Canadians have relatively few binding national myths, but one of the most pervasive and enduring is the conviction that the country is doomed. In 1965 George Grant passionately defended Canadian identity by asking fundamental questions about the meaning and future of Canada's political existence. In Lament for a Nation he argued that Canada - immense and underpopulated, defined in part by the border, history, and culture it shares with the United States, and torn by conflicting loyalties to Britain, Quebec, and America - had ceased to exist as a sovereign state. Lament for a Nation became the...

In his famous 1839 call to reform, John George Lambton, Earl of Durham, recommended that Upper and Lower Canada be accorded responsible government by uniting the two provinces under a single legislative assembly--a union which would also bring about the assimilation of the French-Canadians. The Report has been criticized ever since--from British imperialists who found it dangerously liberal to French Canadians who despised Durham for his presumed racism. This new edition of Gerald Craig's abridgement retains his 1963 introduction and adds essays that debate Durham's political assumptions and...

The writings of prominent anthropologists are collected in this volume, to provide a multi-faceted look at the native peoples of the North Pacific Coast, including the Tlingit, the Haida, the Bella Coola and the Salish.

There was a time in history when the sea was as important as the land for defining a country's social and cultural identity. Outrageous Seas is about that time, and about the harrowing, almost mythic, experience of shipwreck, near-shipwreck, and survival in waters off Newfoundland. Travellers from many walks of life - explorers and missionaries, traders, fishers and mariners, Native Peoples, aristocrats and immigrants - have left rare and fascinating first-hand accounts of such disasters. Their narratives span four centuries and touch many historical sub-themes such as the appeal of religion...

A fifty-three-year-old Anglican priest and poet when the First World War broke out, Frederick George Scott was an improbable volunteer, but also an invaluable war memoirist about life at the front. Enlisting at the very beginning of the conflict and serving on the Western Front until the Armistice, Scott became the most decorated Canadian chaplain. A High Anglican and staunch British imperialist described by one of his fellow officers as "an old snob of the old school," Scott also defied stereotypes, often rejecting the privileges he was entitled to as an officer and insisting on being at the...

Presents a survey of the vast movement of industrial capital across the Canadian-American frontier, and for its multi-faceted analysis of the determinants and results of this movement.

This edition focuses on the Jesuit mission to the Hurons which culminated in the martyrdom of Fathers Brebeuf and Lalemant, and gives a fascinating glimpse of the Great Lakes Indian culture at the time the white man first came.

These selections date from early contact of the native peoples of Atlantic Canada with, among others, Norse sailors, and a French priest in 1612. Some excerpts look at the now-extinct Beothuk people of Newfoundland, but most pertain to the Micmac peoples.

First published in 1970, Silent Surrender helped educate a generation of students about Canadian political economy. Kari Levitt details the historical background of foreign investments in Canada, their acceleration since World War II, and the nature of intrusions by multinational corporations into a sovereign state. Silent Surrender was prophetic in predicting that the ultimate consequence of relinquishing control of the Canadian economy to United States business interests would be political disintegration through the balkanization of the country and its eventual piecemeal absorption into the...