Although Canada was a committed member of the western alliance and publically supported Washington, DC’s efforts to isolate communist China, Ottawa embarked on large-scale wheat sales to Beijing in the late 1950s in the face of sustained US opposition. Drawing on a broad range of archival records, this paper explores the three main factors that encouraged the Canadian government in this course: growing doubts about the wisdom of isolating communist China; mounting anger at Washington, DC’s use of subsidized wheat sales to capture traditional Canadian markets; and a surging sense of Canadian nationalism that sought a distinct role for Canada on the world stage. Clearly, as was so often the case in postwar Canadian foreign economic policy, a narrowly defined national interest easily trumped the ideological pressures of western solidarity.
Historians have paid scant attention to the compulsory conscription of men under the National Resources Mobilisation Act (NRMA) in Canada during the Second World War. This paper uses the mobilisation of Native Canadians as a case-study to determine the depth and extent of human resource mobilisation policies between 1940 and 1945. Government mobilisation departments and agencies relied on a remarkably decentralised and permissive administrative structure to carry out the NRMA mobilisation mandate. These organizational traits were exacerbated by active Native Canadian opposition to conscription and other factors, such as the geographic isolation and poor health of many Native men. As a result, a patchwork of disparate, inconsistent and ineffectual mobilisation policies affecting Canadian Indians was adopted during the course of the war.
Bertrand Russell left the “bleak hideousness” of Chicago in March 1939 to accept an appointment at the University of California at Los Angeles. Scholarly analysis of Russell’s sojourn in California has focused on the College of the City of New York controversy that engulfed him in the winter term of 1940 and his subsequent departure from UCLA to take up the William James Lectureship at Harvard University. This paper concentrates on Russell’s appointment to UCLA and his experience teaching in Los Angeles during the 1939–40 academic year in an attempt to reconstruct his activities during this tumultuous period while he resided in America between 1938 and 1944.
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