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Best Book in Political History Prize
Ivana Caccia. Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime: Shaping Citizenship Policy, 1939-1945 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).
Ivana Caccia’s Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime: Shaping Citizenship Policy 1939-1945 stands out for the quality of its scholarship, the suppleness of its arguments, and the contribution it makes to our understanding of the transition towards a broader and more inclusive definition of Canadian citizenship in the mid-20th century. Managing the Canadian Mosaic is a sensitive and effective analysis of public debates regarding the institutional responses to the challenges posed by the growing number of Canadians of non-British or French origin to national unity and a unified Canadian war effort during the Second World War. While acknowledging the nuances, contradictions, and even the ambivalence that characterised official Canadian policy towards ethnocultural minorities during the war, Caccia traces the emergence by the war’s end of a more open and inclusive perception of Canadian identity focused on shared values that challenged earlier definitions of Canadian identity that focused on the country’s Britishness. Clearly written, impeccably researched, and engagingly argued, Managing the Canadian Mosaic makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates about the changing nature of Canadian nationalism and identity in the mid-20th century and is essential reading for scholars interested in modern Canadian political history.