Reckoning, reconciliation, and reflection are changing our landscapes. In When Heroes Become Villains, Jon Bartlett and Brian Robertson bring home the “naming” controversy, telling the stories of three erstwhile heroes, and how our reconsideration of their roles in our collective story is unsettling our maps.John Sebastian Helmcken, a trained medical doctor and senior colonial politician, bears a singular responsibility for the rampant spread of smallpox that decimated coa...

The winter of 1932–33 saw the small interior town of Princeton, BC divided. Charges of outside agitators and charges by mounted provincial police into picket lines of workers, Ku Klux Klan threats and a beating and cross–burning, the kidnapping of legendary labour organizer Slim Evans who was bundled onto the next train out of town (though he returned soon enough) ––– Princeton's few thousand citizens saw much of the human drama of the Great Depression play out right in their own lives ove...

Over 1.5 million Canadians were on relief, one in five was a public dependant, and 70,000 young men travelled like hoboes. Ordinary citizens were rioting in the streets, but their demonstrations met with indifference, and dissidents were jailed. Canada emerged from the Great Depression a different nation.The most searing decade in Canada's history began with the stock market crash of 1929 and ended with the Second World War. With formidable story-telling powers, Berton reconstructs...

Shocked by Canada's 1837 rebellions, John A. Macdonald sought to build alliances and avoid future conflicts. Thanks to financial worries and an alcohol problem, he almost quit politics in 1864. The challenge of building Confederation harnessed his skills, and in 1867 he became the country's first prime minister.As "Sir John A.," he drove the Dominion's westward expansion, rapidly incorporating the Prairies and British Columbia before a railway contract scandal unseated him in 1873....

“Berton has made an invaluable contribution, rendering the grand Canadian adventure more readable than any detective story.” —The Vancouver SunThis is the final chapter in Pierre Berton’s epic retelling of the opening of the Canadian West in the years following Confederation. After the pioneers, surveyors and entrepreneurs came the settlers—a million people lured by government propaganda, ruthless boosterism and Utopian visions of a Promised Land. The West...

In this new and revised edition, Knowles explores new materials relating to multiculturalism and immigration.Immigrants and immigration have always been central to Canadians’ perception of themselves as a country and a society. In this crisply written history, Valerie Knowles describes the different kinds of immigrants who have settled in Canada, and the immigration policies that have helped define the character of Canadian immigrants over the centuries. Key policy...

Jay Dolan of Notre Dame University is one of America's most acclaimed scholars of immigration and ethnic history. In THE IRISH AMERICANS, he caps his decades of writing and teaching with this magisterial history of the Irish experience in the United States. Although more than 30 million Americans claim Irish ancestry, no other general account of Irish American history has been published since the 1960s. Dolan draws on his own original research and much other recent scholarship to weave an ...

The definitive biography of John Maynard Keynes, the most significant economic thinker of the world's most consequential century'A wonderfully lucid exposition of complicated ideas ... required reading' Guardian'Clarke's prose sparkles, and his book is the place to begin if you want to understand the economist's personality and charisma' New York TimesIn the midst of our current economic crisis, we...

'That politics was the most exciting of all the exciting things in the world I never doubted'Shirley Williams was born to politics. As well as being influenced by her mother, Vera Brittan, her father George Catlin, a leading political scientist, encouraged his daughter to have high ambitions for herself - including daring to climb the bookshelves in his library. Elected as MP for Hitchin in 1964, she was a member of the Wilson and Callaghan governments and was also...

Historians, veterans, museums, and public education campaigns have all documented and commemorated the experience of Canadians in times of war. But Canada also has a long, rich, and important historical tradition of resistance to both war and militarization. This collection brings together the work of sixteen scholars on the history of war resistance. Together they explore resistance to specific wars (including the South African War, the First and Second World Wars, and Vietnam), the ideol...

This collection brings together a wide array of writings on Canadian immigrant history, including many highly regarded, influential essays. Though most of the chapters have been previously published, the editors have also commissioned original contributions on understudied topics in the field.The readings highlight the social history of immigrants, their pre-migration traditions as well as migration strategies and Canadian experiences, their work and family worlds, and their politi...

Winner of the Dafoe Book PrizeWinner of the University of British Columbia Medal for Canadian Biography1995 marked the 100th anniversary of that most charismatic and enigmatic public figure, the thirteenth prime minister of Canada, John George Diefenbaker. Beloved and reviled with equal passion, he was a politician possessed of a flamboyant, self-fabulizing nature that is the essential ingredient of spellbinding biography.After several runs at politi...