Harry Livingstone's Forgotten Men
Harry Livingstone's Forgotten Men

Author: Dan Black

Publisher: James Lorimer & Company

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 1459414330

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HARRY LIVINGSTONE was a small town doctor from Listowel, Ontario when he felt the pull of patriotism that led him to volunteer in the First World War. In 1917, Livingstone found himself embarking on a strange journey that took him to China, where he would inspect,and ultimately travel back to Canada with, men who became known as the Chinese Labour Corps. Once in Canada, the Chinese under Livingstone's care travelled across Canada in secret trains bound for Halifax. All news about the trains and the men was censored. On board crowded ships, the men crossed the U-boat-infested Atlantic. They were then put to work to keep the war machine in motion — digging trenches, hauling supplies, repairing military vehicles, and the grisly job of cleaning up the battlefields. About 300,000 Chinese labourers were recruited by the British,French, and Russian allies during the First World War. Nearly 84,000 of them passed through Canada on their way to France. Livingstone and other officers kept diaries and journals, and wrote letters home telling of their experiences with the Chinese. From these first-person accounts as well as historical records and from rare letters written by Chinese labourers themselves, author Dan Black offers for the first time a full account of Canadians and the Chinese Labour Corps — a story that had mostly been unknown until now.

Harry Livingstone's Forgotten Men
Harry Livingstone's Forgotten Men

Author: Dan Black

Publisher: James Lorimer & Company

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 1459414322

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During the WWI, more than 80,000 Chinese labourers were secretly transported from China across Canada to the Western Front where they built bridges and roads, repaired tanks, unloaded supplies, and then, after the war, cleaned up the grisly battlefields. Though the use of Chinese labourers for the war has been known, the story of their journey and their work, and the role of Canadians in recruiting and transporting them, has not been fully told — until now. In Veil of Secrecy, Dan Black describes the perilous journey taken by the Chinese labourers from their remote villages in China, across the North Pacific, the vast country of Canada from Vancouver to Halifax, and across the North Atlantic to the battlefields of Europe, and then back again. For political reasons and to prevent them from escaping, the Chinese labourers were locked into cattle cars and forbidden to disembark during the journey. The Canadian public, too, was kept in the dark about the trains. But their experience is indelibly evident — in graves across the country from Vancouver Island to Thunder Bay, and Petawawa to Halifax. One Canadian plays a central role in this story — Captain Harry Livingstone, a small-town doctor from Listowel, Ontario. Livingstone joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps in 1917, at the age of 28. His first assignment was to go to northeast China to a recruitment depot, where he examined poor, young Chinese men to ensure they were fit for service. He later joined them on their journey across the North Pacific to a quarantine station on Canada's West Coast. Drawing on the diaries written by Livingstone, and the letters of the Canadian missionaries who served as temporary officers with the corps in Europe, Dan Black traces the experience of the Chinese Labour Corps and sheds new light on the mistreatment and racism they faced in Canada and in wartime Europe.

Old Enough to Fight
Old Enough to Fight

Author: Dan Black

Publisher: Lorimer

Published: 2015-08-13

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 9781459409552

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Between 15,000 and 20,000 underage youths, some as young as ten, signed up to fight in Canada's armed forces in the First World War. They served in the trenches alongside their elders, and fought in all the major battles: Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele, Vimy Ridge, and the rest. Many were injured or suffered psychological wounds. Many died. This is the first book to tell their story. Some boys joined up to escape unhappy homes and workplaces. Others went with their parents' blessing, carrying letters from fathers and mothers asking the recruiters to take their eager sons. The romantic notion of a short, victorious campaign was wiped out the second these boys arrived on the Western Front. The authors, who narrate the fighting with both military professionalism and humanity, portray many boys who, in the heat of battle, made a seamless transition from follower to leader to hero. Authors Dan Black and John Boileau combed the archives and collections to bring these stories to life. Passages from letters the boy soldiers wrote home reveal the range of emotions and experiences they underwent, from the humorous to the unspeakably horrible. Their parents' letters touch us with their concern, love, uncertainty, and often, grief. Meticulously researched and abundantly illustrated with photographs, paintings, and a collection of specially commissioned maps, Old Enough to Fight is Canadian military and social history at its most fascinating.

Too Young to Die
Too Young to Die

Author: John Boileau

Publisher: James Lorimer & Company

Published: 2016-10-03

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 1459411730

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John Boileau and Dan Black tell the stories of some of the 30,000 underage youths -- some as young as fourteen -- who joined the Canadian Armed Forces in the Second World War. This is the companion volume to the authors' popular 2013 book Old Enough to Fight about boy soldiers in the First World War. Like their predecessors a generation before, these boys managed to enlist despite their youth. Most went on to face action overseas in what would become the deadliest military conflict in human history. They enlisted for a myriad of personal reasons -- ranging from the appeal of earning regular pay after the unemployment and poverty of the Depression to the desire to avenge the death of a brother or father killed overseas. Canada's boy soldiers, sailors and airmen saw themselves contributing to the war effort in a visible, meaningful way, even when that meant taking on very adult risks and dangers of combat. Meticulously researched and extensively illustrated with photographs, personal documents and specially commissioned maps, Too Young to Die provides a touching and fascinating perspective on the Canadian experience in the Second World War. Among the individuals whose stories are told: Ken Ewing, at age sixteen taken prisoner at Hong Kong and then a teenager in a Japanese prisoner of war camp Ralph Frayne, so determined to fight that he enlisted in the army, navy and Merchant Navy all before the age of seventeen Robert Boulanger, at age eighteen the youngest Canadian to die on the Dieppe beaches

High Treason 2
High Treason 2

Author: Harrison Edward Livingstone

Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)

Published: 1993-08-08

Total Pages: 656

ISBN-13: 9780786700172

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The second volume in a two volume study of the assassination of JFK presents new evidence and an analysis of existing documents and facts about the conspiracy, the assassination, and the coverup

André Gide
André Gide

Author: Alan Sheridan

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 754

ISBN-13: 9780674035270

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Sheridan presents a literary biography of one of the most important writers of the 20th century--an intimate portrait of the reluctantly public man, whose work was deeply and inextricably entangled with his life. 35 halftones.

The Boys in the Boat (Movie Tie-In)
The Boys in the Boat (Movie Tie-In)

Author: Daniel James Brown

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2023-12-05

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0593512308

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The inspiration for the Major Motion Picture Directed by George Clooney—exclusively in theaters December 25, 2023! The #1 New York Times bestselling true story about the American rowing triumph of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin—from the author of Facing the Mountain For readers of Unbroken, out of the depths of the Depression comes an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times—the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant. It was an unlikely quest from the start. With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the University of Washington’s eight-oar crew team was never expected to defeat the elite teams of the East Coast and Great Britain, yet they did, going on to shock the world by defeating the German team rowing for Adolf Hitler. The emotional heart of the tale lies with Joe Rantz, a teenager without family or prospects, who rows not only to regain his shattered self-regard but also to find a real place for himself in the world. Drawing on the boys’ own journals and vivid memories of a once-in-a-lifetime shared dream, Brown has created an unforgettable portrait of an era, a celebration of a remarkable achievement, and a chronicle of one extraordinary young man’s personal quest.

The Last Utopia
The Last Utopia

Author: Samuel Moyn

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-03-05

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0674256522

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Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Strangers on the Western Front
Strangers on the Western Front

Author: Guoqi Xu

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-02-28

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0674060555

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During World War I, Britain and France imported workers from their colonies to labor behind the front lines. The single largest group of support labor came not from imperial colonies, however, but from China. Xu Guoqi tells the remarkable story of the 140,000 Chinese men recruited for the Allied war effort. These laborers, mostly illiterate peasants from north China, came voluntarily and worked in Europe longer than any other group. Xu explores China’s reasons for sending its citizens to help the British and French (and, later, the Americans), the backgrounds of the workers, their difficult transit to Europe—across the Pacific, through Canada, and over the Atlantic—and their experiences with the Allied armies. It was the first encounter with Westerners for most of these Chinese peasants, and Xu also considers the story from their perspective: how they understood this distant war, the racism and suspicion they faced, and their attempts to hold on to their culture so far from home. In recovering this fascinating lost story, Xu highlights the Chinese contribution to World War I and illuminates the essential role these unsung laborers played in modern China’s search for a new national identity on the global stage.