Canadian - Historian | December 23, 1943 -
A lot of my father's family in Canada volunteered in the First World War because they saw it as a war that was defending the mother country.
Margaret MacMillan
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I'm interested in the balance between big currents in history - the economies, the ideologies, social structures, and so on - and the decisions that people have to make. At the heart of all these great decisions to go to war, there are human beings who have to say, 'Yes, let's do it,' or 'No, we won't do it.'
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The trouble with the First World War, for example, is that people think war was inevitable, but I don't agree. If you look at the Cold War, you could argue that a war was bound to happen between the Soviet Union and its allies and the United States and its allies, but it didn't.
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Maintaining peace can be as strenuous as winning a war.
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As a Canadian, I've always approached international history as an outsider, neither attacking nor defending key decisions - those were made by actors who are also major figures within national historical traditions for American and British scholars.
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I've always been interested in war, but especially its effects on society, which means bringing in the voices of women, which aren't heard as much in the grand narratives.
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Women are so much a part of war, even if they tend to see another side of it. To say they don't understand war is ridiculous.
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I've always loved reading diaries and memoirs and just getting a sense of different personalities and what made them tick as individuals.
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If you read about millions of people doing this and millions of people doing that, history seems remote and inaccessible.
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Individual lives remind us that there is something called a common humanity and that, over the centuries, there have been people who have lived and breathed and sometimes worried about very different things and sometimes worried about the same things we do.
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Climate change respects no borders.
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