In 1957, Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize for creating the United Nations Emergency Force during the Suez crisis. The award launched Canada’s enthusiasm and reputation for peacekeeping. Pearson’s Peacekeepers explores the reality behind the rhetoric by offering a detailed account of the UNEF’s decade-long effort to keep peace along th …

Countless books and articles have traced the impact of colonialism and public policy on Canada’s First Nations, but few have explored the impact of Aboriginal thought on public discourse and policy development in Canada. First Nations, First Thoughts brings together Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholars who cut through the prevailing orthodoxy t …

The social suffering and self-determination of Indigenous peoples are important public policy issues in Canada today. This book asks a fundamental question regarding Canadian-Aboriginal relations: Are self-government agreements an effective path to self-determination?

Finding Dahshaa describes self-government negotiations between Canada and the Deh …

Between 1916 and 1918, Lance-Corporal George Timmins, a British-born soldier who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, wrote faithfully to his wife and children. Sixty-three letters and four fragments survived. These letters tell the compelling story of a man who, while helping his fellow Canadians make history, used letters home to remain a …

Thousands of children attended summer camps in twentieth-century Ontario. Did parents simply want a break, or were broader developments at play? The Nurture of Nature explores how competing cultural tendencies – antimodern nostalgia and modern sensibilities about the landscape, child rearing, and identity – shaped the development of summer camp …

Real and imagined encounters among Aboriginal peoples, European colonists, Chinese migrants, and mixed-race populations produced racial anxieties that underwrote crossracial contacts in the salmon canneries, the illicit liquor trade, and the (white) slavery scare in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British Columbia. Colonial Proximities …

This book explores the family allowance phenomenon from the idea's debut in the House of Commons in 1929 to the program's demise as a universal program under the Mulroney government in 1992. Although successive federal governments remained committed to its underlying principle of universality, party politics, bureaucracy, federal-provincial wrangli …

In Mixed Company explores taverns as colonial public space and how men and women of diverse backgrounds – Native and newcomer, privileged and labouring, white and non-white – negotiated a place for themselves within them. The stories that emerge unsettle comfortable certainties about who belonged where in colonial society. Colonial taverns were …

Since 1970 in Quebec, there has been immense change for the Cree, who now live with the consequences of Quebec’s massive development of the North. Home Is the Hunter presents the historical, environmental, and cultural context from which this recent story grows. Hans Carlson shows how the Cree view their lands as their home, their garden, and the …

This book proposes a new pedagogy for addressing Aboriginal subject material, shifting the focus from an essentializing or “othering” exploration of the attributes of Aboriginal peoples to a focus on historical experiences that inform our understanding of contemporary relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples. Reflecting on th …

Kurt F. Jensen argues that Canada was a more active intelligence partner in the Second World War alliance than has previously been suggested. He describes Canada’s contributions to Allied intelligence before the war began, as well as the distinctly Canadian activities that started from that point. He reveals how the government created an intellig …

In the first major study of postwar social movement organizations in Canada, Dominique Clément provides a history of the human rights movement as seen through the eyes of two generations of activists. Drawing on newly acquired archival sources, extensive interviews, and materials released through access to information applications, Clément explor …

For decades the crown jewels of Japan’s postwar manufacturing industry, motorcycles remain one of Japan’s top exports. Japan’s Motorcycle Wars assesses the historical development and societal impact of the motorcycle industry, from the influence of motor sports on vehicle sales in the early 1900s to the postwar developments that led to the ma …

Capitán de Navío Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra was the most important Spanish naval officer on the Northwest Coast in the eighteenth century. Serving from 1774 to 1794, he participated in the search for the Northwest Passage and, with George Vancouver, endeavoured to forge a diplomatic resolution to the Nootka Sound controversy between Spa …

Landing Native Fisheries reveals the contradictions and consequences of an Indian land policy premised on access to fish, on one hand, and a program of fisheries management intended to open the resource to newcomers, on the other. Beginning with the first treaties signed on Vancouver Island between 1850 and 1854, Douglas Harris maps the connections …

The Reluctant Land describes the evolving pattern of settlement and the changing relationships of people and land in Canada from the end of the fifteenth century to the Confederation years of the late 1860s and early 1870s. It shows how a deeply indigenous land was reconstituted in European terms, and, at the same time, how European ways were recal …

First Nations Cultural Heritage and Law explores First Nations perspectives on cultural heritage and issues of reform within and beyond Western law. Written in collaboration with First Nation partners, it contains seven case studies featuring indigenous concepts, legal orders, and encounters with legislation and negotiations; a national review essa …

John Lutz traces Aboriginal people’s involvement in the new economy, and their displacement from it, from the arrival of the first Europeans to the 1970s. Drawing on an extensive array of oral histories, manuscripts, newspaper accounts, biographies, and statistical analysis, Lutz shows that Aboriginal people flocked to the workforce and prospered …

With material provided by the Gitxsan Hereditary Chiefs’ office, court transcripts from Delgam’Uukw v. British Columbia, and her own research, Dawn Mills paints a compelling picture of the Gitxsan and their right to land and self-government. While the book focuses on the judgments rendered in the Gitxsan’s struggle in the Supreme Court and an …

Kiumajut [Talking Back]: Game Management and Inuit Rights 1900-70 examines Inuit relations with the Canadian state, with a particular focus on two interrelated issues. The first is how a deeply flawed set of scientific practices for counting animal populations led policymakers to develop policies and laws intended to curtail the activities of Inuit …

Hiroshima Immigrants in Canada, 1891-1941 is a fascinating investigation of Japanese migration to Canada prior to the Second World War. It makes Japanese-language scholarship on the subject available for the first time, and also draws on interviews, diaries, community histories, biographies, and the author’s own family history.

Starting with the …

The rationalist ideal has been met with cynicism in progressive circles for undermining the role of emotion and passion in the public realm. By exploring the social and political implications of the emotions in the history of ideas, contributors examine new paradigms for liberalism and offer new appreciations of the potential for passion in politic …

Canada has always been a trading nation. From the early days of fur and fish, to the present, when a remarkable ninety percent of our gross national product is attributable to exports and imports, Canadians have relied on international trade to bolster our economy. A Trading Nation, Michael Hart's brilliantly crafted overview and analysis of the hi …

The Courts and the Colonies offers a detailed account of a protracted dispute arising within a Hutterite colony in Manitoba, when the Schmiedeleut leaders attempted to force the departure of a group that had been excommunicated but would not leave. This resulted in about a dozen lawsuits in both Canada and the United States between various Hutterit …

Focusing on Vancouver's social history, the essays written for this special edition of BC Studies treat hitherto neglected areas of the city's past and bring new insights into how its residents lived and worked. Receiving particular attention is the socio-economic and residential structure of Vancouver with one author arguing that the city's econom …

The history of indigenous political action in Canada is long, hard-fought, and under-told. By the mid-1900s, Native peoples across western Canada were actively involved in their own political unions in a drive to be heard outside their own, often isolated, reserve communities. In Alberta, the Indian Association of Alberta (IAA) represented the inte …

Established in 1940 in response to the Great Depression, the original goal of Canada’s system of unemployment insurance was to ensure the protection of income to the unemployed. Joblessness was viewed as a social problem and the jobless as its unfortunate victims. If governments could not create the right conditions for full employment, they were …

Patricia E. Roy is the winner of the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award, Canadian Historical Association.

A White Man’s Province examines how British Columbians changed their attitudes towards Asian immigrants from one of toleration in colonial times to vigorous hostility by the turn of the century and describes how politicians responded to popular …

In 1891, Alice Barrett moved from Port Dover, Ontario, to the Okanagan Valley to keep house for her brother and uncle. She soon married Harold Parke, a former NWMP officer, and spent the next decade recording her experiences in a series of notebooks sent to her Ontario family. Few women’s diaries have survived from that time, and Barrett Parke re …

This book brings together recent and original work to illuminate comparisons and contrasts between two former colonies of the British empire. The contributors include some of the top names in history and political science, in Canada and Australia. Parties Long Estranged covers the entire 20th century and examines different aspects of Canadian-Austr …

In Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship, Ronald Beiner engages critically with a wide range of important political thinkers and current debates in light of the Aristotelian idea that shared citizenship is an essential human calling. Virtually every aspect of contemporary political experience – globalization, international migration, secessionist …

The Aleutian Islands, a mostly forgotten portion of the United States on the southwest coast of Alaska, have often assumed a key role in American military strategy. But for most Americans, prior to the Second World War, the bleak and barren islands were of little interest. In Stepping Stones to Nowhere, Galen Perras shows how that changed with the …

Augmenting published and unpublished sources with information culled from personalized questionnaires sent to key scholars and practitioners, Sylvia Wargon describes and interprets the development of the field. She provides important background information about the origins and history of demography in Europe and Canada from the seventeenth to the …

During the interwar era, the world of mainstream Protestant missions was in transition. The once-dominant paradigm of separate spheres – “women’s work for women” – had lost its saliency, and professional women often entered work worlds largely peopled by men. Medical missionaries Belle Choné Oliver and Florence Murray and literature spec …

In the early 1990s, lawyer Beth Symes brought an equality challenge against the Canadian Income Tax Act, arguing that her childcare costs were a business expense. The case ignited public controversy. Was Symes disadvantaged on the basis of gender, or unfairly privileged on the basis of class? This book seeks answers to those questions through close …

The speed and intensity of global integration in the last two decades have provoked serious debate about the human impact of globalization and deep concern about the capacity of the state to provide social justice. Street Protests and Fantasy Parks focuses on two dimensions of globalization: the cultural and social realities of global connection an …

This critical, multi-disciplinary collection explores the convergence of past and future in contemporary Japan. Contributors comment on a wide range of economic, socio-cultural, and political trends – such as the mobilization of Japanese labour, the burgeoning Ainu identity movement, and the shifting place of the modern woman – and conclude tha …

The history of the legal profession in Canada and elsewhere is one of the exclusion of women, Aboriginals, ethnic and racial minorities, and those from less privileged classes. Based on face-to-face interviews with 50 women and 50 men called to the Bar in British Columbia during the past 3-7 years, Joan Brockman has studied this phenomenon and trie …

This book examines Canadian experiences of social control, moral regulation, and governmentality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Informed by the wealth of theoretical and historical writings that have recently emerged on these subjects, the contributors explore diverse state, social, legal, and human encounters with the re …

What is democracy? Is it the movement toward united self-government in which equality is our highest value? Or is it about preserving the freedom of individuals? In Democracy: A History of Ideas, Boris DeWiel argues that neither of these popular definitions is correct. Inspired by Isaiah Berlin, he describes democracy as a contest of values. Equali …

In our modern world, where human will routinely presides over the natural world, it is easy to imagine that sensibility to animals has been merely a matter of peripheral concern in human history. Rod Preece, in this impressively researched volume, demonstrates that, on the contrary, respect for animals has always been a part of human consciousness. …

In this provocative inquiry into the status of animals in human society from the fifth century BC to the present, Rod Preece provides a wholly new perspective on the human-animal relationship. He skillfully demonstrates that, counter to prevailing intellectual opinion, ethical attitudes toward animals are neither restricted to the twentieth century …

Canada has a long history of using the criminal justice system to address social problems of youth in society. Yet, according to clinical psychologist Mary Vandergoot, this approach has ignored that many so-called juvenile delinquents may have developmental disabilities, mental health disorders, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or have been victims …

Historically, Aboriginal people have had little influence on the development of Native policy from within government; as a result political organizations have been established to lobby government on Native peoples’ issues. Using his experience as director of land claims for the Métis Association of Alberta, Joe Sawchuk explains how these Aborigi …

For two centuries (1670-1870), English, Scottish, and Canadian fur traders voyages the myriad waterways of Rupert’s Land, the vast territory charted to the Hudson’s Bay Company and later splintered among five Canadian provinces and four American states. The knowledge and support of northern Native peoples were critical to the newcomer’s survi …