Historians have long engaged in passionate debate about collective memory and the building of national identities. Alan Gordon focuses on one national hero - Jacques Cartier - to explore how notions about the past have been created and passed on from generation to generation in English- and French-speaking Canada and used to present particular ideas about the world.

The Hero and the Historians traces the evolution of Cartier's image - from his exploration of the St. Lawrence in 1534 to the mid-twentieth century, when hero worship fell from favour among professional historians...