Canadians in the Great War; Fighting Spirit, Military Identity, and an Emerging Nation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During World War I (WWI), the battles that occurred in 1917 fundamentally changed the Canadians and presented a paradox in which a once-loyal dominion emerged with a strong sense of national identity. In three critical battles, Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, and Passchendaele, nationalism was fostered among the Canadian fighting forces. Canadian conscription efforts also demonstrated changing sentiments towards the empire and the war, with 484,983 Canadians voluntarily enlisting and 620,000 Canadians serving by the end of WWI. Canadian wartime policies and recruitment efforts resulted in a diverse fighting force, including French, Irish, Highlanders, Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and Black Canadians. These battles brought together the various ethnic groups within Canada and resulted in a unique mentality of resilience and a shared sentiment of Canadian exceptionalism forming. This exceptionalism was also globally acknowledged through the emergence of a distinct reputation. Canadians were recognized as elite "shock troops" of the British Empire and commanded both fear and respect from their allies and enemies. Following the war, the Canadian reputation emboldened negotiations with Britain, beginning with the Treaty of Versailles and resulting in the Statute of Westminster. Canadian politicians also continued to invoke collective memory to tie Canadians to a shared, newly forged identity, which further fueled nationalist sentiments. Although the overt willingness to engage with the painful memories of WWI is contested, the distinction earned by Canadians would forever be marked by memorials to the soldiers who fought there. This new identity forged on the battlefield was imbued with Canadian pride. In turn, the diplomatic resolve of the Canadians was strengthened while separating from the British Empire. Ultimately, this thesis posits that it was not a "myth" or "legend" that emerged from these battles; rather, the experience of Canadian soldiers laid the groundwork for the post-war shift towards greater autonomy, reinforced by their war experience.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".