The history of Kitchener is unique among cities in southern Ontario. Although Kitchener shares so much of the character of the region today, its past was considerably different. Until 1916, Kitchener was Berlin, “Canada’s German capital.” Over two-thirds of the residents were of German origin; many retained strong traces of that past. These b …

A transcription of Lucy Peel’s wonderfully readable journal was recently discovered in her descendent’s house in Norwich, England. Sent in regular installments to her transatlantic relatives, the journal presents an intimate narrative of Lucy’s Canadian sojourn with her husband, Edmund Peel, an officer on leave from the British navy. Her dail …

“So often a long-awaited book is disappointing. Happily such is not the case with Sutherland’s masterpiece.” Robert M. Stamp, University of Calgary, in The Canadian Historical Review

“Sutherland’s work is destined to be a landmark in Canadian history, both as a first in its particular field and as a standard reference text.” J. Stewart …

When most people think of the War of 1812, they think of the Niagara frontier, the British burning of the White House, the harrowing tale of Laura Secord, and the much-ballyhooed Battle of New Orleans. But there was more of British North America involved in the war than Upper and Lower Canada. With Great Britain locked in battle with Napoleon's Fra …

Adults need playgrounds. In 1907, the Canadian government designated a vast section of the Rocky Mountains as Jasper Forest Park. Tourists now play where Indigenous Peoples once lived, fur traders toiled, and Métis families homesteaded. In Culturing Wilderness in Jasper National Park, I.S. MacLaren and eight other writers unearth the largely unrec …

Demers revives the memory of journalist Miriam Green Ellis, an all-but-forgotten feminist, suffragist, and agricultural reporter who documented the modernist sphere for over four decades and who refused to be confined to the "women's pages." With written material from the University of Alberta's Miriam Green Ellis Collection, accompanied by an exce …

From 1960 to 1982 Barry L. Strayer was instrumental in the design of The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the patriation of Canada's Constitution. Here Dr. Strayer shares his experiences as a key legal advisor with a clear, personal voice that yields an insightful contribution to Canadian history and political memoir. He discusses the pe …

“A visitor from down south stared at my apple tree and said: ‘Those don’t grow here you know. It’s too cold.’ If the apricot tree in Highlands knew it couldn’t live here, it might stop scattering white blossoms over three lawns.” – Bert Almon

Edmonton has a rich and diverse horticultural history. Vacant lot gardeners, rose gardeners, …

The mountain parks are for all Canadians for all time and their value cannot be measured in terms of how many access roads, motels, souvenir shops and golf courses we've provided. -Bob Jordan, 1971 The Alpine Club of Canada imagined the Rockies and neighbouring ranges to the west and the north as a "climber's paradise." Through a century of adventu …

For eighteen months during the Second World War, the Canadian military interned 1,145 prisoners of war in Red Rock, Ontario (about 100 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay). Camp R interned friend and foe alike: Nazis, anti-Nazis, Jews, soldiers, merchant seamen, and refugees whom Britain feared might comprise Hitler’s rumoured “fifth column” …

From roughly 1818 to 1867, Faku was ruler of the Mpondo Kingdom located in what is now the north-east section of the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Because of Faku’s legacy, the Mpondo Kingdom became the last African state in Southern Africa to fall under colonial rule.

When his father died, Faku inherited his power. In a period of intense raiding, m …

The original people of the Hudson Bay lowlands, often known as the Lowland Cree and known to themselves as Muskekowuck Athinuwick, were among the first Aboriginal peoples in northwestern North America to come into contact with Europeans. This book challenges long-held misconceptions about the Lowland Cree, and illustrates how historians have often …

Religious ceremonies were an inseparable part of Aboriginal traditional life, reinforcing social, economic, and political values. However, missionaries and government officials with ethnocentric attitudes of cultural superiority decreed that Native dances and ceremonies were immoral or un-Christian and an impediment to the integration of the Native …

During the first half of the twentieth century, Winnipeg Beach proudly marketed itself as the Coney Island of the West. Located just north of Manitoba’s bustling capital, it drew 40,000 visitors a day and served as an important intersection between classes, ethnic communities, and perhaps most importantly, between genders. In Winnipeg Beach, Dale …

Stefan Epp-Koop’s "We’re Going to Run This City: Winnipeg’s Political Left After the General Strike" explores the dynamic political movement that came out of the largest labour protest in Canadian history and the ramifications for Winnipeg throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Few have studied the political Left at the municipal level—even though …

A quixotic figure, Vasile Avramenko (1895-1981) used folk culture and modern media in a life-long crusade to promote Ukraine’s struggle for independence to North American audiences. From his base in New York City, he built a network of folk dance schools and produced musical spectacles to help Ukrainian immigrants sustain their identity. His feat …

This book offers a short, comprehensive history of post-war Canada. All the major events and developments in Canadian history are discussed: the evolution of the welfare state; the growth of economic domination by the United States; the halcyon days as a Middle Power; the Quiet Revolution; the First Nations' quest for autonomy; the flowering of Eng …

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Saskatchewan was one of the fastest growing provinces in the country. In the early 1900s, it revolutionized the Canadian political landscape and gave rise to socialist governments that continue to influence Canadian politics today. It was the birthplace of Canada’s publicly funded health care system, and hom …

At the turn of the twentieth century, Winnipeg was the fastest-growing city in North America. But its days as a diverse and culturally rich metropolis did not end when the boom collapsed. Prairie Metropolis brings together some of the best new graduate research on the history of Winnipeg and makes a groundbreaking contribution to the history of the …

Politics in Manitoba is the first comprehensive review of the Manitoba party system that combines history and contemporary public opinion data to reveal the political and voter trends that have shaped the province of Manitoba over the past 130 years. The book details the histories of the Progressive Conservatives, the Liberals, and the New Democrat …

In the decade after the Second World War, 35,000 Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution and their dependants arrived in Canada. This was a watershed moment in Canadian Jewish history. The unprecedented scale of the relief effort required for the survivors, compounded by their unique social, psychological, and emotional needs challenged both the estab …

In this long-awaited book from one of the most recognized and respected scholars in Native Studies today, Emma LaRocque presents a powerful interdisciplinary study of the Native literary response to racist writing in the Canadian historical and literary record from 1850 to 1990. In When the Other is Me, LaRocque brings a metacritical approach to Na …

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 …

When dealing with Indigenous women’s history we are conditioned to think about women as private-sphere figures, circumscribed by the home, the reserve, and the community. Moreover, in many ways Indigenous men and women have been cast in static, pre-modern, and one-dimensional identities, and their twentieth century experiences reduced to a singul …

Before the First World War, Winnipeg was Canada's third-largest city and the undisputed metropolis of the West. Rapid growth had given the city material prosperity, but little of its wealth went to culture or the arts. Despite the city's fragile cultural veneer, the enthusiasm and dedication of members of the arts community and a grpup of public-sp …

Storied Landscapes is a beautifully written, sweeping examination of the evolving identity of major ethno-religious immigrant groups in the Canadian West. Viewed through the lens of attachment to the soil and specific place, and through the eyes of both the immigrant generation and its descendants, the book compares the settlement experiences of Uk …

Saskatchewan is the anchor and epitome of the ‘prairie’ provinces, even though half of the province is covered by boreal forest. The Canadian penchant for dividing this vast country into easily-understood ‘regions’ has reduced the Saskatchewan identity to its southern prairie denominator and has distorted cultural and historical interpretat …

My Parents: Memoirs of New World Icelanders is a collection of essays written by second-generation Icelandic immigrants in North America, describing the lives of their parents. Originally collected in 1956 by Dr. Finnbogi Gumundsson, the first Chair of Icelandic at the University of Manitoba, seven of the fourteen memoirs are translated here from I …

Manitoba has always been a province in the middle, geographically, economically, and culturally. Lacking Quebec’s cultural distinctiveness, Ontario’s traditional economic dominance, or Alberta’s combustible mix of prairie populism and oil wealth, Manitoba appears to blend into the background of the Canadian family portrait. But Manitoba has a …

At the beginning of the last century, no city on the continent was growing faster or was more aggressive than Winnipeg. No year in the city’s history epitomized this energy more that 1912, when Winnipeg was on the crest of a period of unprecedented prosperity. In just forty years, it had grown from a village on the banks of the Red River to becom …

Families, Lovers, and their Letters takes us into the passionate hearts and minds of ordinary people caught in the heartbreak of transatlantic migration. It examines the experiences of Italian migrants to Canada and their loved ones left behind in Italy following the Second World War, when the largest migration of Italians to Canada took place. In …

With roots going back to the Red River Settlement in the 1850s, Winnipeg’s St. John’s College is the oldest Anglophone educational institution in Western Canada. First founded as a school for the children of the employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company, over the decades the college has re-invented itself many times. When it was established as St …

“I am going to tell you how we are treated. I am always hungry.” — Edward B., a student at Onion Lake School (1923)

"[I]f I were appointed by the Dominion Government for the express purpose of spreading tuberculosis, there is nothing finer in existance that the average Indian residential school.” — N. Walker, Indian Affairs Superintendent …

The area between the Great Lakes and Lake Winnipeg, bounded on the north by the Hudson Bay lowlands, is sometimes known as the "Petit Nord." Providing a link between the cities of eastern Canada and the western interior, the Petit Nord was a critical communication and transportation hub for the North American fur trade for over 200 years.Although n …

Despite being one of the largest immigrant groups contributing to the development of modern Canada, the story of the English has been all but untold. In Invisible Immigrants, Barber and Watson document the experiences of English-born immigrants who chose to come to Canada during England’s last major wave of emigration between the 1940s and the 19 …

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 …

In the 1870s, approximately 18,000 Mennonites migrated from the southern steppes of Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine) to the North American grasslands. They brought with them an array of cultural and institutional features that indicated they were a "transplanted" people. What is less frequently noted, however, is that they created in their eve …

Historian Royden Loewen has brought together selections from diaries kept by 21 Mennonites in Canada between 1863 and 1929, some translated from German for the first time. By skillfully comparing and contrasting a wide cross-section of lives, Loewen shows how these diaries often turn the hidden contours of household and community "inside out." The …

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 …

The 1920s were one of the wildest decades in Canada’s history, a time of frivolous fads, shocking crimes, and political and social changes that definitively yanked the country out of the 19th century and into the modern age. In Strange Days, Ted Ferguson revisits dozens of stories that could only have happened in the ’20s — tales of serial ki …

In June of 1962, the Canadian Pacific Railway announced a proposal to redevelop part of its reserved land in the heart of downtown Calgary. In an effort to bolster its waning revenues and to redefine its urban presence, the CPR proposed a multimillion dollar development project that included retail, office, and convention facilities, along with a m …

In an expanding and socially fractious early twentieth-century Winnipeg, Lewis Benjamin Foote (1873-1957) rose to become the city’s pre-eminent commercial photographer. Documenting everything from royal visits to deep poverty, from the building of the landmark Fort Garry Hotel to the turmoil of the 1919 General Strike, Foote’s photographs have …

“It can start with a knock on the door one morning. It is the local Indian agent, or the parish priest, or, perhaps, a Mounted Police officer.” So began the school experience of many Indigenous children in Canada for more than a hundred years, and so begins the history of residential schools prepared by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of …

Ethnic elites, the influential business owners, teachers, and newspaper editors within distinct ethnic communities, play an important role as self-appointed mediators between their communities and “mainstream” societies. In Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity, Aya Fujiwara examines the roles of Japanese, Ukrainian, and Scottish elites during th …

Place and Replace is a collection of recent interdisciplinary research into Western Canada that calls attention to the multiple political, social, and cultural labours performed by the concept of “place.” The book continues a long-standing tradition of situating questions of place at the centre of analyses of Western Canada’s cultures, pasts, …

In the early years of the Great Depression, thousands of unemployed homeless transients settled into Vancouver’s “hobo jungle.” The jungle operated as a distinct community, in which goods were exchanged and shared directly, without benefit of currency. The organization of life was immediate and consensual, conducted in the absence of capital …

Italian anarchism emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, during that country’s long and bloody unification. Often facing economic hardship and political persecution, many of Italy’s anarchists migrated to North America. Wherever Italian anarchists settled they published journals, engaged in labour and political activism, and atte …

Mennonite Women in Canada traces the complex social history and multiple identities of Canadian Mennonite women over 200 years. Marlene Epp explores women’s roles, as prescribed and as lived, within the contexts of immigration and settlement, household and family, church and organizational life, work and education, and in response to social trend …

In the early part of the Dirty Thirties, the Canadian prairie city was a relatively safe haven. Having faced recession before the Great War and then again in the early 1920s, municipalities already had relief apparatuses in place to deal with poverty and unemployment. Until 1933, responsibilty for the care of the urban poor remained with local gove …

Through Feminist Eyes gathers in one volume the most incisive and insightful essays written to date by the distinguished Canadian historian Joan Sangster. To the original essays, Sangster has added reflective introductory discussions that situate her earlier work in the context of developing theory and debate. Sangster has also supplied an introduc …