S9E17 - Lost in the Crowd: Acadians and the First World War

Curious Canadian History

The First World War occupies a complicated space in our public memory. For many Canadians, places like Vimy Ridge or Passchendaele are certainly familiar, Remembrance Day is generally well attended, issues like shell shock are broadly understood, and the traumatic events of the conscription crisis are often taught, though in very different ways whether one is French-Canadian or not. Yet, in the last two decades more and more scholarship has appeared which has added nuance and complexity to narratives that have traditionally been presented or taught or even understood in far more simplistic and inaccurate ways. Gregory Kennedy has contributed to this burgeoning field by examining the story of Acadians in the First World War. The Acadians are a minority French community in the Maritimes and yet their experience highlights the much more nuanced realities of the broader Canadian experience during that nation-defining conflict. While much of the country railed against the perceived lack of participation of French Canadians, Kennedy’s work shows that the Acadians did indeed enlist at very similar rates as to Anglophone Maritimers. The contributions of Acadians formalized into the raising of the 165th battalion, an all-Acadian regiment. Yet, even the story of the 165th sheds light on the varying experiences of Canadian soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

Gregory Kennedy is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Professor of History at Brandon University. He was previously Professor of History at the Université de Moncton, and from 2015 through 2023 was the Research Director of the Institut d'études acadiennes. He has two monographs, Lost in the Crowd: Acadian Soldiers of Canada's First World War and Something of a Peasant Paradise? Comparing Rural Societies in Acadie and the Loudunais, 1604-1755, both with McGill-Queen's University Press. Kennedy is the lead researcher of the SSHRC-funded Partnership Development project Military Service, Citizenship, and Political Culture in Atlantic Canada. He is also the co-editor of a forthcoming interdisciplinary collection of essays called Repenser l'Acadie dans le monde, and a co-researcher of the SSHRC-funded Partnership project Trois siècles de migrations francophones en Amérique du Nord.

Today’s book recommendation is by Gregory Kennedy titled Lost in the Crowd: Acadian Soldiers of Canada’s First World War, published by McGill Queen’s Press in 2024.

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