This is a story about a remarkable Sikh family and the communities they lived in and supported in both Canada and India. Kapoor Singh Siddoo arrived in British Columbia in 1912 and overcame racial prejudice and legal discrimination to transform himself from laborer to lumber baron. He and his wife, Besant Kaur, fostered in their daughters a vision of service and activism that they fulfilled by establishing a hospital in Punjab and introducing an Indian spiritual tradition to their new home in Canada. Hugh Johnston tells their story with warmth and perceptiveness, while telling a larger...

During the summers of 1792-4 George Vancouver and the crew of the British naval ships Discovery and Chatham mapped the northwest coast of North America from Baja California to Alaska. Vancouver's voyage was the last, and the longest, of the great Pacific voyages of the late eighteenth century. Taking the art and technique of distant voyaging to a new level, Vancouver eliminated the possibility of a northwest passage, and his remarkably precise surveys completed the outline of the Pacific.

But to map an area is to appropriate it - to begin to bring it under control - and Vancouver's...

What has long been the most thoroughly researched account of the Komagata Maru incident is now released in a new and expanded edition. At the centre of the event are the ship's nearly 400 Punjabi passengers, who sought entry into Canada at Vancouver in the summer of 1914, only to be chased away by a Canadian warship. This story became a symbol of prejudicial immigration policies that Canadians today reject and served to fuel the emerging anti-British movement in India. It deserves the careful re-examination it gets in this thoroughly updated edition that provides a contemporary perspective...