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 …
High Seas, High Risk
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 …
First Nations Sacred Sites in Canada's Courts
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 …
Empires at War
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 …
The Heiress vs the Establishment
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 …
Vanishing British Columbia
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 …
One River, Two Cultures
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 …
Negotiated Memory
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 …
Our Box Was Full
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 …
Imagining Difference
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 …
From UI to EI
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 …
Dominion and the Rising Sun
The Dominion and the Rising Sun is the first major study of Canada’s diplomatic arrival in Japan and, by extension, East Asia. It examines the political, economic, and cultural relations forged during this seminal period between the foremost power in Asia and the young dominion tentatively establishing itself in world affairs.
The book begins with …
CCF Colonialism in Northern Saskatchewan
Often remembered for its humanitarian platform and its pioneering social programs, Saskatchewan’s Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) wrought a much less scrutinized legacy in the northern regions of the province during the twenty years it governed.
Until the 1940s churches, fur traders, and other wealthy outsiders held uncontested control …
Selling British Columbia
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 …
Mountie in Mukluks
But readers of Mountie in Mukluks will soon realize they are in the presence of one of the most un-cop-like cops who ever built an igloo. And by the time they have finished they will never be able to think quite the same way about the fabled Redcoats, or life in the far north.
During the 1930s, Bill White gave up trapping and joined the Royal Cana …
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 …
Healing in the Wilderness
This unforgettable story reveals how medical missionaries responded to crises, emergencies and sudden illnesses--including grizzly bear attacks and airplane crashes--without modern technology or urban hospitals. It portrays the small missions and infirmaries and tells how their staff handled life and death in the deep bush, on mountain ranges, in N …
Northern Exposures
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.
Belle of Batoche
Belle, an 11-year-old Metis girl, and Sarah both want the coveted job of church bell ringer.
An embroidery contest is held to award the position, and Sarah cheats. Before Belle can expose her, the two are caught up in the advancing forces of General Middleton and his troops as they surround Batoche in the 1885 Riel Rebellion. The church bell disappe …
First Peoples in Canada
Since Native Peoples and Cultures of Canada was first published in 1988, its two editions have sold some 30,000 copies, and it is widely used as the basic text in colleges and universities across the country.
Now retitled, this comprehensive book still provides an overview of all the Aboriginal groups in Canada. Incorporating the latest research in …
The Oriental Question
Patricia E. Roy is the winner of the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award, Canadian Historical Association.
Patricia Roy’s latest book, The Oriental Question, continues her study into why British Columbians – and many Canadians from outside the province – were historically so opposed to Asian immigration. Drawing on contemporary press and governme …
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 …
Raincoast Chronicles 20: Lilies and Fireweed
Lilies and Fireweed is packed with unforgettable stories of women surviving in the unforgiving, sometimes hostile environment of pioneer and aboriginal British Columbia. Based on award-winning journalist Stephen Hume's popular series "Frontier Women of BC" that appeared in the Vancouver Sun in 2002, this collection of essays contains stories, photo …
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 …
The Remarkable Adventures of Portuguese Joe Silvey
British Columbia is known for the colourful pioneers who helped build and shape the character of this weird but wonderful province. And few were as colourful as Portuguese Joe Silvey - a saloon keeper, whaler and pioneer of seine fishing in British Columbia.
Born on Pico Island, of Portugal's Azores Islands, sometime between 1830 and 1840, Joseph Si …
Catching Spring
The year is 1957, and Bobby lives on the Tsartlip First Nation reserve on Vancouver Island where his family has lived for generations and generations.
Bobby loves his weekend job at the nearby marina. He loves to play marbles with his friends. And he loves being able to give half his weekly earnings to his mother to eke out the grocery money, but he …
Songhees Pictorial
In the mid 1840s, 50 years after first contact with Europeans, the Songhees people amalgamated on a reserve across the harbour from the newly built Fort Victoria. Grant Keddie tells the story of the old Songhees Reserve through the eyes of outsiders, expressed in newspaper reports and private journals, and depicted in sketches, paintings and photog …
Stepping Stones to Nowhere
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 …
A Voyage to the North West Side of America
Colnett’s journal of this expedition is published here for the first time. Editor Robert Galois provides extensive annotations, along with an introductory essay addressing the geopolitical context of the voyage and the intellectual background that shaped the writing of the journal. Galois supplements Colnett’s writings with extracts from a seco …
McGowan's War
Could a horde of American miners have delivered British Columbia into the hands of the United States in 1859? In McGowan's War, Donald J. Hauka argues that the new colony was a rifle shot away from war and annexation during the fateful winter of 1859, when the British Crown could barely control 30,000 politically divided American miners camped the …
When Coal Was King
The town of Ladysmith was one of the most important coal-mining communities on Vancouver Island during the early twentieth century. The Ladysmith miners had a reputation for radicalism and militancy and engaged in bitter struggles for union recognition and economic justice, most notably the Great Strike of 1912-14. This strike, one of the longest a …
Edenbank
A richly illustrated chronicle that captures more than a century of life on a landmark Fraser Valley farm. This fascinating account details farming methods of a bygone era and all the toil, triumph and tragedy behind the establishment of a championship dairy herd.
When Allen Casey Wells passed through the valley of the Chilliwack River en route to t …
Cassiar
For four decades--1952 to 1992--the town of Cassiar thrived in the northern wilderness. Spawned by the post-World War II demand for asbestos and killed, in part, by the growing concerns over asbestosis, the story of Cassiar is the story of the the quintessential company town. People of diverse backgrounds find themselves thrown together in the wild …
Box of Treasures or Empty Box?
Over twenty years ago, Aboriginal and Treaty Rights were included in Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982. They provided the basis for recognition of the unique status of Indigenous Peoples within Canada. After four first ministers' conferences on Aboriginal Constitutional Matters failed to produce any substantial agreement between Indigenous P …
Chretien and Canadian Federalism
Constitutionalist Ted McWhinney draws on his extensive experience in the workings of our federal system to discuss the need for modernization and updating to meet the radically new demands of the plural, multicultural Canada of the 21st century. His focus is on law-in-action - the "living law" of contemporary intergovernmental practice - rather tha …
Parties Long Estranged
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 …
Game in the Garden
The shared use of wild animals has helped to determine social relations between Native peoples and newcomers. In later settlement periods, controversy about subsistence hunting and campaigns of local conservation associations drew lines between groups in communities, particularly Native peoples, immigrants, farmers, and urban dwellers. In addition …
