An important and comprehensive exploration of 400 years of Black history in Canada.This narrative journey through Canadian Black history begins with the arrival in 1604 of Mathieu Da Costa, the first known African in Canada, and continues through the Black Lives Matter movement and the ongoing fight for social justice. It covers Canada’s legacy of slavery, the Black Loyalists, the Underground Railroad, the Exodusters and the Black civil rights movements in Canada. With sidebars, pr...

Community is essential for humans. But living together comes with challenges—challenges often solved by engineers!Access to clean drinking water? Engineers did that. Managing garbage? Engineers too. Safe and comfortable places to live with electricity and running water? You got it, engineers. Engineers are also behind the communication and transportation networks that keep our communities operating smoothly. Oh, and advances in healthcare? You can thank engineers f...

Building walls that separate us from others is as old as humanity.People have built walls to keep others out for thousands of years, from the Great Wall of China to Hadrian's Wall to security fences along the US-Mexico border. But did you know they've also been built to keep people in, to grow food, to control nature and to collect taxes? Sometimes they've helped people and kept communities safe, but they've also created inequity and done more harm than good. Why d...

★ “Moving and bittersweet…Discusses the reality of slavery and the racial violence and prejudice formerly enslaved individuals experienced.” — Booklist, starred reviewIn 1841, a 12-year-old enslaved boy, Edmond Albius, made history when he discovered how to hand-pollinate vanilla plants using a bamboo twig.Until that time, only bees in Mexico could pollinate the plant—botanists couldn’t figure out another way. With his master, Edmond travelled arou...

Racism can make everyday things like going to a well-resourced school, accessing clean water and living in a safe community difficult or nearly impossible.For Black people, some of their experiences of racism are unique to the Black experience and are either not shared by other racialized people or experienced differently. There are many reasons for this, and most of them are historic. Africans were largely first brought to North America in chains, and racism was u...

"When psychos fall...A whole family of monsters has menaced my home for far too long. And in the battle to take them down, one of resurrected gangsters I love may have lost his life all over again.Am I pissed off? Understatement of the century.But my men have already survived one set of murders. I made it out of the looney bin and rescued my sister. We've proven we don't back down... even when maybe we should.The villains have way more people, more money and...