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Record W1995415707 · doi:10.1353/jmh.0.0166

Fighting from Home: The Second World War in Verdun, Quebec (review)

2009· article· en· W1995415707 on OpenAlex
Tavis Harris

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Journal of Military History · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCanadian Identity and History
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsContext (archaeology)PrideHistoryGenealogyWorld War IISubject (documents)WritEthnologySociologyLawGeographyPolitical scienceArchaeologyLibrary science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Reviewed by: Fighting from Home: The Second World War in Verdun, Quebec Tavis Harris Fighting from Home: The Second World War in Verdun, Quebec. By Serge Durflinger. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. ISBN 0-7748-1261-3. Maps. Tables. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. Pp. xvi, 279. $29.95. Until recently, historians showed little interest in studies of the Canadian home front during the Second World War. Building upon the works of Jeff Keshen and Magda Fahrni, among others, Serge Durflinger's study of Verdun, Quebec, provides a useful addition to what has lately become a growing body of literature. Though the home front has become a subject of interest, much work remains to be done. While Durflinger's love for his hometown is obvious throughout the study, this does not compromise his objectivity. While he emphasises Verdun's uniqueness, he also argues that the city was in many ways a microcosm of Canada as a whole. Durflinger adopts a community-based approach to explain the Canadian home front during the Second World War, contending that this new model applies to both wartime social history and local studies, providing a useful complement to national–level examinations. He states that while local histories are often criticized for their narrow context, national studies "may neglect local conditions and communities"(p. 4). Durflinger's primary argument is that several factors gave Verdun its unique wartime character, and that regardless of ethnicity or language, Verdun's residents displayed a great degree of community self identification and pride for their contributions to the war effort. The basic questions guiding the work ask why the war effort in Verdun manifested itself in such a 'patriotic' manner, how the war affected [End Page 318] daily life, how the war influenced political relations in Verdun and the degree to which local linguistic divisions reflected national trends. Durflinger largely satisfies his stated goals in a highly readable narrative. The work is filled with anecdotes on topics ranging from the interesting story of the naming of the frigate HMCS Dunver to the town's reaction to the conscription plebiscite. The wide scope of the work provides a thorough view of the war's impact on Verdun. Durflinger not only addresses the citizens' significant support for wartime charities and bond drives, but also the war's socio-economic impact. The war brought industrial jobs to the area, but also created conflicts within families and amongst the city's distinct linguistic communities. Two criticisms of the work can be offered, the first of which centres on the nature and causes of conflict between French and English residents of Verdun. While the author certainly suggests that there were limits to the goodwill and unity, he does not provide a general explanation for the nature of these boundaries. Instead, incidents of French/English divergences are portrayed episodically – the author deals with these cases as they emerged over issues ranging from nominal French-Catholic support for the Anglo-Protestant Young Men's Christian Association to conscription. The second criticism concerns linkages between Verdun and Canada as a whole. Though the author connects several local trends to the wider national experience these links are sometimes lacking or require additional information to fully place the city in a national context. Readers unfamiliar with the Canadian home front during the Second World War may be left wondering how such a charming and "unique" city reflected Canada as a whole. Criticisms aside, this is an excellent work of scholarship, providing a useful addition to both wartime social history and urban studies. It provides a useful model for specialists pursuing local examinations of the Canadian home front during the Second World War, while its lively writing and insightful stories make it enjoyable for those with a general interest in the subject. Tavis Harris Wilfrid Laurier University Waterloo, Ontario, Canada Copyright © 2009 The Society for Military History

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.447
Threshold uncertainty score0.996

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.012
GPT teacher head0.219
Teacher spread0.207 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it