Making “Man in the Arctic”: academic and military entanglements, 1944–49

Focused on Canada's Defence Research Board (DRB) and the bi-national Arctic Institute of North America, this chapter considers the connections between military and academic institutions and individuals in the study of the Arctic immediately after World War II. At the centre of this story was the DRB's Arctic Research Advisory Committee, which convened in the late 1940s to discuss and support military-funded northern scientific work and featured a small roster of academics and other experts. One result of the Committee and similar initiatives was the creation of ‘man in the north’, a generic soldier posted to or passing through the Arctic. The subject of repeated scientific inquiry during the early Cold War, this figure was also representative of the region's militarization in the same period.