Experience D-Day through the LMH Archive’s Collection Of War Diaries

By Jesse MacLeod In honour of the 70th anniversary of D-Day and the invasion of Normandy, this week’s post will highlight our digitized collection of official war diaries from that campaign. On June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France began as men and materiel landed on the beaches of the Normandy coast. What […]

Newly Identified Air Photos!

By Jesse MacLeod Recently, we were contacted by a research associate of LCMSDS, Evert Stieber, who lives in the Netherlands. He has been looking at the large number of geographically-unidentified aerial reconnaissance photos from the Second World War. Evert provided us with a long and detailed list of boxes and photos which he felt he […]

Newly Discovered Air Photos Coming to the LMH Archive!

By Jesse MacLeod Through the process of digitizing and publishing over 130,000 aerial photographs from the Second World War, it was inevitable that not everything would be absolutely perfect and something would go wrong. Fortunately, due to the tireless efforts of our employees and volunteers, the project was completed without any major problems hindering its […]

Library & Archives Canada (LAC) WW1 Digitization Project

by Jesse MacLeod In honour of Vimy Day, this week’s post will highlight an important initiative on the part of our national archival institution, Library & Archives Canada (LAC). As a major component of the First World War centennial commemorations, LAC will be digitizing all of their Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) personnel files. The aim […]

The National Archives (UK) “Operation War Diary” Initiative

By Jesse MacLeod Related to our previous post about the recent uploading of newly digitized material, this week’s blog post will discuss a new initiative on the part of The National Archives in the UK (TNA). “Operation War Diary” (OWD) is a crowd-sourcing initiative intended to enrich available information about the war diaries of the […]

Adopt-a-Soldier With The Kitchener Public Library

By Jesse MacLeod A recent post gave attention to an initiative in the UK relating to the centennial commemorations of the First World War. Subsequent posts will also deal with similar British initiatives, but this week we want to focus on something at the local level. The Kitchener Public Library (KPL) has launched a crowd-sourcing […]

Introducing the George Lindsey Fonds

by Matthew Wiseman Have you ever wanted to get your hands on classified documents?  Have you ever wanted to read highly restricted information that was not meant for publication? Historians do. They yearn for new discoveries. They yearn to analyze new information that has the potential to alter their understanding of the past. The Laurier […]

The National Archives (UK) First World War Unit Diaries Online

By Jesse MacLeod The National Archives (TNA) in the United Kingdom (UK) have made their second batch of war diaries from the First World War available for download as of today. For a nominal fee, you can now download high quality PDF files containing the war diaries for every unit in the British 9th-33rd Infantry […]

Coming Soon to the LMH Archive: The No Price Too High Collection (Part 1) by Luc Boisvert

In response to the 1992 television documentary series The Valour and the Horror, in 1994 a group of individuals gathered together to assemble various primary documents, papers, letters and information on Canadian soldiers in the Second World War. Their goal was to create a competing documentary, one which highlighted the importance of Canada’s role in […]

(Updated!) Welcome to the Laurier Military History Archive!

The Laurier Military History Archive – www.lmharchive.ca – is a project that was initiated in the Summer of 2013 by the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies (LCMSDS), at Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario). It offers the public previously unavailable access to a variety of digitized materials from LCMSDS’ archival holdings, and will […]