Soviet Princeton
The winter of 1932-33 saw the small interior town of Princeton, BC divided. Charges of outside agitators and charges by mounted provincial police into picket lines of workers, Ku Klux Klan threats and a beating and cross-burning, the kidnapping of legendary labour organizer Slim Evans who was bundled onto the next train out of town (though he retur …
Rebel Life
Extensively revised throughout and including a chapter of new material, Rebel Life chronicles the life of labour organizer, revolutionary, anarchist and labour spy Robert Gosden. Mark Leier's revisions incorporate new information about Gosden's career that has come to light since the first edition was published in 1999. Canada's west coast was rife …
Gardens Aflame
Accustomed to the dark, dripping stands of Douglas-fir, spruce and hemlock that blanketed the Hudson's Bay Company outposts on the remote western coast of the "new World," the first Europeans were surely startled to see the wide-open landscapes of the Garry oak meadows they encountered on Southern Vancouver Island — landscapes that might have rem …
Along the No. 20 Line
In Along the No. 20 Line, Rolf Knight takes the reader on a tour through working-class East Vancouver of a century ago. Knight's "through-line" is literally a line: the old No. 20 streetcar route that ran between downtown Vancouver and the present-day neighbourhood of the Pacific National Exhibition. From 1892 to 1949, when it was shut down and rep …
City of Love and Revolution
City of Love and Revolution takes readers back to Vancouver in the sixties, the decade when everything changed for the Baby Boomer generation. Dozens of rarely seen photos accompany Lawrence Aronsen's account of the tumultuous decade, bringing to life the sights, the sounds, and the passions of the era of psychedelia and free love, when for a brief …
Clam Gardens
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 …
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 …
This Ragged Place
In this groundbreaking portrait of the uneasy state of the province, Terry Glavin's lyrical narratives reveal the fibre of a British Columbia rarely glimpsed. With journalistic acumen, he surveys a landscape of inexorable suburban sprawl, dismantled railway lines, scapegoating of Native fisheries, and strange goings?on at Gustafsen Lake. A new bree …
Red Laredo Boots
As a girl growing up in British Columbia, and now as a mother with a family of her own, Theresa Kishkan has travelled and camped the length and breadth of the province. In these lyrical essays describing her journeys, Kishkan brings to life a landscape impregnated with history and memory, from the Skeena Valley in the north through the dry plateau …
Indians at Work
Indians at Work provides an historical background to native labour in BC from the Gold Rush to the beginning of the Great Depression. It counters the common misconception that native people responded to European settlement and industrial development by retreating to a reserve existence. Evidence amassed from logging, transport, construction, longsh …
High Slack
"Engaging ... Williams writes sensitively and with a minimum of academic jargon ... successfully reveals some of the anxieties of the colonial project in British Columbia without losing sight of the fact that the war, far from being a mere anecdote on the colonial stage, was the 'thin edge of the wedge' of the latent violence that has always simmer …
All Possible Worlds
British Columbia — the last temperate part of the New World to be mapped — has long conjured up images of Utopia, a word that comes from the Greek "no place." Indeed, utopian experiments started springing up soon after the first European explorers passed through. In All Possible Worlds, Justine Brown explores the attraction BC holds for utopian …
Where the Fraser River Flows
White Hoods
White Hoods is the first book about the Hooded Empire in Canada. Award?winning journalist and author Julian Sher traces the Canadian Ku Klux Klan from its birth in the early 1920s, through its powerful influence within Saskatchewan's Conservative party in the 1920s and 1930s, to its renaissance under James McQuirter in the 1980s. McQuirter led the …