The sparsely populated southern Interior of British Columbia was rich in resources and ripe for settlement in the late 1800s. The agricultural lands of the Okanagan and Nicola valleys, and the precious metals and coal of the Kootenays, lay largely unused or undiscovered: the challenges was getting to these places.

Transportation was the key that o …

Towboats have been a part of British Columbia's history since 1836, when the Hudson's Bay Company's ungainly sidewheeler S.S. Beaver made the first powered tow up the coast. Over the years, tugs and their crews have towed just about everything, including food, machinery, rocks, paper, oil, salt, lumber, oil rigs, deep-sea ships, cars and houses. Th …

For his third volume about BC literary history, Alan Twigg traces the writings of David Thompson, Alexander Mackenzie, Simon Fraser and thirty of their peers, mainly Scotsmen, who founded and managed more than fifty forts west of the Rockies prior to 1850. After the failure of Alexander Mackenzie and Simon Fraser to find a navigable route to the Pa …

The Depression has ruined Henry Dafoe's life: his father has left the family farm to look for work, his mother is sick and now she's decided to send Henry to Nova Scotia to work on his uncle's fishboat. But Henry has other ideas. He runs away from home to join his father, which proves more difficult than he imagined. Alone and scared in a strange c …

Yossi Mendelsohn works hard to help his family survive after they flee Russia to find a better life in Montreal. He sells newspapers and carries bundles from the garment factory. Yossi longs to play "le hockey" with the French boys, but he has no skates. When his father falls ill and his sister and her fiancé organize a walkout at the factory, Yos …

In Up-Coast, award-winning author Richard A. Rajala offers the first comprehensive history of the forest industry on British Columbia's central and north coast. He integrates social, political, and environmental themes to depict the relationship of coastal people and communities to the forest from the late 19th century to the present. The account b …

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 …

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 …

Challenging myths about a peaceful west and prairie exceptionalism, the book explores the substance of prairie legal history and the degree to which the region's mentality is rooted in the historical experience of distinctive prairie peoples. The ways in which prairie peoples perceived themselves and their relationships to a wider world were direct …

With Good Intentions examines the joint efforts of Aboriginal people and individuals of European ancestry to counter injustice in Canada when colonization was at its height, from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. These people recognized colonial wrongs and worked together in a variety of ways to right them, but they could not stem …

The Yukon is famous for its Klondike gold rush, but it was the site of another major mineral discovery in 1918 that touched off its own stampede of sourdoughs and eventually produced more paydirt than the Klondike. This was the fabulously rich Keno Hill silver deposit, which made the Yukon one of the world's leading silver producers and backstopped …

In 1897, a 21-year-old unemployed Californian named Jack London borrowed funds so he could make his fortune in the Klondike. His life prior to the gold rush had been a story of toil and lean days. He knew how to pitch a tent, start a fire with minimal effort and how to go without either a fire or a blanket if circumstances required. He had lived in …

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 …

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 …

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 …

It's 1861 and orphan Jo has made it from Carson City, Nevada, to San Francisco without anyone figuring out that she's a girl in boy's clothing. When she hears talk of gold strikes in the Cariboo, Jo and her friend Bart sign on for what turns out to be a journey far more arduous and dangerous than anything Jo experienced as a Pony Express rider. Thr …

In the wake of shocking revelations about the misuse of federal funds in the Sponsorship program, then Prime Minister Paul Martin took the unprecedented step of creating an independent commission of enquiry, to be led by one man. That man was granted extraordinary power to seek out the truth, asking tough questions and demanding real answers. His n …

The sacred sites of indigenous peoples are under increasing threat worldwide as a result of state appropriation of control over ancestral territories, coupled with insatiable demands on lands, waters, and natural resources. Of late, First Nations in Canada have taken their fight for these sites to the courts. Informed by elements of a general theor …

With its focus on sites where identities were forged and contested over crucial decades in Montreal’s history, this collection illuminates the cultural complexity and richness of a modernizing city. Readers will discover the links between identity, place, and historical moment as they meet vagrant women, sailors in port, unemployed men of the Gre …

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 …

Mary is certain that her parents are giving her new shoes for Christmas, but the Depression has hit her Saskatchewan farming family hard. Mary tries to hide her disappointment when she receives a crude homemade doll instead. She ends up liking the doll much more than she expects, but the doll fuels the rivalry between Mary and her older sister, Jud …

For the Gitksan and Witsuwit’en peoples of northwest British Columbia, the land is invested with meaning that goes beyond simple notions of property or sustenance. Considered both a food box and a storage box of history and wealth, the land plays a central role in their culture, survival, history, and identity. In Our Box Was Full, Richard Daly e …

Established in 1940 in response to the Great Depression, the original goal of Canada’s system of unemployment insurance was to ensure the protection of income to the unemployed. Joblessness was viewed as a social problem and the jobless as its unfortunate victims. If governments could not create the right conditions for full employment, they were …

To many, the North is a familiar but inaccessible place. Yet images of the region are within easy reach, in magazine racks, on our coffee tables, and on television, computer, and movie screens. In Northern Exposures, Peter Geller uncovers the history behind these popular conceptions of the Canadian North.

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 …

Selling British Columbia is an entertaining examination of the development of the tourist industry in British Columbia between 1890 and 1970. Michael Dawson argues that in order to understand the roots of the fully-fledged consumer culture that emerged in Canada after the Second World War, it is necessary to understand the connections between the 1 …

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 …

No aspect of this harrowing journey was more difficult--or deadly--than the trek over the Chilkoot Trail: a fifty-three kilometre journey over the coastal mountains from the tidewaters of Alaska, through British Columbia to the headwaters of the Yukon River. But even before the gold rush, the trail was an important First Nations trade and travel ro …

In 1907, Laura Beatrice Berton, a 29-year-old kindergarten teacher, left her comfortable life in Toronto Ontario to teach in a Yukon mining town. She fell in love with the North--and with a northerner--and made Dawson City her home for the next 25 years. I Married the Klondike is her classic and enduring memoir.

When she first arrived by steamboat …

With her parents on vacation and her stern grandmother's arrival delayed, sixteen-year-old Anne McLaughlin-Scott is on her own for a day in the exciting San Francisco of 1970. Anne feels stifled at home and wants to live with her free-spirited Aunt Ruth in Vancouver, BC. So when she encounters a childhood crush, now a draft dodger heading north him …

The year is 1903, and Charlie Sutherland, a sixteen-year-old orphan, is on the run. Three years earlier, he was sent by Dr. Barnardo’s Home in England to work on the remote Alberta homestead of Albert and Buck Brooks. Charlie has been treated poorly by the two brothers, but he has endured. However, when Albert dies under curious circumstances, an …

"Wings Across Water is a thoroughly enjoyable read from start to finish, an absolute must for aviation buffs..."
--Eleanor Eastwick, The Patrician

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Wings Across the Water: Victoria's Flying Heritage 1871-1971 is illustrated with a vengeance: it contains over 600 mesmerizing aviation photographs, most never before published. Beginning with a proces …

The year is 1838 and Ellie's grandmother has arrived all the way from England. Ellie is horrified to discover that the forbidding old woman intends to take her back to Britain to be raised properly. Ellie is determined that she will not go, but what can a nine-year-old girl do in the face of an adult with her mind made up?

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 …

Island Tug & Barge, once the largest employer in Victoria, BC, was a Pacific Ocean marine salvage company world famous for deep-sea rescues and long distance towing feats - and infamous for superior crews and a feisty little fleet, including the renowned Sudbury and Sudbury II. Most famous, however, was the unstopable, fiery owner, Harold Elworthy …

On September 13, 1759, after a daring and unexpected ascent up a steep bluff, Wolfe's English troops confronted Montcalm's French troops and Canadian irregulars on the Plains of Abraham. The battle that followed determined Canada's destiny, but it was only one of many confrontations on several continents in what historians consider the first global …

In 1922, Elizabeth Bethune Campbell, a Toronto-born socialite, unearthed what she initially thought was an unsigned copy of her mother’s will, designating her as the primary beneficiary of the estate. The discovery snowballed into a fourteen-year-battle with the Ontario legal establishment, as Mrs. Campbell attempted to prove that her uncle, a pr …

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 …

Several years ago, Paula Wild spent a month in the Bella Coola Valley. Afterward, she couldn't get the place out of her mind, and it ended up hugely impacting her life. She spent the next few years travelling back and forth between the comparatively bustling metropolis of her hometown of Courtenay, British Columbia and the rugged wilds of Bella Co …

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 …