Francis M. Carroll, A Good and Wise Measure: The Search for the Canadian-American Boundary, 1783-1842 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).A Good and Wise Measure is a meticulous and thorough examination of the political dynamics and relationships between Great Britain and the United States that led to the creation of the Canadian-American border. Through compelling characterizations of the

Stephen High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North Americas Rust Belt, 1969-1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).Steven Highs imaginative comparison of the distinctive impact of deindustrialization in the Midwestern region of the United States and southern Ontario during the early post-industrial era is a compelling and readable book. His rich oral testimony supplements an extensive secondary

Sharon A. Roger Hepburn, Crossing the Border: A Free Black Community in Canada (Urbana et Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2007)(Urbana and Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2007)Sharon Hepburn’s Crossing the Border is an eloquent and exhaustively researched history of the free-black planned community of Buxton, Ontario. Her richly-textured story touches on the transatlantic currents of abolitionism and the transborder activism

John J. Bukowczyk, Nora Faires, David R. Smith, and Randy William Widdis. Permeable Border: The Great Lakes Basin as Transnational Region, 1650-1990 (University of Pittsburgh Press and University of Calgary Press, 2005).Among a strong field of entries, Permeable Border stood out as a particularly successful effort to push forward understandings of Canadian-American borderlands via emerging ideas of transnationalism.  Taking

David L. Preston, The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667-1783.Putting community relations at the heart of this clearly written, innovative study, David L. Preston analyzes intercultural contact among settlers – native and European – on the Iroquoian frontier. The quotidian challenges of daily chores and sociability testify to

Karen A. Balcom, The Traffic in Babies: Cross-Border Adoption and Baby-Selling between the United States and Canada, 1930-1973 Over the twentieth century, many American couples contracted with Canadian agencies to adopt Canadian-born infants, a north-to-south flow of children that was so lightly regulated that unscrupulous operators of maternity homes for unwed mothers engaged in a

Lissa Wadewitz, The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish SeaLissa Wadewitz’s The Nature of Borders illuminates beautifully the variables that affected the salmon population of the transnational Pacific Northwest during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She finds that—rather than mere urbanization or industrial innovation—it was the exploitation of the porous US-Canada boundary that

Robert MacDougall, The People’s Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.MacDougall deploys comparative and transnational theoretical frames to trace the struggle between local telephone operators and the Bell system that eventually (but not inevitably) came to dominate telecommunications in both Canada and the US. The author’s great

Ann M. Little, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright, Yale Univ. Press, 2018 In a large pool of excellent submissions, Ann Little’s The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright stood out for its narrative grace and methodological innovation. Little makes a signal contribution to the history of early America by tracing border crossings involving indigenous nations and what would