“Despite Canada’s claim to be a gender equitable nation, militarism continues to function in ways that protect inequality.” -- from the Introduction

Little has been done to examine, critique, and challenge the ways ingrained societal ideas of militarism and gender influence lifelong learning patterns and practices of Canadians. Editor Nancy Ta …

This book is a biography of my dad’s political life. However, it is also a primer for would-be politicians. Its most salient message? Political victory worth having rarely comes easy. – Rachel Notley, from the Foreword

Grant Notley, leader of Alberta’s New Democratic Party from 1968 to 1984, stood out in Alberta politics. His goals, his person …

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” …

“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 …

From its inception in 1885, the Alaska School Service was charged with the assimilation of Alaskan Native children into mainstream American values and ways of life. Working in the missions and schools along the Yukon River were George E. Boulter and Alice Green, his future wife. Boulter, a Londoner originally drawn to the Klondike, had begun teach …

In Whose Man in Havana? the author offers an unconventional, often dark, but more often hilarious view of diplomacy in settings as varied as Haiti, London, the Dominican Republic, the Balkans, Palestine, Paraguay, Guyana, and Kyrgyzstan, including covert monitoring of Soviet military operations in Cuba on behalf of the CIA with the blessing of Pres …

For indigenous communities throughout the globe, mining has been a historical forerunner of colonialism, introducing new, and often disruptive, settlement patterns and economic arrangements. Although indigenous communities may benefit from and adapt to the wage labour and training opportunities provided by new mining operations, they are also often …

The cowboy, as perhaps no other figure, has captured the imagination of North Americans for over a century. Before Owen Wister's publication of The Virginian in 1902, the image of the cowboy was essentially that of the dime novel - a rough, violent, one-dimensional drifter, or the stage cowboy variety found in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show. Wi …

“When you educate a girl, you educate a nation.” —Malawian saying

The women of Malawi, like many other women in developing countries, struggle to find their way out of poverty and build a better life for themselves and their families. Weaving a Malawi Sunrise tells the story of Memory Chazeza’s quest to get an education and to build a school …

Music in Range explores the history of Canadian campus radio, highlighting the factors that have shaped its close relationship with local music and culture. The book traces how campus radio practitioners have expanded stations from campus borders to sur-rounding musical and cultural communities by acquiring FM licenses and establishing community-ba …

The first collection of critical essays devoted to the study of English-Canadian literary anthologies brings together the work of thirteen prominent critics to investigate anthology formation in Canada and answer these key questions: Why are there so many literary anthologies in Canada, and how can we trace their history? What role have anthologies …

The Great War: From Memory to History offers a new look at the multiple ways the Great War has been remembered and commemorated through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Drawing on contributions from history, cultural studies, film, and literary studies this collection offers fresh perspectives on the Great War and its legacy at the …

The Fence and the Bridge is about the development of the Canada-US border-security relationship as an outgrowth of the much lengthier Canada-US relationship. It suggests that this relationship has been both highly reflexive and hegemonic over time, and that such realities are embodied in the metaphorical images and texts that describe the Canada-US …

This state-of-the-art account gives readers the tools to understand why antisemitism is such a controversial subject. It acquaints readers with the ambiguities inherent in the historical relationship between Jews and Christians and shows these ambiguities in play in the unfolding relationship between Jews and Canadians of other religions and ethnic …

First published more than twenty years ago as My Dear Maggie, this new edition of William Wallace's letters home to England provides rare documentation of the earliest days of settlement in the West. The correspondence conveys a sense of unspoken courage--the courage that was needed to make a fresh start in a strange new land.

"William's letters con …

As playwright, actor, director, teacher, mentor, theatre administrator, and critic, Sharon Pollock has played an integral role in the shaping of Canada's national theatre tradition, and she continues to produce new works and to contribute to Canadian theatre as passionately as she has done over the past fifty years. Pollock is nationally and intern …

The current political climate of confrontation between Islamist regimes and Western governments has resulted in the proliferation of essentialist perceptions of Iran and Iranians in the West. Such perceptions do not reflect the complex evolution of Iranian identity that occurred in the years following the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11) and t …

In Rogues and Rebels, Brian Brennan chronicles the mavericks, iconoclasts, and adventurers who threw away the rulebook, thumbed their noses at convention, and let their detractors howl. They never retracted, never explained, never apologized, and they got things done. Discover the unforgettable characters who made the West what it is today. You kno …

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 …

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 …

Politics and Literature shows how important insights about genocide, poverty, state violence, world terrorism, the clash of civilizations, and other phenomena haunting the world at the turn of the millennium can be derived from contemporary novels. Keren demonstrates ways in which fictional literature can provide new perspectives on the complexitie …

“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, …

Children of the Broken Treaty exposes a system of apartheid in Canada that led to the largest youth-driven human rights movement in the country's history. The movement was inspired by Shannen Koostachin, a young Cree girl named by George Stroumboulopoulos as one of "five teenage girls in history who kicked ass." All Shannen wanted was a decent educ …

In 1950, the biggest firestorm documented in North America—one fire alone burned 3,500,000 acres of boreal forest in northern Alberta and British Columbia—created the world’s largest smoke layer in the atmosphere. The smoke travelled half way around the northern hemisphere and made the moon and sun appear blue. The Chinchaga Firestorm is an h …

Gay never recorded an album, never won a Juno. His music existed in the moment, appreciated by the few who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. For the rest of us, those late-night jam sessions in a shack in an alley on the bad side of Edmonton never happened. We never got to hear him play the Cole Porter songs he loved wit …

Working Memory: Women and Work in World War II speaks to the work women did during the war: the labour of survival, resistance, and collaboration, and the labour of recording, representing, and memorializing these wartime experiences. The contributors follow their subjects’ tracks and deepen our understanding of the experiences from the imprints …

As the South African War reached its grueling end in 1902, colonial interests at the highest levels of the British Empire hand-picked teachers from across the Commonwealth to teach the thousands of Boer children living in concentration camps. Highly educated, hard working, and often opinionated, E. Maud Graham joined the Canadian contingent of fort …

Originally published in 1935, Frederick Niven’s The Flying Years tells the history of Western Canada from the 1850s to the 1920s as witnessed by Angus Munro, a young Scot forced to emigrate to Canada when his family is evicted from their farm. Working in the isolated setting of Rocky Mountain House, Angus secretly marries a Cree woman, who dies i …

The text discusses the legacy of the Cold War in Canada by looking at Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s “Diefenbunkers”—eleven nuclear fallout shelters constructed in secret in the late 1950s to protect the Canadian national and provincial governments from a nuclear strike. While many of these sites have fallen into disrepair or been sold off, o …

There are many points on which the western Canadian and northern Australian cattle frontiers evoke comparisons. Most obviously, they came to life at about the same time: the late 1870s-early 1880s. In both cases corporations were heavy investors and utilized an open range system in which tens of thousands of cattle roamed over thousands of square a …

Sixteenth-century Reformation Europe was a tumultuous time during which many defining ideas of the modern era were formulated. The technological advancement augured by the Gutenberg press allowed the unprecedented circulation of ideas among a growing legion of literate Europeans.

The writings of radical reformer Martin Luther were perhaps most influ …

This book examines how twentieth-century Spanish American literature has registered photography’s powers and limitations, and the creative ways in which writers of this region of the Americas have elaborated in fictional form the conventions and assumptions of this medium. While the book is essentially a study of literary criticism, it also aims …

Why don’t more Métis people go to traditional ceremonies? How does going to ceremonies impact Métis identity?

In Rekindling the Sacred Fire, Chantal Fiola investigates the relationship between Red River Métis ancestry, Anishinaabe spirituality, and identity, bringing into focus the ongoing historical impacts of colonization upon Métis relation …

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 …

Metis and the Medicine Line tells the remarkable story of the Plains Metis and the birth of the Canada/U.S. Border, brought vividly to life by history writing at its best. Exploring the borderland world of the prairies, Michel Hogue reveals how notions of race were created and manipulated to unlock access to Indigenous lands, while challenging Cana …

Life Among the Qallunaat is the story of Mini Aodla Freeman’s experiences growing up in the Inuit communities of James Bay and her journey in the 1950s from her home to the strange land and stranger customs of the Qallunaat, those living south of the Arctic. Her extraordinary story, sometimes humourous and sometimes heartbreaking, illustrates an …

Idle No More bewildered many Canadians. Launched by four women in Saskatchewan in reaction to a federal omnibus budget bill, the protest became the most powerful demonstration of Aboriginal identity in Canadian history. Thousands of Aboriginal people and their supporters took to the streets, shopping malls, and other venues, drumming, dancing, and …

Western Canada’s natural environment faces intensifying threats from industrialization in agriculture and resource development, social and cultural complicity in these destructive practices, and most recently the negative effects of global climate change. The complex nature of the problems being addressed calls for productive interdisciplinary so …

Canada’s engagement with post-independence Africa presents a puzzle. Although Canada is recognized for its activism where Africa is concerned, critics have long noted the contradictions that underlie Canadian involvement. Focusing on the period following 2000, and by juxtaposing Jean Chrétien’s G8 activism with the Harper government’s retrea …

This fifth volume of the History of the Prairie West Series contains a broad range of articles spanning the 1870s to the present and examines the mostly unexplored place of women in the history of the Canada's Prairie Provinces. From "Spinsters Need Not Apply" to "Negotiating Sex: Gender in the Ukrainian Bloc Settlement," women’s roles in politic …

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 …

In 1990, Gerald Conaty was hired as senior curator of ethnology at the Glenbow Museum, with the particular mandate of improving the museum’s relationship with Aboriginal communities. That same year, the Glenbow had taken its first tentative steps toward repatriation by returning sacred objects to First Nations’ peoples. These efforts drew harsh …

The central focus of Reclaiming Canadian Bodies is the relationship between visual media, the construction of Canadian national identity, and notions of embodiment. It asks how particular representations of bodies are constructed and performed within the context of visual and discursive mediated content. The book emphasizes the ways individuals des …

"Heartbreaking and important… brings into dramatic focus why we need reconciliation." - James Daschuk, author of Clearing the Plains This memoir offers a courageous and intimate chronicle of life in a residential school. Now a retired fisherman and trapper, the author was one of an estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Metis children who we …

Dans la conférence prononcée comme récipiendaire de la médaille Symons en 2013, le très honorable Paul Martin, vingt-et-unième premier ministre du Canada, s’appuie sur tout le savoir et le vécu de sa remarquable carrière publique, afin d’expliquer le défi d’obtenir justice pour les peuples autochtones du Canada. Se penchant sur les r …

A young Canadian marches over the Pyrenees and enters into history by joining the International Brigades—men and women from around the world who volunteered to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. This new edition of Ted Allan’s novel, This Time a Better Earth, reintroduces readers to the electrifying milieu of the Spanish Civil War …

From the dawn of cinema, images of Indigenous peoples have been dominated by Hollywood stereotypes and often negative depictions from elsewhere around the world. With the advent of digital technologies, however, many Indigenous peoples are working to redress the imbalance in numbers and counter the negativity.

The contributors to Reverse Shots offe …

In 1926, two British women came from Cornwall to Edmonton and travelled through northern Alberta, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon by rail, sternwheeler, and canoe. For the women, it was a liberating experience, yet Vyvyan's narrative, supported by MacLaren and LaFramboise's insightful editorial work, reveals the imperialist attitudes under …

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 …

In May of 1868, Elizabeth Bingham Young and her new husband, Egerton Ryerson Young, began a long journey from Hamilton, Ontario, to the Methodist mission of Rossville. For the next eight years, Elizabeth supported her husband’s work at two mission houses, Norway House and then Berens River. Unprepared for the difficult conditions and the “eight …