Cole Harris, Making Native Space. Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia. UBC Press, 2002.Historical geographer Cole Harris’s judicious and compelling examination of the history of British Columbian Native land policy uses impeccable methodology in a traditional way to integrate recent post-modern and post-colonial ideas into an analysed body of work. A masterful work of historical geography

Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population. State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840-1875. University of Toronto Press, 2001.This is a fascinating study on the social and political aspects of the Canada census, both before and after Confederation. It balances history as both theory and practice, from the local census takers random observations, to a national

Jerry Bannister. The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699-1832. (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History / University of Toronto Press, 2003)Jerry Bannister’s gracefully written The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699-1832 is an ambitious and engaging reinterpretation of eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Newfoundland history. A significant contribution

Dominique Deslandres. Croire et faire croire. Les missions françaises au XVIIe siécle (1600-1650). (Paris, Fayard, 2003)Dominique Deslandres book, entitled Croire et faire croire : Les missions françaises au XVIIe siècle, deals with the evangelical work undertaken by the major French missionary orders. The authors intention with this book was nothing less than to revisit the history of the

Tina Loo. States of Nature. Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century. Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2006.In a lively and admirable prose, Tina Loo describes the awakening of sensitivity towards wildlife conservation in Canada from the end of the 19th Century up to the 1970s. Through her examination of the way management and preservation of

Michael Gauvreau. The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931-1970. Montréal and/et Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005.In this highly original study, Michael Gauvreau, challenges much of the accepted wisdom on Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. Until now the Quiet Revolution has been portrayed as an essentially political movement in which secularists came to power because a monolithic and increasingly

Ian McKay. Reasoning Otherwise. Leftists and the People’s Enlightenment in Canada, 1890-1920. Toronto: Between The Lines, 2008.Rather than examine the history of the groups, parties and organizations of the “first formation” of socialists, as other historians before him have done, Ian McKay, examines the social, economic, cultural and intellectual context of their emergence. It is

Franca Iacovetta.  Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006.In this lively, engaged and probing analysis, Iacovetta explores the interaction between immigration agents, social workers, journalists and the range of other Canadians involved in reception work and the European immigrants who arrived here after the second world war. Gatekeepers links the high politics

Michel Ducharme. Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des Révolutions atlantiques (1776-1838).  In this original and provocative book, Michel Ducharme situates political debate in the Canadas before 1840 in different conceptions of liberty, both hostile to absolutism, embedded in the political philosophy of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Embedded in a thorough knowledge of political philosophy and

Béatrice Craig. Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists. The Rise of a Market Culture in Eastern Canada.Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists represents a major and original contribution to the social and economic history of Canada. This work, which looks at the emergence of a capitalistic economy in the upper St. John River Valley, asks questions fundamental to our

François-Marc Gagnon with Nancy Senior and Réal Ouellet, eds., The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011In this stunningly beautiful volume F-M Gagnon and his collaborators have brought together two texts held in geographically very distant repositories, barely known even by specialists, one without a known author and the other misattributed. The

William C. Wicken, The Colonization of Mi’kmaw Memory and History, 1794-1928: The King v. Gabriel Sylliboy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.This finely crafted and tightly argued study of memory and meaning, written in a style that is spare and clean, makes imaginative use of a wide range of existing sources to answer innovative epistemological questions

James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. Regina: University of Regina Press, 2013.In this sweeping and disturbing account, James Daschuk chronicles the role that epidemic disease, global trade, the changing environment and government policy had on the lives of Aboriginals living on the Canadian Plains from the early

Jean Barman, French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest.  Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014.This grand narrative of a history long lost powerfully illuminates the influence that  French Canadians and their Indigenous partners had in “the making” of the Pacific Northwest during the 19th through the 21st centuries. By “listening to back stories,” and by

Robert C.H. Sweeny, Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?  Montreal, 1819-1849.  Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.In Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?, Robert Sweeny offers an erudite yet also passionate argument for the re-thinking of Canadian history. In this provocative book, Sweeny answers the question Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?, engaging with historians who have examined the history of

Sarah Carter, Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016.This book explains the formation of the Canadian West as a British-Canadian colony and reveals how homesteading denied property rights to women.  Throughout, it offers incisive reconsiderations of what it means to be ‘Canadian,’ demonstrating

Shirley Tillotson, Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy Shirley Tillotson’s Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy demonstrates how much historians stand to learn by exploring taxation and related fiscal measures. The “terrain of tax culture” is an integral site for the protest, resistance, defiance, and

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 diverse

Eric Reiter. Wounded Feelings: Litigating Emotions in Quebec, 1870-1950. UTP for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2019. Having our feelings hurt is something most people first encounter as very young children. In Wounded Feelings, Eric Reiter traces that intimate experience – given a more adult shape in forms such as shame, disgrace, bodily intrusion,

In Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory, Brittany Luby offers a vivid and timely illustration of the embodied legacies of settler colonialism on the bodies, lands, and lives of Indigenous peoples. Her analysis of the Treaty 3 region in Northwestern Ontario centres an area usually treated as peripheral in both official

Benjamin Hoy, A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border Across Indigenous Lands Benjamin Hoy’s A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands is at once wide-ranging and sharply conceived. Drawing on a wide range of written and oral archives, Hoy examines the physical, political, and cultural making of