"To glimpse this diversity is to feel some of the meaning of being Canadian."?R. Yorke Edwards
R. Yorke Edwards was a pioneer in the field of heritage interpretation in Canada. First with BC Parks and then with the Canadian Wildlife Service, throughout the 1960s Edwards developed an approach to the interpretation of natural and cultural history wi …

In the past two decades, Québec has been racked by a series of controversies in which the religiosity of migrants and other minorities has been represented as a threat to the province’s once staunchly Catholic, and now resolutely secular, identity. In Moments of Crisis, Ian Morrison locates these controversies and debates within a long history o …

BC Book Prize winner (Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Prize)

In his latest book, bestselling author, musician, and cultural historian Aaron Chapman looks back at the most famous music entertainment venues in Vancouver, a city that's transforming so fast it has somehow lost some of its favourite nightspots along the way. These are the places locals a …

When Great Britain and its dominions declared war on Germany in August 1914, they were faced with the formidable challenge of transforming masses of untrained citizen-soldiers at home and abroad into competent, coordinated fighting divisions. The Empire on the Western Front focuses on the development of two units, Britain’s 62nd (2nd West Riding) …

Established narratives portray Indigenous unity as emerging solely in response to the political agenda of the settler state. But unity has long shaped the modern Indigenous political movement. With Indigenous perspectives in the foreground, Assembling Unity explores the relationship between global political ideologies and pan-Indigenous politics in …

The vivid, personal accounts of four women who lived and travelled as settlers in early British Columbia.

??a cloud passing away from the face of the moon revealed a band of wild horses bearing down upon us at a full gallop. As they came near and saw us they divided into two groups, passing by on either side. Had the moon not come out they would pro …

A vivid account of the life and times of the larger-than-life Canadian hero who played a major role in the peaceful development of western Canada.

A descendant of warriors, chiefs, and military men of the Clan MacLeod, James A.F. Macleod led an adventurous life that took him from his birthplace on Scotland's Isle of Skye to the Canadian west. After …

The year is 1938—two years since Sophie, Molly, Mark, Harriet, Leticia, and Posy made international headlines when they uncover the buried treasure of the notorious Brother XII. Since then, life has been decidedly un-exciting for the adventure-loving crew, who feel more at home on the rolling deck of a sailboat than in their stuffy boarding schoo …

The inspiring true story of how one organization has tried to alleviate the struggles faced by indigenous peoples in Canada by building houses and developing livable communities for those in desperate need.

The people who were living here on Turtle Island (North America) before us have been pushed aside from their own land for decades. Mining compa …

Shortlisted for two 2016 BC Book Prizes
Finalist for the 2016 Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing

A compelling history of the earliest explorers to Vancouver Island, brought to life with illustrations and maps.

In 1842, when explorer James Douglas encountered the rugged natural paradise that would become Vancouver Island, he describ …

Where Mountains Meet the Sea commemorates the 125th anniversary of the District of North Vancouver's incorporation as a municipality. Combining hundreds of illustrations with the personal accounts of residents and a lively text, the book presents the story of North Vancouver in all its colour and complexity.

Instead of a conventional chronological …

“A story seemingly drawn out of a Hollywood action script…Gripping stuff.”—Canada’s History

Just before midnight on February 13, 1950, three engines of a US Air Force B-36 intercontinental bomber caught fire over Canada’s northwest coast. The crew jumped, and the plane ditched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Almost four years later, the …

At the age of sixteen, Ernest Lamarque travelled from England to North America, to begin a life as a Victorian adventurer. Born in 1879 and orphaned at age twelve, he would go on to become an artist, a writer and a surveyor, creating some of the earliest visual records of the people of remote regions of Canada. At seventeen, Lamarque started workin …

The 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Vancouver changed both the city and world sport forever. The Games will always be remembered for the "Miracle Mile," the much-anticipated showdown between the first two men to break the four-minute barrier, England's Roger Bannister and Australia's John Landy. But as the press focused the world's at …

In this study of Emilio Picariello (aka Emperor Pick) Adriana Davies paints a vivid portrait of what life was like at the turn of the 20th century in the Canadian west for Italian immigrants, with opportunity hampered by bigotry. Despite this, Emilio managed to build quite the empire, with both legal and illegal business.

His predilection for runni …

In a follow-up to his well-received Voices of British Columbia, Robert Budd returns with more captivating tales of the province's pioneering past in the very words of the people who lived them.

Between 1959 and 1966, the late CBC Radio journalist Imbert Orchard travelled across British Columbia with recording engineer Ian Stephen, conducting intervi …

The Tse-loh-ne from the Sekani First Nation were known as “The People at the End of the Rocks.” This small band of people lived and thrived in one of BC’s most challenging and remote areas, 1600 kilometres north of Prince George in the Rocky Mountain Trench. They were isolated and nomadic, and survived by following the seasons, walking hundre …

The events at Oka in 1990 saw the might of the Canadian Armed Forces in the service of the governments of both Quebec and Canada confront some 40 armed Mohawk “Warriors” who were defending their local community’s resistance against a further colonial encroachment on their native lands. The events of that summer have etched themselves indelib …

The first-ever synthesis of both the patriotic and the problematic in wartime Canada, Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers shows how moral and social changes, and the fears they generated, precipitated numerous, and often contradictory, legacies in law and society. From labour conflicts, to the black market, to prostitution, and beyond, Keshen acknowledge …

I was driving back at night from Fulford, having done a house call. There was a guy lying beside the road. He was big, but I was fairly strong at that time, so I put him in the car and got to the hospital, then phoned John to come and help me. The guy had a completely rigid belly. He'd been drinking--I could smell that. So I thought I'd better try …

In 1889, in an obscure corner of the British Empire called New Westminster, a few dedicated lacrosse players and sportsmen put together a team of world-beaters. In today's era of manufactured teams with generic names, the New Westminster Salmonbellies stand with the old guard: the Yankees, the Canadiens, the Celtics and the Packers. The Salmonbelli …

What if Mike McCardell--beloved reporter of glasses half-full and the brighter side of life--is actually dead... or, more specifically, un-dead? Suppose he has continued to walk among the living ever since he was a sapper with the famous detachment of Royal Engineers who came to British Columbia in 1859 and was known as Jock Linn--the namesake for …

A startling and unexpectedly rich collection of images from Vancouver's pre-gentrification past.

Vancouver may be a youngster among major cities, but it has a rich and beguiling history. Past Tense Vancouver blogger Lani Russwurm is a regular contributor to the popular website Vancouver Is Awesome; in this fascinating book, produced in conjunction w …

Lost in North America is a caustic, humourous exploration of a Canada we don’t often talk about-a collective mental creation of great charm and complexity, hovering precariously somewhere in Video North America, in disguise as the most successful colony in the history of the world. Lost in North America is a personal, idiosyncratic tour of the co …

Scholars often accept without question that the Indian Act (1876) criminalized First Nations. Drawing on court files, police and penitentiary records, and newspaper accounts from the Saskatchewan region of the North-West Territories between 1870 and 1905, Shelley Gavigan argues that the notion of criminalization captures neither the complexities of …

In 1858, some 30,000 gold seekers stampeded to the Fraser River. Scores perished during the gruelling journey, but some made their fortune and many pressed on northwards to the creeks of the Cariboo. Originally compiled by Art Downs, founder of Heritage House, this is a vivid and detailed account of the first gold strikes, the miners who made them …

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 …

La Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Nouveau-Brunswick, fondée en 1913, est la deuxième plus ancienne fédération provinciale du travail au Canada. Son histoire remonte aux premières campagnes en faveur de l’indemnisation des accidents du travail et de la reconnaissance syndicale, et elle se poursuit dans les plus récentes lu …

History in BC grows profusely and luxuriantly, but with odd undergrowth," observed historian J.M.S. Careless many years ago. This claim is fully borne out by this impressive anthology of some of the province's most distinguished historians, geographers, and writers gleaned from over forty years of British Columbia's leading scholarly journal, BC St …

Trucks are everywhere--crowding the highways, lining up for the ferries, roaring down dusty logging roads--and yet trucking is often left off the list when talk turns to British Columbia's major industries. It shouldn't be, as this gorgeous new illustrated history celebrating the BC Trucking Association's 100th anniversary shows. With annual revenu …

Fifteen years before the 1858 Fraser River gold rush, a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk named Alexander Caulfield Anderson threaded his way through mountain passes and down rapids-filled rivers in search of a safe all-British route through the mountains that separated the HBC fort at Kamloops from Fort Langley on the Pacific coast. Eventually, Anderso …

A Lonely Eminence is the second of two volumes tracing the public life and times of Clifford Sifton, one of Canada's most controversial politicians. Volume II examines Sifton's life and work in the twentieth century, especially his political activities. Sifton's involvement in the early administration of the Yukon Territory is analyzed, as is his c …

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 …

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 …

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 …

The federal Department of Justice was established by John A. Macdonald as part of the Conservative party's program for reform of the parliamentary system following Confederation. Among other things, it was charged with establishing national institutions such as the Supreme Court and the North West Mounted Police and with centralizing the penitentia …

Yorkshire-born Francis Mawson Rattenbury (1867-1935) emigrated to British Columbia as a young architect in 1892. Within months of his arrival in Victoria he launched his brilliant, if abbreviated, career by winning an international competition to design the legislative buildings. While his life was marred by controversy, scandal and, in the end, tr …

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 …

The Catholic Congregation of the Sisters of St. Ann had a humble start in Quebec in 1850 and at first concentrated on teaching locally. But when Bishop Modeste Demers asked for help at his West Coast diocese, the Sisters said yes. At a time in history when most people were born and raised in the same area in which they would live and die, these wom …

The story of the expansion of civilization into the wilderness continues to shape perceptions of how Aboriginal people became part of nations such as Canada. Patricia McCormack subverts this narrative of modernity by examining nation building from the perspective of a northern community and its residents. Fort Chipewyan, she argues, was never an is …