New Books in Canadian Studies

Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years. The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast: An Environmental Histo...

Today I talked to Lawrence B. A. Hatter about his book, Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood (University of Virginia Press, 2016). Citizens of Convenience documents how traders in the northern borderlands of the early American Republic constantly shifted sides between British and American nationalities for their own benefit. Or, at very least, the fear that this was...

In Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities (University of North Carolina Press—Chapel Hill & The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2019), Andrew Newman, Professor of English at Stony Brook University, analyzes depictions of reading, writing, and recollecting texts in Indian captivity narratives. While histories of literacy and colonialism have emp...

Today we are joined by Stephen Hardy, retired professor of kinesiology and affiliate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, and Andrew Holman, professor of history at and the director of Canadian studies at Bridgewater State University. Hardy and Holman are the co-authors of Hockey: A Global History (University of Illinois Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the popul...

As they explored and struggled to establish settlements in what they called ‘new found lands’, the encounter with the peoples of those lands deeply affected how the British saw themselves. From the onset of colonisation, exotic visitors appeared in London. We recognise their names: Pocahontas, Manteo, Squanto. If you look carefully, they are a constant presence: in the decorative cartouches of 17t...

In Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet(University of Nebraska Press, 2017), author Rosalyn LaPier, an associate professor in environmental studies at the University of Montana, complicates several narratives about Native people and the nonhuman world. Rather than “living in harmony with nature,” as stereotyped by the ecological Indian mythos, t...

With its long and well-documented history, Prince Edward Island makes a compelling case study for thousands of years of human interaction with a specific ecosystem. The pastoral landscapes, red sandstone cliffs, and small fishing villages of Canada’s “garden province” are appealing because they appear timeless, but they are as culturally constructed as they are shaped by the ebb and flow of the ti...

The story of popular entertainment in American immigrant communities is only just beginning to be told. Chinatown Opera Theater in North America by Nancy Yunhwa Rao from University of Illinois Press (2017) addresses the history of Cantonese Opera performed in Chinatowns in cities across North America with a primary focus on San Francisco, New York City, and Vancouver during the 1920s. Using a weal...

It's been called the first Internet. In the nineteenth century, the telegraph spun a world wide web of cables and poles, carrying electronic signals with unprecedented speed. In order to connect the entire American continent, however, the telegraph had to cross western territory, which brought a host of challenges, conflicts, and uncertainties. What happened when the telegraph crossed the Mississi...

At the dawn of the radio age in the 1920s, Frederick Du Vernet—Anglican archbishop and self-declared scientist—announced a psychic channel by which minds could telepathically communicate across distance. Pamela E. Klassen retalls Du Vernet’s imaginative experiment in her newest book, The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Following D...

Kate Fullagar's and Michael A. McDonnell's edited volume Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) reimagines the Age of Revolution from the perspective of indigenous peoples. Rather than treating indigenous peoples as distant and passive players in the political struggles of the time, this book argues that they helped create and exploit the...

In his new book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands(Texas A&M University Press, 2017), Brenden W. Rensink asks the question "How do national borders affect and react to Native identity?" To answer this question he compares indigenous peoples who traversed North American borders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--emphasizing migrations of...

After being exiled from their native Jamaica in 1795, the Trelawney Town Maroons endured in Nova Scotia and then in Sierra Leone. In Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone (Yale University Press, 2018), Ruma Chopra demonstrates how the unlikely survival of this community of escaped slaves reveals the contradictions of slavery and the complexities...

Don Akenson, who is Douglas Professor of Canadian and Colonial History at Queen’s University, Ontario, is one of the most eminent scholars of Irish history. Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2018; McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018) is the second of a projected three-book series of monographs that will...

In his Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Allan Greer, Canada Research Chair in Colonial North America at McGill University in Montréal, examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexic...

In When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), André Magnan connects the cultivation of wheat on the Canadian prairies to the consumption of bread in Britain. Using the concept of a “food regime” as a theoretical frame, Magnan identifies three broad periods of stability in the relationship between Canadian wheat and British brea...

How do unions and ideas around labor compare between the U.S. and Canada? And how did they come to be as they are today? In his new book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Barry Eidlin uses a variety of sources, including archives, to construct a comprehensive picture of the historical development of labor and unions in both countries. The...

What do Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Canadian popular culture have in common? This is the question that Mark A. McCutcheon seeks to answer in his new book, The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein and the Discourse of Technology, published in 2018 by Athabasca University Press. In this unique and penetrating analysis, McCutcheon argues tha...

Recent historical scholarship stresses the transnational linkages between movements to restrict Asian migration in the Anglophone world. David Atkinson’s The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States (UNC Press, 2016) offers an important revision to this literature by examining legal and social responses to Japanese and South Asian mobility i...

Mark G. Hanna offers a unique perspective on the roles played by piracy in the formation of the British colonial project. In Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570 to 1740 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2015), Hanna weaves a fascinating tale from legal and commercial sources to illustrate ways that the English g...

The story of the American West as it is often told typically involves Spanish, British, and American Empires struggling with Indigenous people for control of the vast territory lands and riches from the Mississippi to the Pacific. After the seventeenth century, French colonists and French-speaking Metis are often relegated to the role of bit players in this tale. Songs Upon the Rivers: The Buried...

Embracing a multi-perspectival authorial voice, Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2017), tells the story of the “last and largest” asylum in the British Commonwealth. From its founding in the 1920s until the age of deinstitutionalization, Weyburn Mental Hospital... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit me...

Sam White’s brand new book A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (Harvard University Press, 2017) turns the tales we learned in grade school about early European colonization of North America upside-down. In the last decades of the 16th and first decades of the 17th century, three empires—Spain, France and England—each sought to establish new colonial project...

In the twenty first century, violence at work is often described in the context of a lone employee “snapping” and harming coworkers or management. In his new book, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960-1980 (University of Illinois Press/UBC Press, 2017), Jeremy Milloy argues that violence in the workplace has a much deeper and more complicated history,...

In his new book, The Search for a New National Identity: The Rise of Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1890s-1970s (Peter Lang Publishing, 2016), Jatinder Mann, an assistant professor of history at Hong Kong Baptist University, offers a comparative look at the policies and politics of multiculturalism in Canada and Australia. He explores how the two countries navigated the transition from...