King's and Western faculty create website documenting WWI and WWII life

Launched on February 15, 2012, Wartimecanada.ca is believed to be the first website to document popular culture artifacts and ephemera from World War I and World War II. The project, led by Western University professor Jonathan Vance and King’s University College professor Graham Broad, explores life during the World Wars through items that were never intended to be preserved.

The site features nostalgic material covering all aspects of the frontline and home-front military experience, including training manuals, photo albums, posters, advertisements and greeting cards, which cover a wide variety of topics including wartime diet, leisure activities, and the many ways of supporting the troops overseas.

The bilingual site is a window into the Canadian experience during the World Wars and currently includes more than 600 pieces, carefully scanned and organized into categories. The team has plans to include a further 3,000 items currently being catalogued. Donations or loans of pieces from the community are encouraged.

“We see this site being useful and of interest to history buffs, students, journalists, researchers and teachers,” says Broad, an assistant professor of History at King’s. “We have gone so far as to design lesson plans to assist teachers in using the pieces found on the site.”

“This is a way for people to see the wars in a different way, through the kind of things that Canadians encountered on a daily basis -- from the bubble gum cards that children collected, to the programs for fund-raising concerts,” says Vance, who holds the J.B. Smallman Memorial Chair in Western's History Department.

Wartimecanada.ca received support from partner institutions the University of New Brunswick, University of Ottawa and Wilfrid Laurier University, and funding from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council.

King's graduates also helped in the creation of the site including:

  • Caitlin Mccauig '11 (research and digitization)
  • Greg Colgan '10 (research, digitization, and interpretative essay writing)
  • Matthew Vanderheide '09 (Educational Outreach Coordinator - developed lesson plans for the K-12 system based on site material)