Canadian Military History

Canada’s flagship journal on military history and current military conflict began in 1992, one year after LCMSDS opened their doors. Working closely with the Canadian War Museum, the journal has always sought to bridge the gap between scholars and the general public. The journal provides an opportunity for many of today’s leading young scholars to publish their first article and also serves as a scholarly outlet for more seasoned academics. With a subscription list of over 500, Canadian Military History remains one of our foremost outreach programs.

Battlefield Study Tours

LCMSDS is renown for its battlefield study tour programs. These tours have brought hundreds of students and teachers to Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany to visit Canadian and international cemeteries, memorials, museums and battlefields. Years of generous support from John Cleghorn has made these tours possible, and most importantly for students, affordable. For 2012 we have shifted our focus to the new ‘Cleghorn High School History Teachers Study Tour’, which will be run in partnership with the Gregg Centre at the University of New Brunswick. This tour provides bursaries to up to 18 participants whom will also have the opportunity to use the tour to obtain a B.Ed or M.Ed credit from UNB. We will continue to work with the Canadian Battlefields Foundation and other organizations to promote this important example of active learning.

Digitization of Archival Collections and Student Employment

LCMSDS currently has a collection of more than 300,000 Second World War Aerial Photographs. Our archival collections also include the Ronnie Sheppard Operational Research Archive, the Terry Copp Papers (which includes the Battle Exhaustion Psychiatric Archive and the No Price Too High Archives), the papers of Prime Ministers Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Sir Robert Borden, in addition to a host of other collections that are currently being digitized for public use. To maintain these collections we have used donor contributions to the Centre to hire students on a part-time basis during the school year and full-time during the summer. This provides a rare opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to ‘work in the field’, building skills to prepare them for their future careers.

Publications

Since the publication of the first Battlefields of Normandy guidebook in 1994, LCMSDS has gone on to publish the largest complement of Canadian-centered battlefield guides in the country. Our guidebooks are divided into two sections. The first provides a short history of the military campaign under study in a concise and accessible manner. These sections are frequently lauded by fellow scholars as the best short histories of Canadian military campaigns available to the public. The second section provides a detailed and guided tour of the battlefields. The most recent guides on Italy and our most recent on the First World War use Google Earth maps in both the history and tour sections to give the readers a birds-eye view of the battlefields after decades of urban and rural development. None of this would be possible without the contributions of our donors.

 

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