Ivana Caccia. Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime: Shaping Citizenship Policy, 1939-1945 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). Ivana Caccia’s Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime: Shaping Citizenship Policy 1939-1945 stands out for the quality of its scholarship, the suppleness of its arguments, and the contribution it makes to our understanding of the transition towards a

Bruce Curtis. Ruling By Schooling Quebec: Conquest to Liberal Governmentality – A Historical Sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Ruling by Schooling Quebec is an innovative and forceful examination of the links between education, power, and governance from 1759 to 1841. Meticulously and exhaustively researched, it examines the attempts of colonial administrators and their local allies

David Wilson, Thomas Darcy McGee, Volume 2: The Extreme Moderate, 1857-1868. (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). David Wilson’s account of Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Canadian years examines the character of a man and of a country, culminating in Canada’s birth and McGee’s murder. Wilson’s McGee was a person with a background of extremes who forged

Dimitry Anastakis, Autonomous State: The Struggle for a Canadian Car Industry from OPEC to Free Trade (UTP, 2013). Anastakis’ study of the Canadian automotive industry in the last third of the twentieth century provides a richly detailed and nuanced examination of the impact of globalization and neo-liberalism on the Canadian state.  This is a timely book

Ian Mosby, Food Will Win the War: the Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front. UBC Press, 2014. Food Will Win the War is an incredibly rich work that pushes us to rethink the interventionist state during WWII. It is a reconsideration of the home front that touches on everything from the politics of

Mark Kuhlberg, In the Power of the Government: The Rise and Fall of Newsprint in Ontario, 1894-1932. UTP, 2015.   In a forcefully argued study of the relationship between the provincial state and the pulp and paper manufacturing industry in Ontario between 1894 and 1932, Mark Kuhlberg challenges the long-standing thesis of H.Viv Nelles that public ownership of crown

Paul Litt, Trudeaumania. Vancouver, UBC Press, 2016. Paul Litt’s remarkable book, Trudeaumania, examines the role played by the media in the political ascent of Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the later 1960s. Litt adopts a political culture approach in his analysis of the Trudeaumania phenomenon. Drawing on a rich documentary source base, and developing an analysis that deepens as

E.A. Heaman,  Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. This book makes an original and compelling contribution to our knowledge of how the Canadian fiscal regime was created, reformed, and received by the State, one both framing and framed by the complex interplay of

Michael Dawson, Selling Out or Buying In?: Debating Consumerism in Vancouver and Victoria, 1945-1985 Buying In or Selling Out?  is a short book on an apparently small topic that has something big to say about the historical origins of our contemporary politics. Dawson’s topic is the prolonged struggle over shopping hours from the 1940s to

Tina Loo. Moved by the State, Forced Relocation and Making a Good Life in Postwar Canada. UBC Press, 2019. Moved by the State is a masterful work. It is as impressive in scope as it is in the intellectual heft of its argument.  Drawing on case studies from the Arctic to the Atlantic, to the Pacific and

Heidi Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance. Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2020. In Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance, Heidi Bohaker draws on a diverse and fragmented source base to produce a fascinating and original account of the principles and system of Anishinaabe governance dating to time immemorial and which

  Benjamin Hoy, A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands (OUP, 2021) Sweeping in its temporal and geographic scope, A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford) offers an audacious intervention in the history of the border between Canada and the United States. By placing