Engaging the Line: How the Great War Shaped the Canada-US Border by Brandon R. Dimmel
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702018754551 |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| Author | Holly M. Karibo |
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
But to return to Major Molineux: arguably, the story of the major and his
foolish young relative has a broader meaning than the one Taylor gives it. In
Revolutions, Taylor emphasizes the clash between thrusting populists and their
demagogic leaders, and society’s elites. This is an older and much broader theme
than the upheavals of the American Revolution. It appears in Aristophanes and
Thucydides. It haunts some of Shakespeare’s plays (remember ‘‘Let’s Hang all the
Lawyers’’?). It is in present in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, and in the
stunning novel by Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz. The American
Revolution did not quench American populism. US history—like Canada’s, like
France’s, like Germany’s—is divided between fearful elites and resentful subjects.
Taylor undermines not only the differences between Canadians and Americans, but
also those between the Americans and the rest of the world. The City on a Hill can
be seen from afar, but perhaps that is because somebody is burning it down.
Brandon R. Dimmel
Engaging the Line: How the Great War Shaped the Canada-US Border
Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016. 229 pp. $32.95 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-0774832755
Reviewed by: Holly M. Karibo (hkaribo@okstate.edu), Oklahoma State University
Wartime raises important questions about citizenship, national belonging, and who
counts as a full and welcomed community member. This is particularly true at a
nation’s borders, which are often framed as the ‘‘front line’’ between competing
national interests. While the USA–Canada border was far from the bloody ‘‘front’’
of the First World War, Brandon R. Dimmel’s well-written book, Engaging the
Line: How the Great War Shaped the Canada-US Border, demonstrates that it was
nonetheless an important site of social and cultural contestation. This study focuses
on how particular borderland communities on both sides of the national line
reacted to the outbreak of war in Europe, and how the developments of the
First World War shaped North American border policies. Dimmel details a tran-
sition from a relatively porous and ‘‘fluid zone of friendly economic and social
interaction,’’ to one better characterized as a ‘‘high security surveillance area’’
heavily controlled by the state (3). The outbreak of the First World War played
a direct role, Dimmel argues, in that transition.
Engaging the Line blends political, social, and cultural history in order to assess
how global developments in the first decades of the twentieth century reshaped the
boundary and relationship between the USA and Canada. One of the strengths of
this study is its comparative approach. Dimmel focuses on three distinct border-
lands communities: Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan; St. Stephen, New
Brunswick and Calais, Maine; and White Rock, British Columbia and Blaine,
Washington. By comparing communities in the northeast, Central Canada/
Midwest, and the Pacific coast, the author successfully shows how local customs,
culture, and history shaped community members’ responses to the outbreak of war.
168 International Journal 73(1)
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