Graham Broad

@ProfessorBroad

Professional historian, amateur philosopher, premature curmudgeon. Associate professor . I tweet about history and bicycles.

London, ON
Joined December 2013

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  1. Pinned Tweet
    10 Oct 2019
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  2. 1 hour ago

    In 1991, I failed a course that I later taught. Don’t give up.

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  3. "Rugged? American football? ... I just think it's rather odd that a nation that prides itself on its virility should feel compelled to strap on forty pounds of protective gear in order to play rugby." Giles, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2, Episode 2.

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  4. I hear people say that professors shouldn't share their political views with their students, but what they really mean is "professors shouldn't share political views I don't approve of with their students."

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  5. Feb 2

    My colleague and I worked out that both and retweeted this, which is ironic: Todman and Sheffield were the assigned readings for the day, but we didn't have time to discuss them! (Next time!)

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  6. Feb 1

    We can't wait to get this extraordinary group of students overseas. We'll make a point of paying our respects to Booth, Apps, Robertson, Akiyama, and Blanchford when we're there.

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  7. Feb 1

    And then was William Booth, buried in Cabaret Rouge Cemetery (despite his file indicating that he was missing), and whose service file says little. It is very probable that no one has spoken his name in decades.

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  8. Feb 1

    In a short time, we learned a great deal about limits of the historical record. There is no indication anywhere of the cause of death of 21 year old Ernest Apps, except that he was "killed in action" on a mostly quiet day for his battalion shortly before Vimy Ridge.

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  9. Feb 1

    And how to account for the unfathomable bravery of men such as James Robertson, VC, who, among much else, gave his life pulling wounded comrades from No Man's Land?

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  10. Feb 1

    We were reminded that the CEF was a diverse army (fully half were not born in the country.) 45 year-old private Akiyama Kichisaburo was born in Okayama, Japan, immigrated to British Columbia around 1900, and fell at the end of April 1917 in France.

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  11. Feb 1

    Yesterday, small groups of students in were given the name of a cemetery on the Western Front and an hour to produce biographies of someone buried there using the digital resources at their disposal. They did an extraordinary job.

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  12. Retweeted
    Jan 31

    Man, it’s really something when two countries totally screw over everything they have worked towards for generations in the same day

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  13. Jan 31

    Made the coffee too weak and now my day is ruined. Current plan:

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  14. Jan 31

    Just remember, peeps: the second best drummer in the Beatles is with you.

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  15. Jan 30

    Take care that, in our laudable entreaties to "talk" and be "well", we don't create the impression, especially in young people, that quite ordinary stress, anxiety, and situational unhappiness are pathological.

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  16. Jan 29

    Buckling down, pushing through, and getting work done. Resilience and fortitude are self care skills too.

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  17. Retweeted
    Jan 29

    Planning meeting today, finalizing some little-known places on the itinerary for . Hints follow. One took us an hour to locate on Google! (Have been there, but it's been a long time...)

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  18. Jan 29

    Sixth, history is an expressly "revisionist" discipline, but usually the charge of "revisionism" is made by people who are ideologically opposed to certain kinds of history but haven't the competence to state what, precisely, is wrong with it.

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  19. Jan 29

    Fifth, the communist governments of the USSR and China themselves, it should be noted, produced reams of propaganda for decades while largely blocking access to their archives to outsiders. And then complained that "Westerners" were understating their contributions to the war.

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  20. Jan 29

    Fourth, it is undeniably true that there has been comparatively little written in English about China's war against Japan. This may have something to do with the fact that it's a small community of scholars who have the requisite language skills and the interest in that topic.

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  21. Jan 29

    Third, if anything, there was a longstanding tendency to denigrate the Anglo-American war effort. There was a virtual consensus in the literature for half a century that the Anglo-American armies fought poorly, for example, winning battles by "brute force" as John Ellis put it.

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