Hometown Horizons: Local Responses to Canada's Great War

Rutherford is arguing, therefore, that for the majority of Canadians who did not serve in the Canadian Expeditionary Force [CEF] and endure at first hand the horrors of trench warfare, the meanings of World War I - what ordinary people believed, felt, and understood about the cataclysmic events taking place in Europe - were largely shaped by local circumstances. Canada may have been born on Vimy Ridge. But the birth was announced and its significance was interpreted in Guelph, [Lethbridge], Trois Rivières, and countless other communities, large and small, in articles and speeches, sermons, parades, thanksgiving services, and other forms of social communication. The nature of these interpretations was in turn shaped by the peculiar characteristics of each community: its major industries, class structure, ethnic profile, and so on. [Robert Rutherdale] therefore begins his study with a long detailed chapter, studded with statistical tables, graphs, and maps, establishing the social, economic, and physical parameters of his three chosen "hometowns." However, he then abandons this conventional structural analysis in favour of a largely cultural approach that is concerned with determining the nature and influence of local communications networks, and analysing the role of public rituals and other forms of symbolic action in mediating experience, generating social meaning, and constructing usable pasts. But he is not of course claiming that World War I can only be understood as a manifestation of the local. One of the great virtues of Rutherdale's study is the way in which he ties the micro-historical analysis of local urban cultures to events taking place beyond their parochial boundaries. Rutherdale does not treat his three hometowns as isolated, self-contained communities, but places them within a complex web of "reciprocal linkages" to the state, the "surrounding social world," and "history itself," represented by the war raging in Europe. (271) The boundaries between the national and the local were permeable and fluid. The war may have been experienced and comprehended in local contexts, making use of the social and cultural materials available within limited "hometown horizons." But Rutherdale shows how under conditions of modernity these horizons were constantly shifting and expanding, admitting various influences from the wider world in a continuous process of communicative exchange. He conceptualizes this relationship by drawing upon John Bodnar's well-k