Clio's Warriors
Clio’s Warriors examines how the Canadian world war experience has been constructed and reconstructed over time. Tim Cook elucidates the role of historians in codifying the sacrifice and struggle of a generation as he discusses historical memory and writing, the creation of archives, and the war of reputations that followed each of the world wars …
Battle Grounds
Base closures, use of airspace for weapons testing and low-level flying, environmental awareness, and Aboriginal land claims have focused attention in recent years on the use of Native lands for military training. But is the military’s interest in Aboriginal lands new? Battle Grounds analyzes a century of government–Aboriginal interaction and n …
Betrayed
In January 1944, Vice Admiral Percy Walker Nelles was fired from his position as head of the Royal Canadian Navy. Betrayed reveals the true story behind the dismissal: a divisive power struggle between two elite groups within the RCN pitted the navy’s regular officers against a small group of self-appointed spokesmen for the voluntary naval reser …
“Here Is Hell”
Grant Dawson’s analysis of political, diplomatic, and military decision making avoids a narrow focus on the shocking offences of a few Canadian soldiers, deftly investigating the broader context of the deployment in Somalia. He shows how media pressure, government optimism about the United Nations, and the Canadian traditions of multilateralism a …
Fighting from Home
In Verdun, English and French speakers lived side by side. Through their home-front activities as much as through enlistment, they proved themselves partners in the prosecution of Canada’s war. Shared experiences and class similarities shaped responses based first and foremost in a sense of local identity. Fighting from Home paints a comprehensiv …
Prisoners of the Home Front
In the middle of the most destructive conflict in human history, the Second World War, almost 40,000 Germans civilians and prisoners of war were detained in internment and work camps across Canada. Prisoners of the Home Front details the organization and day-to-day affairs of these internment camps and reveals the experience of their inmates. Auger …
Commanding Canadians
Commander A.F.C. Layard, RN, wrote almost daily in his diary, in bold, neat script, from the time he entered the Royal Navy as a cadet in 1913 until his retirement in 1947. The pivotal 1943-45 years of this edited volume offer an extraordinarily full and honest chronicle, revealing Layard’s preoccupations, both with the daily details and with the …
The Gothic Line
BOOK TWO in the Canadian Battle Series
Stretching like an armour-toothed belt across Italy’s upper thigh, the Gothic Line was the most fortified and fiercely defended position the German army had yet thrown in the path of the advancing Allied forces. On August 25, 1944, it fell to I Canadian Corps to spearhead the famed Eighth Army’s major offe …
Holding Juno
Following his national best-seller, Juno Beach, and with his usual verve and narrative skill, historian Mark Zuehlke chronicles the crucial six days when Canadians saved the vulnerable beachheads they had won during the D-Day landings.
D-Day ended with the Canadians six miles inland—the deepest penetration achieved by Allied forces during this lo …
Gardening Under the Arch
A passion for gardening
First released in 1982, Gardening Under the Arch has long been hailed as the gardening bible for the challenging chinook region of southwestern Alberta. Now, for the first time since its original publication, this hugely successful book has been revised and updated into a full-colour edition by some of its original contribut …
The Soldiers' General
Self-doubt so plagued him that he suffered a nervous breakdown even before fighting his first combat action. But, by the end of the Second World War, Bert Hoffmeister had exorcised his anxieties, risen from Captain to Major-General, and won more awards than any Canadian officer in the war. Fighting from the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 to the fi …
Hometown Horizons
In Hometown Horizons, Robert Rutherdale considers how people and communities on the Canadian home front perceived the Great War. Drawing on newspaper archives and organizational documents, he examines how farmers near Lethbridge, Alberta, shopkeepers in Guelph, Ontario, and civic workers in Trois-Rivières, Québec took part in local activities tha …
Home Before Dark
Erik and his friends spend all their time on the water, exploring the shoreline and islands off British Columbia's Sunshine Coast. While they all have experience with boats and the outdoors, the unpredictable weather and fickle seas often manage to test their courage and abilities. While exploring a burned-out homestead on a remote island, the teen …
Juno Beach
Drawing on personal diaries as well as military records, Juno Beach: Canada’s D-Day Victory: June 6, 1944 dramatically depicts Canada’s contribution to the most critical Allied battle of World War II.
Acclaimed military historian Mark Zuehlke recreated the pivotal day of World War II from planning through attack. Falling through a black night, p …
Emily's Dream
In the sequel to Discovering Emily, Emily Carr is determined to become an artist.
Emily's parents have died, and she and her siblings are ruled by the iron-willed eldest, Dede. Dede is more concerned with decorum than with ridiculous dreams and is not averse to punishing Emily severely. In the face of such resistance, and in the conservative climate …
The Red Man's on the Warpath
“The red man’s on the warpath! The time has come for him to dig up the hatchet and join his paleface brother in his fight to make the world safe for the sacred cause of freedom and democracy.” -- Winnipeg Free Press, May 1941
During the Second World War, thousands of First Nations people joined in the national crusade to defend freedom and de …
Fight or Pay
Our slogan has always been ‘Fight or Pay.’ We call upon the people to enlist or help others enlist. We sometimes say: ‘If you cannot put the "I" into fight, put the "pay" into patriotism,’ and that serves as a slogan on any platform.
– Sir Herbert Ames, founder of the Canadian Patriotic Fund
Unlike the Second World War, the Great War exis …
Discovering Emily
Young Emily Carr has no interest in learning to be a lady. She loves animals and the outdoors, and she is beginning to discover that what she loves most of all is drawing and painting. Will she find a way to develop her talent in the straitlaced world of nineteenth-century Victoria, British Columbia? Discovering Emily is the first of two books in a …
Frigates and Foremasts
The first comprehensive study of naval operations involving North American squadrons in Nova Scotia waters, Frigates and Foremasts offers a masterful analysis of the motives behind the deployment of Royal Navy vessels between 1745 and 1815, and the navy’s role on the Western Atlantic.
Interweaving historical analysis with vivid descriptions of piv …
Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers
It was the “Good War.” Its cause was just; it ended the depression; and Canada’s contribution was nothing less than stellar. Canadians had every reason to applaud themselves, and the heroes that made the nation proud. But the dark truth was that not all Canadians were saints or soldiers. Indeed, many were sinners.
In this eye-opening and capt …
Canadians Behind Enemy Lines, 1939-1945
During the Second World War, almost one hundred Canadians served the Allied forces by passing as locals in occupied countries. At the behest of two British secret services, these men made language and custom their costumes. They risked their lives assisting resistance groups in sabotage and ambush missions or in smuggling Allied airmen out of occup …
The Hippie House
The "summer of love" is a time of idealistic freedom and experimentation for Emma, her cousin Megan, and the young people of Pike Creek. While her brother Eric's band practices in what Uncle Pat has dubbed the Hippie House, the girls suntan on their small lake and hitchhike into town to hang around the Drop-In Center. They find the growing crowd of …
Great Stanley Cup Victories
The most exciting time in hockey is when the best teams battle it out for the greatest hockey prize of all: the Stanley Cup. Thrilling and dramatic games happen during the playoffs, when the stakes are high and everything is on the line. Celebrate the joy of victory with some of the greatest hockey stories of the past century.
A War of Patrols
The extended peace the world anticipated following the decisive Allied victory in the Second World War was abruptly shattered in June 1950 by the invasion of South Korea by communist North Korea. Responding to a United Nations’ call to assist the South Korean regime, Canada deployed an 8000-man brigade to the peninsula to fight as part of an Amer …
The Liri Valley
BOOK TWO in the Canadian Battle Series
For the Allied Armies fighting their way up the Italian boot in early 1944. Rome was the prize that could only be won through one of the greatest offensives of the war. Mark Zuehlke, following his book, Ortona, returns to the Mediterranean theatre of World War II with this gripping story of courage in the face …
Avoiding Armageddon
Drawing on previously classified government records, Richter reveals that Canadian defence officials independently came to strategic understandings of the most critical issues of the nuclear age regarding the use of force in resolving disputes. Canadian appreciation of deterrence, arms control, and strategic stability differed conceptually from the …
The Halifax Explosion and the Royal Canadian Navy
The Halifax Explosion of 1917 is a defining event in the Canadian consciousness, yet it has never been the subject of a sustained analytical history. Astonishingly, until now no one has consulted the large federal government archives that contain first-hand accounts of the disaster and the response of national authorities. Canada's recently establi …
ABCs of West Coast Gardening
Gardening on the west coast can be a frustrating undertaking. The adverse weather and wildlife in our region can be enough to turn some off for good. With the right information in hand, however, gardening in our luscious region can be as rewarding as anywhere else on the planet. The key to obtaining that ever-elusive west coast green thumb is Mary …
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 …
Another Kind of Justice
Another Kind of Justice is the first historical survey of Canadian military law, providing insights into military justice in Canada, the purpose of military law, and the level of legal professionalism within the Canadian military.
Drawing on a wide range of materials, Chris Madsen traces the development of military law from 1867 to 1997. After delv …
Death So Noble
This book examines Canada’s collective memory of the First World War through the 1920s and 1930s. It is a cultural history, considering art, music, and literature. Thematically organized into such subjects as the symbolism of the soldier, the implications of war memory for Canadian nationalism, and the idea of a just war, the book draws on milita …
A Line in the Sand
In the autumn of 1990, during Operation Desert Storm, two young men, one a troubled Canadian soldier, the other a teenage Palestinian black-marketeer, meet in the scorched Qatari desert. Breaching the divide of a profound cultural misunderstanding and against a backdrop of massive global conflict, these two become unlikely and secret friends. This …