Browse Case Studies

One of McMaster’s few holdings of German archival material, the letters of Otto and Ada Hartmann extend over a period of less than a year, between the spring and fall of 1915. Despite the relatively small size of the collection, amounting to some two dozen letters, it nevertheless provides valuable insight into military operations and attitudes in the German rearguard and into the daily life of a German soldier’s wife during this important first full year of international warfare.

A memorial plaque was unveiled in 1975 at Dachau concentration camp to four women who had been shot there by the Nazis thirty years earlier. The story of the heroism of Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment, Noor Inayat Khan, and Eliane Plewman is preserved in journalist E.H. Cookridge’s account of the ceremony.

Child survivor of the Holocaust, Alex Aronson dedicated his life to bringing aid to those caught up in war, especially children. McMaster’s Alex Aronson collection provides insights into a remarkable man through letters written from October 1962 until his untimely death at the hands of Saddam Hussein in December 1975.

Necessity is said to be the mother of invention. In the twentieth century, necessity all too often arrived in the guise of war. Aerial photography was among the transformative technical innovations developed during the First World War.

The protest movement which developed in opposition to the Vietnam War was unprecedented in its size and influence. Particularly vocal in the United States, where young men were forcibly conscripted for service, its influence was felt in Canada, Britain and around the world. Nor was it solely a peace crusade of the young; Bertrand Russell, by then in his nineties, worked against the war for as long as he lived.

From a family New Year’s party in a peaceful English seaside town to a German prison camp, 1914 was to prove a fateful year for a seventeen year old British teenager.