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 …

The Doukhobors, Russian-speaking immigrants who arrived in Canada beginning in 1899, are known primarily to the Canadian public through the sensationalist images of them as nude protestors, anarchists, and religious fanatics – representations largely propagated by government commissions and the Canadian media. In Negotiating Memory, Julie Rak exa …

This book brings together recent and original work to illuminate comparisons and contrasts between two former colonies of the British empire. The contributors include some of the top names in history and political science, in Canada and Australia. Parties Long Estranged covers the entire 20th century and examines different aspects of Canadian-Austr …

The Aleutian Islands, a mostly forgotten portion of the United States on the southwest coast of Alaska, have often assumed a key role in American military strategy. But for most Americans, prior to the Second World War, the bleak and barren islands were of little interest. In Stepping Stones to Nowhere, Galen Perras shows how that changed with the …

Imagining Difference is an ethnography about historical and contemporary ideas of human difference expressed by residents of Fernie, BC – a coal-mining town transforming into an international ski resort. Focusing on diverse experiences of people from the European diaspora, Robertson analyzes expressions of difference from the multiple locations o …

This young adult historical novel focuses on Charlotte and her family, Loyalists who are forced to flee their home in the Mohawk Valley as a result of the violence of the "Sons of Liberty" during the American Revolution. At the beginning, fifteen-year-old Charlotte Hooper is separated from her sweetheart, Nick, who sympathizes with the Revolutionar …

Kiumajut [Talking Back]: Game Management and Inuit Rights 1900-70 examines Inuit relations with the Canadian state, with a particular focus on two interrelated issues. The first is how a deeply flawed set of scientific practices for counting animal populations led policymakers to develop policies and laws intended to curtail the activities of Inuit …

The old buildings and historic places of British Columbia form a kind of “roadside memory,” a tangible link with stories of settlement, change, and abandonment that reflect the great themes of BC's history. Michael Kluckner began painting his personal map of the province in a watercolour sketchbook. In 1999, after he put a few of the sketches o …

In about 1800, fur trader Charles Ermatinger married an Obijwa woman, Mananowe. Their three sons grew up with both their mother’s hunter/warrior culture and their father’s European culture. As adults, they lived adventurously in Montreal and St Thomas, where they were accepted and loved by fellow citizens while publicly retaining their Ojibwa h …

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 …

The Culture of Hunting in Canada covers elements of the history of hunting from the pre-colonial period until the present in all parts of Canada and features essays by practitioners and scholars of hunting and by pro- and anti-hunting lobbyists. The result crosses the boundaries between scholarship and personal reflection, and between academia and …

The history of British Columbia’s economy in the twentieth century is inextricably bound to the development of the forest industry. In this comprehensive study, Gordon Hak approaches the forest industry from the perspectives of workers and employers, examining the two institutions that structured the relationship during the Fordist era: the compa …

Historicizing Canadian Anthropology is the first significant examination of the historical development of anthropological study in this country. It addresses key issues in the evolution of the discipline: the shaping influence of Aboriginal-anthropological encounters; the challenge of compiling a history for the Canadian context; and the place of i …

Nutrition Policy in Canada, 1870-1939 examines the beginnings and early evolution of nutrition policy developments, mainly at the federal level, from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the Second World War. It outlines the development of a national system of food safety and surveillance, the federal government’s early policy focus on …

In the early 1900s, British Columbia embarked on a brief but intense effort to manufacture a modern countryside. The government wished to reward veterans of the Great War with new lives: soliders and other settlers would benefit from living in a rural community, considered a more healthy and moral alternative to urban life. But the fundamental reas …

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

Patricia E. Roy examines the climax of antipathy to Asians in Canada: the removal of all Japanese Canadians from the BC coast in 1942. Canada ignored the rights of Japanese Canadians and placed strict limits on Chinese immigration. In response, Ja …

Beautiful Desolation Sound, 150 km north of Vancouver, has for many years been the most popular cruising destination on the BC coast, but is today almost as devoid of local occupants as it was in 1792 when the dyspeptic Captain George Vancouver gave it its misleading name. It has not always been this way. Thick clamshell middens in remote bays, rot …

The moment of contact between two peoples, two alien societies, marks the opening of an epoch and the joining of histories. What if it had happened differently?

The stories that indigenous peoples and Europeans tell about their first encounters with one another are enormously valuable historical records, but their relevance extends beyond the past. …

The Archive of Place weaves together a series of narratives about environmental history in a particular location – British Columbia’s Chilcotin Plateau. In the mid-1990s, the Chilcotin was at the centre of three territorial conflicts. Opposing groups, in their struggle to control the fate of the region and its resources, invoked different under …

From the 1870s until the Great Depression, immigration was often the question of the hour in Canada. Politicians, the media, and an array of interest groups viewed it as essential to nation building, developing the economy, and shaping Canada’s social and cultural character. One of the groups most determined to influence public debate and governm …

Hunters at the Margin examines the conflict in the Northwest Territories between Native hunters and conservationists over three big game species: the wood bison, the muskox, and the caribou. John Sandlos argues that the introduction of game regulations, national parks, and game sanctuaries was central to the assertion of state authority over the tr …

With an abundance of buffalo, other game, and lodge pole pine, the hills straddling the Alberta/Saskatchewan/United States border were a natural gathering point for First Nations and Métis peoples. Their presence drew the Hudson Bay Company and American free traders, whiskey traders, and wolfers, resulting in a clash of cultures culminating in the …

British Columbia inherited a legal system that granted married men control over most family property and imposed few obligations on them toward their wives and children. Yet from the 1860s onward, lawmakers throughout the Anglo-American world, including legislators on the Pacific Coast, began to grant women and children new rights. Domestic Reforms …

The story of the Northwest Rebellion is synonymous with Métis leader Louis Riel, whose allies joined together in 1885 to face the military forces of the Canadian government, engaging in a civil war on the Canadian Prairies. A lesser-known element of the story is the gripping tale of river warfare along the banks of rivers in Saskatchewan, Alberta …

In May 1936, George Dalziel flew far up the Nahanni River to check on Bill Eppler and Joe Mulholland, who were working one of his traplines. He found their cabin burned to the ground and no sign of them anywhere. What had happened to the healthy young men? Had there been an accident, or was a killer on the loose?

Dalziel, known as The Flying Trapper …

Finalist for 2006 BC Book Prize – Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize

Shortlisted for George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in B.C. Writing and Publishing

Each year, over eight million people visit Stanley Park, a 400-hectare (1000-acre) haven of beauty that offers a backdrop of majestic cedars and firs and an environment teeming with wildlife ju …

The Heart of the Cariboo-Chilcotin anthology celebrates this beautiful and remote region of British Columbia. From the days of the gold rush through to modern times, the stories in this collection capture the spirit of a place whose beauty and wildness have inspired its people throughout its history. Legendary tales include:

• a husband's promis …

Reliving the adventures of past explorers.

Trail to the Interior is R. M. Patterson's rich account of exploration and personal adventure in the Cassiar district of British Columbia. The trail is the historic track from Wrangell, Alaska, along the Stikine and Dease rivers and across the height of the land into the valleys of the Liard and the Macken …

Timeless tales about wilderness living.

Eric Collier's riveting recollections about the 26 years that he, his wife Lillian and son Veasy spent homesteading in the isolated Chilcotin wilderness made for an international bestseller and one of the most famous books ever written about British Columbia.

In the early 1930s, Collier and his family moved t …

The Manly Modern, the first major book on the history of masculinity in Canada, traces the history of what happened when men’s supposed modernity became one of their defining features. Through a series of case studies covering such diverse subjects as car culture, mountaineering, war veterans, murder trials, and a bridge collapse, Christopher Dum …

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 …

When sixteen-year-old Sarah from Toronto learns that she is to spend the summer with her grandparents in Nova Scotia, she is convinced that it will be the most tedious summer ever. She gets off to a rough start when she meets Luke, the nephew of her grandmother’s friend, and one unfortunate event leads to another. Just when she thinks her summer …

The year is 1935 and Maggie Sullivan's world has fallen apart. Maggie has grown up in a close-knit mining community perched atop a mountain in British Columbia. But now her father has been killed in a mine explosion and she is being forced to leave the only home she has ever known. To make matters worse, she must also leave behind her best friend L …

In the summer of 1883 a famous clipper ship ran aground off the coast of Prince Edward Island near the home of a young girl named Lucy Maud Montgomery. Lucy Maud, who became one of Canada's most beloved writers, wrote about the grand adventure in her journals and reflected on it years later in her notebooks. The town of Cavendish was transformed by …

The indomitable spirit of Bert Irvine is at the heart of Nechako Country, a story that provides a glimpse into a simpler world in simpler times. After Bert moved his young family from Barrhead in northwestern Alberta to Vanderhoof in central British Columbia, the upper Nechako country and Nechako River became integral parts of their lives. Bert's l …

The Other Quiet Revolution traces the under-examined cultural transformation woven through key developments in the formation of Canadian nationhood, from the 1946 Citizenship Act and the 1956 Suez crisis to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963-70) and the adoption of the federal multiculturalism policy in 1971. José Igartua …

States of Nature is one of the first books to trace the development of Canadian wildlife conservation from its social, political, and historical roots. While noting the influence of celebrity conservationists such as Jack Miner and Grey Owl, Tina Loo emphasizes the impact of ordinary people on the evolution of wildlife management in Canada. She als …

Obstructed Labour analyzes how the movement to legalize midwifery in Ontario reproduced racial inequality by excluding from practice hundreds of professional midwives from the global south. Global macroprocesses of power, institutional forms of exclusion, and interpersonal expressions of racism all play a part. Sheryl Nestel shows that unequal rela …

In Philip Timms' Vancouver, the city's "golden age" has been captured with spirit and style by one of British Columbia's foremost photographers. Philip Timms was a man of many accomplishments, but one of the most notable was his photographic record of Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, created between 1900 and 1910. As Vancouver evolved from a colo …

For many years, archaeologists were unaware of the ancient clam terraces at Waiatt Bay, on Quadra Island. Author Judith Williams knew no differently until she was advised of their existence by a Klahoose elder named Elizabeth Harry (Keekus). By liaising with other observers of clam gardens in the Broughton Archipelago and conducting her own survey …

British Columbia's colourful story has been told many times, but until now no one has attempted to relate the chronicle specifically for young readers. From the gold rush to the Gumboot Navy and from "brideships" to W.A.C. Bennett, BC history comes alive in this highly illustrated and vivid account by award-winning writer and historian Daniel Franc …

Behind Closed Doors features written testimonials from thirty-two individuals who attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School. The school was one of many infamous residential schools that operated from 1893 to 1979. The storytellers remember and share with us their stolen time at the school; many stories are told through courageous tears.

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 …