Kategoria BISAC: History >> Canada - Post-Confederation (1867-)

The Liberal Party has governed Canada for much of the country's history. Yet over the past two decades, the 'natural governing party' has seen a decrease in traditional support, finding itself in opposition for nearly half of that time. In Divided Loyalties, Brooke Jeffrey draws on her own experience as a party insider and on interviews with more than sixty senior Liberals to follow the trajectory of the party from 1984 to the leadership of Stephane Dion in 2008.

Riven by internal strife, leadership disputes, and financial woes, the Liberal Party today faces unprecedented...

In Remembrance of Patients Past, historian Geoffrey Reaume remembers previously forgotten psychiatric patients by examining in rich detail their daily life at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane (now called the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health - CAMH) from 1870-1940. Psychiatric patients endured abuse and could lead monotonous lives inside the asylum's walls, yet these same women and men worked hard at unpaid institutional jobs for years and decades on end, created their own entertainment, even in some cases made their own clothes, while forming meaningful relationships with...

First published in 1965, The Indian History of British Columbia: The Impact of the White Man remains an important book thanks to Wilson Duff's rigorous scholarship. It is an excellent overview of the history of the interaction between the First Nations of British Columbia and the colonial cultures that came to western North America. In its 30 years in print, this book has sold more than 15,000 copies and continues to reside on the reading lists of many university and college anthropology courses.

Wilson Duff wrote this book as the first in a series. The second was to be the...

When Vincent Massey wrote On Being Canadian in 1948, he acknowledged the importance of the arts to education and citizenship. He did not consider what the arts can tell us about being Canadian or about being ourselves. In On the Art of Being Canadian, Sherrill Grace traces how painters, writers, and filmmakers have shaped Canadian identity in three fields of representation that are staples in Canadian culture ? the North, iconic national figures, and war. By telling stories in their chosen medium and genre about life here or about events and figures from the past, she shows that...

Captain James Cook first made contact with the area now known as British Columbia in 1778. The colonists who followed soon realized they needed a written history, both to justify their dispossession of Aboriginal peoples and to formulate an identity for a new settler society. Writing British Columbia History traces how Euro-Canadian historians took up this task, and struggled with the newness of colonial society and overlapping ties to the British Empire, the United States, and Canada. This exploration of the role of history writing in colonialism and nation building will appeal to anyone...

In 1913, Toronto launched an experiment in feminist ideals: a woman's police court. The court offered a separate venue to hear cases that involved women and became a forum where criminalized women and feminists met and struggled with the meaning of justice.

The court was run by and for women, but was it a great achievement? Amanda Glasbeek's multifaceted portrait of the cases, defendants, and officials that graced its halls reveals a fundamental contradiction at the experiment's core: the Toronto Women's Police Court was both a site for feminist adaptations of justice and a court...

Following its victory in the 1993 election, the first act of Jean Chretien's Liberal Party was the cancellation of an order to replace the Sea King maritime helicopter. The Liberals claimed the Tory plan was too expensive, but the cancellation itself actually cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. The incident and subsequent attempts to replace the Sea King have drawn public attention to inefficiency and waste in Canada's defence spending and to the under-equipped state of its military.

Seeking an explanation for this situation, Aaron Plamondon explores the history of the...

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...

Minnie Smith's (ca. 1874-1933) feminist domestic novel, Is It Just?, is a harsh critique of the injustices perpetuated by male-dominated society and law. Published in 1911, it tells the tragic story of Mary Pierce, who, through the actions of her selfish and lazy husband, loses her land, her social standing, and ultimately her life.

In Is It Just?, the conventions of the domestic novel - episodic presentation, stock characters, contrived plots, and romantic conclusions - illustrate the superiority of female values and argue for expanded social, political, and legal...

Finance departments have often been portrayed as guardians of the public purse. In The Guardian, a multidisciplinary group of contributors examines the Ministry of Finance of Ontario since the Second World War. During the last sixty years the Ministry was transformed from a relatively small 'Treasury' to a sophisticated policy machine. What started as a modest bookkeeping operation evolved into a key bureaucratic and policy agency as the government of Ontario assumed a leadership position in developing the province.

These essays reveal Ontario's 'finance' as a dynamic policy...

Over the past 15 years, the citizenship debate in political and social theory has undergone an extraordinary renaissance. To date, much of the writing on citizenship, within and beyond Canada, has been oriented toward the development of theory, or has concentrated on contemporary issues and examples. This collection of essays adopts a different approach by contextualizing and historicizing the citizenship debate, through studies of various aspects of the rise of social citizenship in Canada. Focusing on the formative years from the late 19th through mid-20th century, contributors examine...

With tales of a gruesome murder, a typhoid epidemic, corrupt politicians, and a Japanese invasion, The Writing on the Wall was intended to shock its readers when it was published in 1921. Thinly disguised as a novel, it is a propaganda tract exhorting white British Columbians to greater vigilance to prevent greedy politicians from selling out to the Chinese and Japanese. It was also designed to convince eastern Canada of British Columbia's need for protections against an onslaught of the 'yellow peril.'

This novel is not exceptional in its extreme racism; it reiterates...

During the interwar period, Quebec was a strongly patriarchal society, where men in the Church, politics, and medicine, maintained a traditional norm of social and sexual standards that women were expected to abide by. Some women in the media and religious communities were complicit with this vision, upholding the "ideal" as the norm and tending to those "deviants" who failed to meet society's expectations. By examining the underside of a staid and repressive society, Andr?e L?vesque reveals an alternate and more accurate history of women and sexual politics in early twentieth-century...

Fighting from Home paints a comprehensive and, at times, intimate portrait of Verdun and Verdunites at war. Serge Durflinger offers an innovative interpretive approach towards understanding wartime Canadian and Quebec social and cultural dynamics.

In Verdun, English and French speakers lived side by side. Durflinger shows that, through their home-front activities as much as through enlistment, French-speaking Verdunites were partners beside their English-speaking neighbours in the prosecution of Canada's war. Shared experiences and class similarities facilitated the...

One hundred years ago, Canadians went to the polls to decide the fate of their country in an election that raised issues vital to Canada s national independence and its place in the world. Canadians faced a clear choice between free trade with the United States and fidelity to the British Empire, and the decisions they made in September 1911 helped shape Canada s political and economic history for the rest of the century. Canada 1911 revisits and re-examines this momentous turn in Canadian history, when Canadians truly found themselves at a parting of the ways. It was Canada s first...