Alberta's ranching heritage occupies an important place in the province's historical consciousness. Trails and Trials documents the development of the beef cattle industry in Alberta from its open-range ranching phase to the beginnings of the modern era. This narrative history documents how the beef cattle industry responded to the challenges follo …

The Midewiwin is the traditional religious belief system central to the world view of Ojibwa in Canada and the US. It is a highly complex and rich series of sacred teachings and narratives whose preservation enabled the Ojibwa to withstand severe challenges to their entire social fabric throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It remains an importan …

With countless news stories about disappearing towns in the drylands, David Jones's Empire of Dust is being brought back into print. With a new preface, this enduring historical account of the settlement of the Palliser Triangle region chronicles the disturbing fate of thousands of people who were forced to abandon their farms as a result of prairi …

Ancestral Portraits is a retrospective of the art and life of Frederick R. McDonald, one of Alberta's most exciting Alberta First Nations artists working today, and a celebration of a rich Cree heritage. With one foot in the world of his ancestral peoples and the other in the realm of contemporary Canadian society, McDonald paints from a unique per …

Established in 1877, just seven years after the founding of the province itself, the University of Manitoba has grown to become an international centre of research and study. It is the birthplace of discoveries such as the cure for Rh disease of newborns and the development of Canola, and its alumni include Marshal McLuhan, Margaret Laurence, Monty …

We live in an age dominated by the cult of efficiency. Efficiency in the raging debate about public goods is often used as a code word to advance political agendas. When it is used correctly, efficiency is important: it must always be part of the conversation when resources are scarce and citizens and governments have important choices to make amon …

Alberta farmers and ranchers know that, in the frustrating business of agriculture, years of bounty inexplicably turn into years of despair. Looking back over the past half century, Jaques recounts the tumultuous history of the Alberta farm organization Unifarm. This book documents Alberta farmers' quest to increase control over the forces that hav …

How dangerous can words be?

The University of Alberta's English Department is caught up in a maelstrom of poison-pen letters, graffiti and misogyny. Miranda Craig seems to be both target and investigator, wreaking havoc on her new-found relationship with one of Edmonton's Finest.

The men's residence at the U of A wants to party and issues invitations …

Critical forces of culture and nature collide in this comprehensive history of Ellesmere Island in the age of contact. Surveying the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lyle Dick presents an impressive treatment of European-Inuit contact in the High Arctic (the area of what is now the Quttinirpaaq National Park) while considering the roles of …

What did happen to the body of Thomas Scott?The disposal of the body of Canadian history's most famous political victim is the starting point for historian J.M. Bumsted's new look at some of the most fascinating events and personalities of Manitoba's Red River Settlement.To outsiders, 19th-century Red River seemed like a remote community precarious …

Amphibians and reptiles (herpetofauna) are a significant but much-neglected component of the natural economy of the province of Alberta. This second edition, which continues both as a field guide and a comprehensive natural history, builds on the strengths of the first with a richly illustrated text and colour photographs of the species taken by re …

This valuable volume of investigative archaeology focuses on stone tools, the artifacts produced by these tools, and the revealing debris left behind at sites where they were produced. The majority of study sites discussed are in western North America, including Alberta's own Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a World Heritage Site.

Suitable for both th …

For over 1500 years, the Sayisi Dene, 'The Dene from the East,' led an independent life, following the caribou herds and having little contact with white society. In 1956, an arbitrary government decision to relocate them catapulted the Sayisi Dene into the 20th century. It replaced their traditional nomadic life of hunting and fishing with a slum …

Before the fall of Imperial Rome, priests cast the guts of sacrificial animals on the temple floor, claiming to be able to divine the future from these entrails. By probing the remains of Alberta's past sacrifices (reading the entrails), the author believes we might dimly see an apparition of Alberta's future.

This controversial book vividly portra …

"Looking for Country" refers to the thought process of animals bent on escape. A stampeding herd, or a spooked horse running away with its rider, may be described as "looking for country." It could also be applied to this memoir in another sense -- immigrants were looking for land, a piece of new country, and, perhaps, an escape from their old coun …

An album of photographs and musical experiences during the first century of Alberta's history. Explore Alberta's astonishing musical heritage, from brass bands and minstrel shows to Ukrainian folk music and symphonies, from native singers to Wilf Carter.

Government and First Nations leaders have tended to operate within two different systems of knowledge and perception regarding treaty rights issues in Canada. While First Nations emphasize the original spirit or intent of an agreement, government stresses the letter of the agreement. The Spirit of the Alberta Indian Treaties has long been acknowled …

Traditional approaches to Prairie literature have focussed on the significance of "the land" in attempts to make a place into a home. The emphasis on the importance of landscape as a defining feature ignores the important roles played by other influences brought to the land such as history, culture, gender, ethnicity, religion, community, family, a …

Pipe organs were once a central (and sometimes hotly debated) part of Manitoba's cultural life. The Organ in Manitoba portrays that history—the instruments, builders, players and critics—from the date of the earliest known installations to the 1990s, and includes information on musical organizations such as the Royal Canadian College of Organis …

The first economic, military, and diplomatic history of the Plains Cree from contact with the Europeans in the 1670s to the disappearance of the buffalo from Cree lands by the 1870s, focussing on military and trade relations between 1790 and 1870.

Milloy describes three distinct eras, each characterized by a paramount motive for war—the wars of mi …

The tarnished reputation of this turn-of-the-century poet is persuasively burnished anew by fifteen scholars, editors, and poets.

The book begins with a description of the impression Canada made on Gissing upon his arrival in this country in 1913 at the age of 18. Gissing wanted to be a cowboy. He travelled from Alberta to California and back on horseback, sketching and painting as he went. Examples of this early work appear in the book. Gissing began selling his work and sup …

"It would be possible to argue," writes William Nicholls, "that the pivotal subject of debate among theologians for the past two hundred years has been the relationship between modernity and the Christian tradition."

What is modernity—a philosophical outlook or a set of ideas? What is modernization —a social process? Is modernity the same as sec …

W. B. Yeats spent a great deal of his life immersing himself in magical, mystical, and philosophic studies in order, as he claimed, to devise a personal system of thought “that would leave [his] ... imagination free to create as it chose and yet make all that it created, or could create, part of the one history, and that the soul's.” He succeed …

This book constitutes a major and comprehensive reevaluation of British defence policy in the early 1930s.The author traces the evolution of British opinion toward rearmament, from opposition to approval, between 1931 and 1935 and assesses the impact of this opinion on the formation of the Government's defence policy. He places public opinion among …

This volume is woven around the idea that wholeness (the firm) and fragmentation (risking formlessness) alternate in human affairs. This theme is applied to the history and the present condition of Australian Aboriginals. Their religion is seen as a way to bolster a precarious identity and to affirm order in an existence which would otherwise becom …

Allan Sullivan wrote over forty works of popular fiction between 1890 and 1940; today it is difficult to find even one copy of many of these works. A well-known and widely read author in the first half of this century, Sullivan wrote thrillers, historical romance, children's stories, and novels set in the north (The Great Divide, The Fur Masters, C …

Heralded as a prairie writer and best known for As For Me and My House and for his stories of the bleak dust bowl Prairies of the Great Depression, Sinclair Ross has also written of urban life and, briefly, of army life, as the stories in this collection demonstrate.
The Race and Other Stories includes previously uncollected short stories and a …