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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Fifteen thousand Canadians were captured during Canada’s twientieth-century wars. They experienced the bewilderment that accompanied the moment of capture, the humiliation of being completely in the captor’s power, and the sense of stagnating in a backwater while the rest of the world moved forward. Jonathan Vance provides the first comprehensi …

Through an examination of the roles of relief and relocation in response to welfare and other perceived problems and the federal government's overall goal of assimilating the Inuit into the dominant Canadian culture, this book questions the seeming benevolence of the post-Second World War Canadian welfare state. The authors have made extensive use …

This classic in Yukon gold rush literature was originally published in 1900 and has long been out of print. Tappan Adney, a New York journalist, was dispatched to the Yukon in 1897, at the height of the gold fever, to “furnish news and pictures of the new gold fields.” The pages contain excellent descriptions of the people, places, events, and …

The book, based on the accounts of dozens of prospectors, follows the first gold-seekers from their arrival in 1873 until the stampede to the Klondike in 1896. Gates captures the essence of these early years of the gold rush, about which very little has been written. He chronicles the trials, hearbreaks, and successes of the unique and hardy indivi …

Canada is a great maritime nation. Although ships and the sea have been part of its history for centuries, very little is known about the men and women who have worked in its coastal and lake fleets. Ships and Memories is a fascinating account of life at sea during the age of steam. In it, seafarers tell ther own stories and remember the good times …

Covering vast distances in time and space, Yukon: The Last Frontier begins with the early Russian fur trade on the Aleutian Islands and closes with what Melody Webb calls 'the technological frontier'. Colourful and impeccably researched, her history of the Yukon Basin of Canada and Alaska shows how much and how little has changed there in the last …

Helena Gutteridge was born in England in 1879. A militant suffragist, tutored by the Pankhursts, she learned the politics of confrontation early. Emigrating to Vancouver in 1911, she found the suffrage movement there too polite and organized the B.C. Woman's Suffrage League to help working women fight for the vote. And she kept on organizing. As a …

In 1860, at the age of fourteen, Susan Louisa Moir left England for British Columbia. After settling initially at Hope, she lived briefly in both Victoria and New Westminster, then B.C.’s two most important settlements. Returning to Hope, she helped her mother open the community’s first school, and in 1868 she married John Fall Allison, riding …

During the first two decades of this century, Sir William Mackenzie was one of Canada’s best known entrepreneurs. He spearheaded some of the largest and most technologically advanced projects undertaken in Canada during his lifetime – building enterprises that became the foundations for such major institutions as Canadian National Railways, Bra …

Patricia E. Roy is the winner of the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award, Canadian Historical Association.

A White Man’s Province examines how British Columbians changed their attitudes towards Asian immigrants from one of toleration in colonial times to vigorous hostility by the turn of the century and describes how politicians responded to popular …

In May 1914, 400 Sikhs left for British Columbia by chartered ship, resolved to claim their right to equal treatment with white citizens of the British Empire and force entry into Canada. They were anchored off Vancouver for over two months, enduring extreme physical privation and harrassment by immigration officials, but defying federal deportatio …

Robert Brown, a twenty-one-year-old Scotsman, arrived on Vancouver Island in 1863 for the purpose of collecting seeds, roots, and plants for the Botanical Association of Edinburgh. Relations with his employer quickly deteriorated, however, and when the opportunity arose in 1864 to head the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition, Brown eagerly accept …

In 1857, the French Roman Catholic religious order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, began permanent missionary work among the Native peoples of British Columbia. The memoirs of Father Nicolas Coccola, a Corsican-born Oblate who arrived in the province in 1880, reveal the complexity of the work carried out by the ordinary missionary pries …

On the Northwest is the first complete history of commercial whaling in the Pacific Northwest from its shadowy origins in the late 1700s to its demise in western Canada in 1967. Whaling in the eastern North Pacific represented a century and a half of exploration and exploitation which involved the entrepreneurs, merchants, politicians, and seamen o …

The two volumes comprising Indian Education in Canada present the first full-length discussion of this important subject since the adoption in 1972 of a new federal policy moving toward Indian control of Indian education. Volume 1 analyzes the education of Indian children by whites since the arrival of the first Europeans in Canada. Volume 2 is con …

In A Narrow Vision, Brian Titley chronicles Scott's career in the Department of Indian Affairs and evaluates developments in Native health, education, and welfare between 1880 and 1932. He shows how Scott's response to challenges such as the making of treaties in northern Ontario, land claims in British Columbia, and the status of the Six Nations c …

The button blanket is eye-catching, prestigious and treasured -- one of the most spectacular embellishments to the Indian culture of the Northwest Coast and a unique form of graphic and narrative art. The traditional crest-style robe is the sister of the totem pole and, like the pole, proclaims hereditary rights, obligations and powers. Unlike the …

The two volumes comprising Indian Education in Canada present the first full-length discussion of this important subject since the adoption in 1972 of a new federal policy moving toward Indian control of Indian education. Volume 1 analyzes the education of Indian children by whites since the arrival of the first Europeans in Canada. Volume 2 is con …

Ninstints, located on Anthony Island, one of the smallest and most southerly of the Queen Charlotte chain, contains the vestiges of the great wooden structures and houses of the Kunghit Haida people who abandoned the village in the late 1800s. George MacDonald combines archival material and scientific and photographic evidence to record what is kno …

Spurred on by reports of gold in the Cariboo, adventurers from all over the world descended on British Columbia in the mid-1800s. Among them were ambitious easterners who accepted the challenge of the shorter but more arduous overland route across the prairies and the Rockies. One such man determined to find his fortune in the West was Thomas McMic …