Hobnobbing with a Countess and Other Okanagan Adventures
In 1891, Alice Barrett moved from Port Dover, Ontario, to the Okanagan Valley to keep house for her brother and uncle. She soon married Harold Parke, a former NWMP officer, and spent the next decade recording her experiences in a series of notebooks sent to her Ontario family. Few women’s diaries have survived from that time, and Barrett Parke re …
Captain McNeil and His Wife the Nishga Chief
The historical recount of the life and times of Captain McNeill, a long-standing captain in the pioneering days of the fur trade. McNeill was the captain of the Honourable Hudson's Bay steam ship SS Beaver.The historical recount of the life and times of Captain McNeill, a long-standing captain in the pioneering days of the fur trade. McNeill was th …
Telling Tales
Women played a vital role in the shaping of the West in Canada between the 1880s and 1940s. Yet surprisingly little is known about their contributions or the differences sex and gender made to the opportunities and obstacles women encountered. Telling Tales contributes to the rewriting of western Canada’s past by integrating women into the shifti …
The Canadian Department of Justice and the Completion of Confederation 1867-78
The federal Department of Justice was established by John A. Macdonald as part of the Conservative party's program for reform of the parliamentary system following Confederation. Among other things, it was charged with establishing national institutions such as the Supreme Court and the North West Mounted Police and with centralizing the penitentia …
The Chinese in Vancouver, 1945-80
In The Chinese in Vancouver, Wing Chung Ng captures the fascinating story of the city's Chinese in their search for identity. He juxtaposes the cultural positions of different generations of Chinese immigrants and their Canadian-born descendants and unveils the ongoing struggle over the definition of being Chinese. It is an engrossing story about c …
Islands of Truth
In Islands of Truth, Daniel Clayton examines a series of encounters with the Native peoples and territory of Vancouver Island in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although he focuses on a particular region and period, Clayton also meditates on how representations of land and people, and studies of the past, serve and shape specifi …
The Frontier World of Edgar Dewdney
The Frontier World of Edgar Dewdney is a biography of a man who played a key role in the events which marked the political, social, and economic transformation of western Canada in the latter half of the nineteenth century. An immigrant adventurer seeking his fortune in the colonies, Dewdney was embroiled in the gold rushes of the 1860s, the B.C. d …
No Place to Run
Historians of the First World War have often dismissed the important role of poison gas in the battles of the Western Front. Tim Cook shows that the serious threat of gas did not disappear with the introduction of gas masks. By 1918, gas shells were used by all armies to deluge the battlefield, and those not instructed with a sound anti-gas doctrin …
The Burden of History
This book is an ethnography of the cultural politics of Native/non-Native relations in a small interior BC city – Williams Lake – at the height of land claims conflicts and tensions. Furniss analyses contemporary colonial relations in settler societies, arguing that “ordinary” rural Euro-Canadians exercise power in maintaining the subordina …
Once Upon an Oldman
Once Upon an Oldman is an account of the controversy that surrounded the Alberta government's construction of a dam on the Oldman River to provide water for irrigation in the southern part of the province. Jack Glenn argues that, despite claims to the contrary, the governments of Canada and Alberta are not dedicated to protecting the environment an …
The Limits of Labour
In a few short decades before the First World War, Calgary was transformed from a frontier outpost into a complex industrial metropolis. With industrialization there emerged a diverse and equally complex working class. David Bright explores the various levels of class formation and class identity in the city to argue that Calgary’s reputation as …
Fort Langley Journals, 1827-30
These journals comprise one of the principal sources of information on early European settlement in BC and provide a remarkable and unique record of the establishment of Fort Langley. Although the journals record such day-to-day details as weather, trade, and visitors, they also contain a wealth of information about social and administrative life a …
Butter Down the Well
In this immensely popular Canadian classic, Robert Collins describes his boyhood growing up in Saskatchewan during the bleak years of the Depression. Featuring the fine realist paintings of well-known painter Len Gibbs, this special illustrated edition evokes the mood of that era both through Collins's humorous and touching stories and through Gibb …
The Terror of the Coast
On April 20, 1863, the British naval gunboat Forward attacked a Native village on Kuper Island. The naval officers believed that the village harboured individuals involved in two recent assaults against European transients in the Gulf Islands. The gunboat fired on the village and was repulsed with casualties after a fierce battle with a handful of …
Ellie's New Home
Ellie and her little brother Max find themselves moving from their grandmother's comfortable home in England to Upper Canada. Their mother is dead, Father wants to start over again, and in 1835 there are many opportunities for settlers in British North America. Despite the strangeness of this vast new world, Ellie is sure things will turn out all r …
The Lifeline of the Oregon Country
In The Lifeline of the Oregon Country, James Gibson compellingly immerses the reader in one of the most intractable problems faced by the Hudson's Bay Company: how to realize wealth from such a remote and formidable land. The personalities, places, obstacles, and operations involved in the brigade system are all described in fascinating detail, str …
Creating Historical Memory
Canadian women have worked, individually and collectively, at home and abroad, as creators of historical memory. This engaging collection of essays seeks to create an awareness of the contributions made by women to history and the historical profession from 1870 to 1970 in English Canada. Creating Historical Memory explores the wide range of career …
Gamblers and Dreamers
The popular image of the Klondike is of a rush of white, male adventurers who overcame great physical and geographical obstacles in their quest for gold. Young, white, single American men carried forward the ideals and structures of the western frontier. It was a man's world made respectable only after the turn of the century with the arrival of wh …
Muddling Through
"
When two thousand British bank clerks, butchers, housewives, saleswomen, remittance men and ex-Boer War soldiers followed the charismatic but inept Anglican minister, Isaac Barr, to the Canadian prairies in 1903 their rallying cry was ""Canada for the British.""
Despite the Canadian governmentÌs expectations and BarrÌs assurances, however, very f …
This Ragged Place
In this groundbreaking portrait of the uneasy state of the province, Terry Glavin's lyrical narratives reveal the fibre of a British Columbia rarely glimpsed. With journalistic acumen, he surveys a landscape of inexorable suburban sprawl, dismantled railway lines, scapegoating of Native fisheries, and strange goings?on at Gustafsen Lake. A new bree …
Walking in Indian Moccasins
Walking in Indian Moccasins is the first work to offer a different view of the Tommy Douglas provincial government in Sakatchewan: their policies, their applications, and their shortcomings. Much more than that, however, it is a careful account of the development of Indian and Metis people in Saskatchewan in the post-war period. The goal of the CCF …
Trading Beyond the Mountains
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the North West and Hudson’s Bay companies extended their operations beyond the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. There they encountered a mild and forgiving climate and abundant natural resources and, with the aid of Native traders, branched out into farming, fishing, logging, and min …
Paul Kane's Great Nor-West
In this beautifully designed and richly illustrated book, Diane Eaton and Sheila Urbanek re-create Paul Kane’s heroic journey across Canada and bring to life the people, places, and events he experienced.
Determined to document the lives and customs of the Indians of the Northwest, Paul Kane set out in 1845 to cross the continent “with no compa …
The Emergence of Social Security in Canada
This book analyzes the major influences shaping the Canadian welfare state. A central trend in Canadian social security over most of the twentieth century has been a shift from a “residual” to an “institutional” concept. The residual approach, which dominated until the Second World War, posited that the causes of poverty and joblessness wer …
The Resettlement of British Columbia
In this beautifully crafted collection of essays, Cole Harris reflects on the strategies of colonialism in British Columbia during the first 150 years after the arrival of European settlers. The pervasive displacement of indigenous people by the newcomers, the mechanisms by which it was accomplished, and the resulting effects on the landscape, soci …
Making Vancouver
Making Vancouver explores social relationships in Vancouver from 1863 to 1913. It considers how urbanization structured social boundaries among Burrard Inlet's increasingly large population and is premised on the belief that, in studying social boundaries, historians must abandon single category forms of analysis and build into their research strat …
Red Laredo Boots
As a girl growing up in British Columbia, and now as a mother with a family of her own, Theresa Kishkan has travelled and camped the length and breadth of the province. In these lyrical essays describing her journeys, Kishkan brings to life a landscape impregnated with history and memory, from the Skeena Valley in the north through the dry plateau …
Indians at Work
Indians at Work provides an historical background to native labour in BC from the Gold Rush to the beginning of the Great Depression. It counters the common misconception that native people responded to European settlement and industrial development by retreating to a reserve existence. Evidence amassed from logging, transport, construction, longsh …
The Vancouver Island Letters of Edmund Hope Verney
This previously unknown collection of letters lets us experience colonial British Columbia through the eyes of a young British naval officer who spent three years on Vancouver Island commanding a Royal Navy gunboat during the Cariboo gold rush.
A keen observer of life in the new world, Edmund Hope Verney corresponded on a regular basis with his fath …
A Thousand Blunders
In A Thousand Blunders, Frank Leonard looks at why the “Road of a Thousand Wonders” failed to live up to the expectations forecast by company president Charles M. Hays and other senior managers. Not only was the railway built through a sparsely settled region, which generated little immediate traffic, but its economic difficulties were also com …
High Slack
"Engaging ... Williams writes sensitively and with a minimum of academic jargon ... successfully reveals some of the anxieties of the colonial project in British Columbia without losing sight of the fact that the war, far from being a mere anecdote on the colonial stage, was the 'thin edge of the wedge' of the latent violence that has always simmer …
Britain and the Origins of Canadian Confederation, 1837-67
In Britain and the Origins of Canadian Confederation, 1837-1867, Ged Martin offers a sceptical review of claims that Confederation answered all the problems facing the provinces, and examines in detail British perceptions of Canada and ideas about its future. The major British contribution to the coming of Confederation is to be found not in the af …
Roaring Days
In the 1890s, Rossland was the most important mining centre in southeastern British Columbia. In Roaring Days, Jeremy Mouat examines many different aspects of mining, from work underground to corporate strategies. He also brings to life the unique individuals who were a part of this history – the miners who toiled long hours under unimaginable wo …
All Possible Worlds
British Columbia — the last temperate part of the New World to be mapped — has long conjured up images of Utopia, a word that comes from the Greek "no place." Indeed, utopian experiments started springing up soon after the first European explorers passed through. In All Possible Worlds, Justine Brown explores the attraction BC holds for utopian …
