Jim Wood has taught at several post-secondary institutions in Canada, including Trent University, the Royal Military College of Canada, UBC Okanagan, Kwantlen Polytechnic University and the University of Victoria. In addition to articles published in Canadian Military History, The Journal of Military History, The American Review of Canadian Studies, and BC Studies, his book publications include We Move Only Forward: Canada, the United States, and the First Special Service Force, 1942-44 (2006) and Militia Myths: Ideas of the Canadian Citizen Soldier, 1896-1921 (UBC Press, 2010). He currently teaches history at Okanagan College.
The image of farmers and workers called to the battlefields
endures in Canada's social memory of the First World War. But is
the ideal of being a citizen first and a soldier only by necessity as
recent as our histories and memories suggest?
Militia Myths brings to light a military culture that
consistently employed the citizen soldier as its foremost symbol, but
was otherwise in a state of profound transition. At the time of
Confederation, the defence...