of inadequate material resources on the Western Front. Shoestring Soldiers incorporates a wealth of research material from official documents, soldiers' letters and diaries, and the battlefields themselves, surveyed extensively by the author. It marks an important contribution to the growing body of literature on Canada in the First World War.