The First World War, when it was first commemorated in the 1920s on the allied side, it was commemorated as victory. We change ourselves as a people and we change how we remember the past, and that's inevitable. You say that remembering war, and how we remember it, is often tangled up in political and social debates.
So it's useful always, I think, to look back and see how we got to where we are today. And I think these were important moments. And as a result of the Second World War, we became pretty much fully independent from the British. It's part of the fabric of our history and it's part of what made us what we are.Īs a result of the First World War, we came out more confident of ourselves as a nation, as a player in the world, we were prepared to take more independence from the British. Why is it important that we as Canadians remember what happened in a war that was more than a century ago? She spoke with The Current's Matt Galloway about what it means to remember, and how learning about the past can help us in the present.
Her latest work, War: How Conflict Shaped Us, looks at how conflict has shaped human society and culture over the centuries. MacMillan is the author of several historical books.
#War and remembrance how to
"And I think we have to really think about it, because if we don't think about it, we won't think about how to stop it, how to end it, how to control it, how potentially to outlaw it altogether." "There still is an awful lot of war in the world," said Margaret MacMillan, a history professor at the University of Toronto and the University of Oxford.
On Remembrance Day, as Canadians honour those who sacrifice their lives to defend our freedom, one historian says it's more important than ever to talk about war and history.