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In the Special Materials Reading Room in the National Library of Scotland is a document entitled "A Lady's Campaigns in Canada: Extracts from the Journal of a Subaltern's Wife, Written in Canada in 1812, 1813, and 1814." It is part of the William "Tiger" Dunlop portion of the Dunlop Collection and is Manuscript 9303, folios 62-74. The extracts tell the story of a small, young, English military family's encounter with war on the Canadian frontier. In so doing, it reveals the gendered emotional landscapes of the war, the lived content of genteel female respectability and martial masculinity. It includes both genders centrally in the history of war. "A Lady's Campaigns in Canada" deploy, apparently unconsciously, the racialized tropes powerfully operating within the colony and the empire (because they are "uncivilized" in the document, "Indians" commit "murder" even in warfare). In this regard, the extracts make early nineteenth-century racism visible to today's readers. The document is of extraordinary note, too, in the way it conceives of history. It is a history of the War of 1812 in the Canadas that resists teleological repurposing by nationalistic myth makers. The story it tells is a fractured one that speaks through fragmentary and shifting points of view: of the subaltern's wife, of valourous officers, of husbands, and of silenced First Nations warriors only seen through a white lens. To a startling extent, "A Lady's Campaigns in Canada" leap-frogs over two centuries of manufactured myth and memory to remind historians that the calls to acknowledge diversity, tension, and racism, for example, echo the knowledge of near contemporaries about this war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to discuss how a combined comparative and transnational approach can widen our understanding of historical change. By using examples from the first wave of the women's movement in Sweden and Canada we argue that exploring national differences, investigating differences in class and political culture and finally even tracing the transfer of resources and ideas could open up for new perspectives in gender history. Comparisons of women's organizing in different countries, but within the same international organizations, could help us to discern common structures that otherwise tend to be regarded as unique in one national context. In addition, such an approach can help to highlight specific national opportunities, cultures or strategies influencing the outcome of women's organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lieutenant Joseph de Dorlodot (1871-1941), a Belgian aristocrat and philanthropist, was the Director of the Belgian Correspondence and Documentation Office in Folkestone, England. This article uses the 'Joseph de Dorlodot' archive collection (Archives Générales du Royaume de Belgique, Bruxelles) to investigate the emotional support provided by the Correspondence Office during the First World War. Throughout the conflict, its mission was to facilitate the sending of mail between Belgians, to provide them with legal advice and to offer humanitarian assistance to those who were in material and emotional distress. This was particularly the case of soldiers at the front. In the spring of 1916, the Office set up a mail system between Belgian soldiers and wartime godmothers - 'marraines' - from Canada and the USA. Lieutenant de Dorlodot imposed a precise moral and political framework for correspondence, where an intimate space was created in order to strengthen patriotic sentiment on the one hand, and control masculinities and femininities on the other. Through their letter exchanges with soldiers, godmothers participated in the war effort by bringing emotional reinforcement to the front line, from their homes, through a type of caring work often ignored or at least disconnected from any notion of work in the history of the Great War.