This extensively annotated wartime diary illuminates the military service of Leslie Howard Miller (1889–1979), a Canadian soldier who served in the First World War. Miller joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) in 1914. From the outset, he served in the signals – the branch of the service responsible for communications. In his off-duty hours, he kept this extraordinarily eloquent diary of his training, deployment overseas, service on the Western Front, and periods of leave in the United Kingdom. A teacher and school principal who attended the University of Toronto, Miller writes with a scholar’s eye – keenly observant of his surroundings and always pausing to reflect on what is new and novel, especially in the natural world he so cherished. In 1919, Miller returned to Canada with acorns he gathered on the Western Front and planted them on his farm in Milliken, Ontario. Saplings from the original oaks have been repatriated to Vimy Ridge and planted at sites around Canada as part of the Vimy Oaks project. Graham Broad, working from a transcription of the diary produced by Miller’s family, includes a thorough introduction and afterword, as well as over 500 notes that situate and explain Miller’s many references to the people, places, and events he encountered. Unpublished for over a century, written in bracing and engaging prose, illustrated with Miller’s own drawings and unseen photographs, Part of Life Itself illuminates a bygone world and stands as one of Canada’s most important wartime diaries.

This short microhistory details the life and death of Eddie McKay, a varsity athlete at Western University, who flew with the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War. Graham Broad switches creatively from telling McKay's fascinating story to teaching valuable lessons on how to do history: why the past matters, why historians take different approaches, how to pose historical questions, how to identify relevant source materials, and the importance of thoughtful, intelligent, and respectful treatment of historical subjects. The book includes a timeline of the subject's life, a map of relevant combat areas in the Battle of the Somme, and nine illustrations. It concludes with four unsolved events in McKay's life: a mysterious woman, a strange advertisement for batteries, an empty envelope, and an unknown grave-demonstrating that even a detailed history about one person's life is never really complete.

We often picture life on the Canadian home front as a time of austerity, as a time when women went to work and men went to war. Graham Broad explodes this myth of home front sacrifice by bringing to light the contradictions of consumer society in wartime. Governments pressured Depression-weary citizens to save for the sake of the nation, but Canadians had money in their pockets, and advertisers tempted them with fresh groceries, glamorous movies, and new cars and appliances. Broad reveals that our “greatest generation” was not impervious to temptation but rather embarked on one of the biggest spending booms in our nation’s history.