The First World War profoundly affected every community in Canada. In Regina, the politics of national identity, the rural myth, and the social gospel all lent a distinctive flavour to the city’s experience of the Great War. For many Reginans, the fight against German militarism merged with the struggle against social evils and the “Big Interests,” adding new momentum to the forces of social reform, including the fights for prohibition and women’s suffrage. James M. Pitsula traces these social movements against the background of the lives of Regina men who fought overseas in battles such as Passchendaele and Vimy Ridge. Skillfully combining vivid detail with the larger social context, For All We Have and Are provides a nuanced picture of how one Canadian community rebuilt both its realities and myths in response to the cataclysm of the “war to end all wars.”

James M. Pitsula is professor of Canadian history at the University of Regina. He is the author of five books in political and social history, most recently New World Dawning: The Sixties at Regina Campus.

James M. Pitsula's profile page

• Winner, Regina Municipal Heritage Award (Education)

"Between the battlefield and the home front, Regina contributed policies, produce, and people to Canada’s war effort. The city was affected by many of the same issues that faced the rest of the nation: loyalty of immigrants, maximizing production, conscription, and social reform movements. Though unique in many ways, Pitsula demonstrates that the city was trying to adhere to emerging Canadian ideals and values. For this reason, For All We Have and Are is not only an in-depth study of Regina and Saskatchewan in the First World War, but an accurate look at the Canadian war experience.”

Canadian Military History, Autumn 2009

“[This] book should be welcomed, for it provides a wealth of information about the ways the war affected ethnic and class relations, gender identity, Canadian citizenship, social movements, and politics. For All We Have And Are contextualizes these issues in a regional centre and provincial capital convinced its success depended on a wheat economy sucked dry by the ‘Big Interests’ in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal. The Anglo-Canadian majority in the city of 30,000 were also convinced of the superiority of the ‘British civilization’ to which they belonged. Pitsula’s exploration of the way the war emboldened this ethno-cultural bias and its consequences for the large proportion of non-British immigrants in the city (many of whom lived in Regina’s ‘Germantown’) and province is one of the book’s major strengths.”

University of Toronto Quarterly, Winter 2010