Twelve-year-old Jolene is determined to find independence from her brother, Michael, during a family trip to research the Halifax explosion of 1917 for her father's Museum of Disasters. When her grandfather finds a time crease into the past, Jolene discovers a new friend and the importance of family and loyalty in a world torn apart by World War I. …

The search for a Métis identity and what constitutes that identity is a key issue facing many Aboriginals of mixed ancestry today. The People Who Own Themselves reconstructs 250 years of Desjarlais family history across a substantial area of North America, from colonial Louisiana, the St. Louis, Missouri, region, and the American Southwest to Red …

For much of its 130-year history, the Bar U Ranch can claim to have been one of the most famous ranches in Canada. Its reputation is firmly based on the historical role that the ranch has played, its size and longevity, and its association with some of the remarkable people who have helped develop the cattle business and build the Canadian West. Th …

Canadians have an ambivalent feeling towards the North. Although climate and geography make our northern condition apparent, Canadians often forget about the north and its problems. Nevertheless, for the generation of historians that included Lower, Creighton, and Morton, the northern rivers, lakes, forests, and plains were often seen as primary ch …

To read A.F. Moritz is to find out what it means to be alive at this juncture of history. These poems are mansions, both derelict and opulent. Wander in with the mind open and hear what the ages, humanity, and the myth of progress have wrought.

Night Street Repairs contains necessary meditations on time, modernity, and our current situation as a soc …

During a time of two world wars and a sluggish world economy, many Northern Europeans left their homelands to build the American and Canadian West with dreams of abundance and new life. Spanning a period from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, To Be a Cowboy recounts the dreams and realities of a father and a son.

Otto Christensen came to North Ameri …

With nine out of ten Canadians claiming a religious affiliation of some kind - Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Aboriginal, or one of dozens of other religions - faith has huge impact on our personal and social lives. In this book, Robert Choquette offers a comprehensive history of religion in Canada and examines the ongoing …

An award-winning children's playwright tells all for kids. Using several of her plays, which have toured in Canada and the United States, as the centrepiece, Kathleen McDonnell talks about the history of theater and drama, with a who's who of players, inc

At the start of the Second World War, Poland was invaded by both the German and the Soviet armies. The country was unable to withstand the assaults and thousands of Polish soldiers and civilians were shipped to labour camps and prisons, where starvation, disease, and mistreatment were their daily expectations. With the signing of an amnesty between …

In 1979, the streets of Iran’s capital city, Tehran, turned ugly. Six Americans caught in the uprising found protection at the Canadian embassy. Through the feverish efforts of the embassy staff, the fugitives were disguised as Canadians—complete with fictitious passports—and able to escape the country.

History is full of such daring escapes, …

Magic Off Main chronicles the life and art of Esther Warkov, a visual artist of Jewish heritage who lives in Winnipeg and paints in a surrealistic and postmodern style. It considers Warkov's art through an understanding of her life and the palpable effect her life as a Jewish woman growing up on the Canadian prairies has had on her art.

By tracing t …

This compelling biography of Doug Hepburn, the weightlifter who won gold for Canada in Stockholm in 1953 and at the British Empire Games in Vancouver in 1954, delivers fascinating, first-hand information about an unusual Vancouver athlete and the sporting world of the 1950s and 1960s. In this plain-spoken and moving biography of a strength legend, …

The field of Adapted Physical Activity is a rapidly expanding area in post-secondary education. As the profession grows, so does the demand for new texts that challenge students to think critically. "Adapted Physical Activity" edited by Steadward, Wheeler and Watkinson is a textbook that combines up-to-date information with a critical thinking appr …

Situating the wolf in the history of Canadian national parks, Karen Jones considers changing ideas of nature and wilderness and competing visions of the North American West. Wolf Mountains is essentially a work of environmental history, treating the land as an actor in the historical process.

This controversial study examines the tumultuous relation …

Using long-ignored constitutions of various Jewish organizations, this unique book uncovers the political history of Canadian Jewry since its beginning during the 1700s. Building on the premise that Jews, since time immemorial, have written down their values and ideologies, this study effectively demonstrates how these writings record the principle …

Once in a long while a lyric poet comes along whose technique, emotional pitch, and intellect combine in sublime balance and take poetry to a new level. Witness Adam Sol.

Sol's work is exhilarating in its range. Here he is gentle and mournful, attuned to his surroundings, and suddenly over here he mounts a sneak attack and hits us with erotic joy, e …

Neil Forkey makes a significant contribution to the growing body of work on Canadian environmental history. Themes of ethnicity and environment in the Trent Valley are brought into wider perspective with comparisons to other areas of contemporary settlement throughout the British Empire and North America.

Forkey begins by placing his study within t …

Canada's foremost literary critic looks at the politics of irony in modern writing and explains how it relates to imperial history, how it impacts upon personal memories, how it speaks from the margin, and how it indirectly teaches us to resist presumptuous authority. Funny, informed and emotionally engaging, Grandchild of Empire, an extension of t …

In this fascinating historical novel, twelve-year-old Jolene travels back in time to the year 1903 and finds herself in the coal mining town of Frank on the eve of Canada's deadliest rockslide. Disguised as a boy, Jolene must face the wrath of an impatient teacher, challenge her ability as a gymnast, and disentangle herself from an embarrassing lov …

Originally written in the early 1970s, As I Remember Them is based on Jeanne-Elise Olsen's extraordinary recall of her childhood and youth spent in an isolated part of the Laurentians in the Lièvre River Valley in the early twentieth century.

Jeanne was the daughter of a Roman Catholic priest who was excommunicated from the Church because he marrie …

On August 22, 1922, near Macroom, County Cork, a single bullet from an unknown gunman killed Michael Collins, the Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army. The day Collins was buried, businesses across Dublin shut down as thousands lined the streets to pay their respects. And on that day, Michael Lyons, a cooper from the Guinness factory tak …

The craft of craft, the art of craft - here in Canada we're just starting to really talk about these things. In March 1999, Jean Johnson, who runs Toronto's Craft Studio at Harbourfront Centre, organized a wildly successful symposium on the state of craft in Canada. Curators, writers, critics, academics and craftspeople spoke about all aspects of …

Rarely a week goes by when juvenile delinquency or the Young Offenders Act are not discussed in the dominant media. Are we witnessing a moral panic over youth crime or a spate of “child-blaming” driven by the politics of law and order? Sangster traces the history of young women and crime and in so doing punctures dozens of myths surrounding the …

In March 2000, a suitcase arrived at a children's Holocaust education center in Tokyo, Japan from the Auschwitz museum in Germany. Fumiko Ishioka, the center's curator, was captivated by the writing on the outside that identified its owner: "Hana Brady, May 16, 1931, Waisenkind (the German word for orphan)." Children visiting the center asked: who …

A trail book unlike any other, Chilkoot: An Adventure in Ecotourism is a richly woven insight into the Chilkoot Trail and the region straddling the American-Canadian border in the Alaska and British Columbia. The authors present the trail in three interrelated parts. They begin by describing the trail as a classic example of modern ecotourism with …

Despite the long human history of the Canadian central arctic, there is still little historical writing on the Inuit peoples of this vast region. Although archaeologists and anthropologists have studied ancient and contemporary Inuit societies, the Inuit world in the crucial period from the 16th to the 20th centuries remains largely undescribed and …

With this book, Henry Klassen has made accessible the story of one of early Montreal's most remarkable citizens. Rising from humble origins, Luther H. Holton became an entrepreneur extraordinaire, with interests in real estate, railway building, steamboats, and banking. From the success of his various business ventures, Holton moved easily into the …

New ways of thinking about literature and history have radically changed how we think about or even "define" a region like the Prairie West. In fact, the very concept of "defining" has come into question by new theoretical approaches and it may now seem a hopeless endeavour. But the process of defining can be just as important as the actual product …

Considering accounts written by Northwest Coast marine tourists between 1861 and 1990, Nancy Pagh examines the ways that gender influences the roles women play at sea, the spaces they occupy on boats, and the language they use to describe their experiences, their natural surroundings, and their contact with Native peoples.

Unique features of this b …

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 …

One of the most turbulent periods in the history of prairie agriculture is chronicled in a new book about the life and times of Alexander "Mac" Runciman, the Saskatchewan farmer who led the United Grain Growers as president from 1961 to 1981. Mac Runciman earned the respect and admiration on both sides of the great agriculture debates of the 1960s …

"All girls [should read] The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis." — Malala Yousafzai, New York Times

The first book in Deborah Ellis’s riveting Breadwinner series is an award-winning novel about loyalty, survival, families and friendship under extraordinary circumstances during the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan.

Eleven-year-old Parvana lives with her …

Cowboys, Ranchers and the Cattle Business is an easily accessible and comprehensive summary of current studies on the Canadian ranching frontier. This collection of essays provides an excellent perspective on the latest developments in the historiography of the range, drawing from topics such as Wild West shows, artistic depictions of the cowboy, a …

Is There a Canadian Philosophy? addresses the themes of community, culture, national identity, and universal human rights, taking the Canadian example as its focus. The authors argue that nations compelled to cope with increasing demands for group recognition may do so in a broadly liberal spirit and without succumbing to the dangers associated wit …

Manitoba has been at the crossroads of many of the important debates and events in Canadian history. From the early fur trade to the Riel Rebellion to the Winnipeg General Strike, Manitobans have frequently played crucial roles in Canadian and sometimes world history. Until now, there has been no comprehensive, contemporary source for information o …

Greenwor(l)ds rewrites the literary history of Canada from a feminist ecological perspective through a series of essays that examine the lives and work of nine women poets. Using insights from fields of knowledge as disparate as history and biology, physics and philosophy, psychoanalysis and communications studies, these essays reflect the transdis …

For many Canadians, the state of our health care and medical system is at the top of the public agenda. By following the growth and development of modern medicine in one Canadian province, Manitoba Medicine provides an insight into where our present medical system came from and how it developed.

Beginning with a description of some early Aboriginal …

Images of Canadianness offers backgrounds and explanations for a series of relevant--if relatively new--features of Canada, from political, cultural, and economic angles. Each of its four sections contains articles written by Canadian and European experts that offer original perspectives on a variety of issues: voting patterns in English-speaking C …

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 …

In these Red Cross memoirs, thirty women tell their stories of volunteer work with the Canadian Red Cross Corps in overseas postings during World War Two and the Korean War. These dramatic narratives take us across oceans infested with enemy submarines to witness Canadian women on duty in the U.K., in Europe and in Asia. Laced with humour and fille …

Proceedings of the 22nd International Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences in Ottawa from August 18 to 23, 1996. -- Actes du 22e congrès international des sciences généalogique et héraldique à Ottawa du 18 au 23 août 1996.

Let's say you want to know which famous Canadian poet lived in the Waverley Hotel for seven years, constantly changing rooms in fear of RCMP bugs. Or you live at 44 Walmer and want to know what on earth they were thinking with those balconies. Or you want to know what's behind (or underneath!) that giant O hanging over Harbord at Spadina. These thi …

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 …

Through a unique combination of biography, memoir, and autobiography, Cherie Smith traces four generations of her immigrant family and, in doing so, charts the very course of Russian-Jewish immigration to the Canadian prairies over the last one hundred years.

The story begins in the shtetles of Poland and Latvia in the 1890s and follows an often wil …

Winnipeg writer Katherine Martens interviewed 26 women from the Mennonite community in southern Manitoba, ranging in age from 22 to 88 years old. They had many different backgrounds, but they all had one important characteristic: all were mothers.In the course of these interviews, Martens was searching for answers to questions that affected her bot …

Winner of the 1997 Howard O’Hagan Short Fiction Award!

“In the Diamond, at the end of a long green vinyl aisle between two booths of chrome, Naugahyde, and Formica, are two large swinging wooden doors, each with a round hatch of face-sized window. Those kitchen doors can be kicked with such a slap they’re heard all the way up to the soda fount …

The prairies are a focal point for momentous events in Canadian history, a place where two visions of Canada have often clashed: Louis Riel, the Manitoba School Question, French language rights, the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, and the dramatic collapse of the Meech Lake Accord when MLA Elijah Harper voted “No.”Gerald Friesen believes that it …

In Lobsticks and Stone Cairns, over one hundred Arctic stories are told about adventurers, military officers, authors, guides, cultural heroes, police, traders, and even the occasional charlatan. While some of the biographies in the book are of people still active in the North, others tell stories from as far back as the sixteenth century. The subj …

The firm of McCarter & Nairne dominated public architecture in Vancouver from the inception of the partnership between John Y. McCarter (1886-1981) and George C. Nairne (1884-1953) until the completion of the General Post Office in 1958. The respected background and experience of McCarter and Nairne reflected the localization of sophisticated trans …