Clio's Warriors ─ Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars

Clio's Warriors examines the role of academic military history in the writing of the world wars in Canada. To elucidate the role of historians in codifying the sacrifice and struggle of a generation, Tim Cook discusses historical memory and writing, the creation of archives, and the war of reputations that followed each of the world wars.

For much of the twentieth century, official historians of the Department of National Defence controlled the tenor and focus of war writing. Training, administration, and operational war fighting remained the dominant topics. Only recently have academic military historians pushed the discipline to explore the impact of the wars on Canadian society, and even so, the publications of the official historians continue to provide the central narrative of Canada's world wars.

The opening of the archives has allowed new generations of historians to address long-standing controversies. Clio's Warriors examines where the profession has come from and where it needs to go from here, and will be an essential addition to the library of all Canadian military historians and students of military history and historiography.