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Ancient Web: Canadian Soldiers Built a Research Library Around the Army’s 20th-Century History

CanadianSoldiers.com is the sort of site that becomes valuable when the subject is too large for one article and too specific for a general encyclopedia.

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The site is built around the history of the Canadian Army, especially the twentieth century. Its research sections bring together official histories, bibliographies, campaign material, unit information, and links to digitized documents.

The useful part is the structure.

A bibliography that keeps opening doors

One section traces the official histories of the Canadian Army through the First World War, Second World War, and Korea.

The First World War story alone is complicated. The site explains that Colonel A. F. Duguid was tasked with producing an official history after the war, but only one volume appeared. Gerald Nicholson later produced the single-volume Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919 in 1964.

For the Second World War, the site points readers toward the three-volume official history, including C. P. Stacey’s Six Years of War and G. W. L. Nicholson’s volume on the Canadians in Italy.

Its bibliography pages then fan outward into general histories, campaign studies, memoirs, and specialized works.

That is the old-web advantage here.

A modern search engine can find a book title. A hand-maintained military-history site can explain why that book belongs beside five others and where the official record fits into the larger historiography.

CanadianSoldiers.com also links outward to digitized copies hosted by government and military-history projects, so the site acts partly as a map to material distributed across the web.

The tone is not flashy. It assumes the reader came looking for something specific and is willing to follow references.

That makes it useful in 2026 for exactly the same reason it was useful when it was built.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes specialist history sites because many of them function less like articles and more like annotated card catalogs.

That kind of site does not need a redesign nearly as badly as it needs to stay online.

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