Atlantic CanadaJerry 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 has written a lively and fascinating book that opens up the relatively unknown world of 18th century Newfoundland. Bannister shatters myths of isolation and the despotic nature of naval

Atlantic CanadaPeter Pope. Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press and Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2004)Writing with a masterful clarity that belies the complexity of both his topic and his methodology, Peter Pope effectively re-positions Newfoundland in the socioeconomic landscape of seventeenth-century

The NorthJohn Sandlos, Hunters At The Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories.  University of British Columbia Press, 2007Hunters At The Margin is a richly detailed, well researched, and insightfully argued book.  John Sandlos convincingly demonstrates the Canadian government’s determination to colonize the northern landscape, and Canada’s Northern Aboriginal people in an effort to

AtlanticRusty Bittermann.  Rural Protest on Prince Edward Island: From British Colonization to the Escheat Movement, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2006.To an historiography habitually accused of insularity, Rusty Bittermann has contributed an innovative new study of an old theme. His account of rural protest on Prince Edward Island during the period 1763 to 1842 not only

AtlanticN.E.S. Griffiths. From Migrant to Acadian: A North American Border People, 1604-1755. Montréal and/et Kingston, Canadian Institute for Research on Public Policy Administration, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005.Naomi Griffiths has long been recognized as the foremost authority writing on pre-Deportation Acadia in English, and the winner of this year’s Atlantic region CLIO clearly stands as her masterwork. From

Atlantic CanadaBéatrice Craig. Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists: The Rise of a Market Culture in Eastern Canada.Béatrice Craig’s work on the Madawaska district and her explorations of economic life in rural communities are well-known for their sensitive explorations of domestic production, gender, inter-generational transmission of wealth, and other topics. These themes and others are fully explicated

AtlanticJohn Reid, with contributions by Emerson W. Baker, Essays on Northeastern North America: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.John Reid’s Northeastern North America: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries stands as a record of how his scholarship has dramatically changed the historical questions pertaining to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic region and beyond. The three essays in Part One: Colonial Habitation, demonstrate the

Atlantic CanadaDean Bavington. Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse.With lucid and highly accessible prose, Dean Bavington offers an insightful, and often disturbing, explanation of how “the northern cod was scientifically managed out of existence” (2). Bavington traces the history of managerial ecology and its hegemony in environmental discourse and practices of the twentieth

AtlanticPhilip Girard, Lawyers and Legal Culture in British North America: Beamish Murdoch of Halifax. In this nontraditional biography of Beamish Murdock, Philip Girard immerses us in the life of a colonial lawyer in pre-confederation Nova Scotia.  It is an insightful recreation of Murdoch’s world, contextualized within the development of the legal profession and a broader colonial legal

AtlanticWiliam C. Wicken. The colonization of Mi’kmaw memory and history, 1794-1928 : The King v. Gabriel Sylliboy. (University of Toronto Press, 2012).In this engaging and inventive study, Wicken explores the “living tradition” of a treaty relationship across some 200 years. His narrative hook is a 1928 appeal of the conviction of Gabriel Sylliboy, Grand Chief of

 ATLANTICGregory M.W. Kennedy, Something of a Peasant Paradise? Comparing Rural Societies in Acadie and the Loudunais, 1604-1755 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014).               Gregory Kennedy’s Something of a Peasant Paradise? is a significant achievement that will shift the historiography of Acadie and New France. The Acadians, descendants of a few hundred seventeenth-century French settlers, inhabited

ATLANTICRenée N. Lafferty,The Guardianship of Best Interests. Institutional Care for the Children of the Poor in Halifax, 1850-1960.        The public and private institutions that have played a role of guardian of the poor children of Halifax were guided by what they believed to be the “best interests of the child.” On the other

Raymond B. Blake, Lions or Jellyfish: Newfoundland-Ottawa Relations since 1957. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.Lions or Jellyfish is a polished investigation of the often-strained relationship between Ottawa and Newfoundland and Labrador. While many elements of this story are well known, Raymond Blake brings a sophisticated analysis and a well-constructed narrative.As Blake shows, Confederation has never been a

ATLANTICJeffers Lennox, Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690-1763. University of Toronto Press, 2017.Homelands and Empires offers a richly detailed and methodologically innovative account of the struggle to define and control the territory we now envision as “Atlantic Canada.” Exploring the power inherent to both space

Ronald Rudin, Kouchibouguac: Removal, Resistance, and Remembrance at a Canadian National Park. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.Ronald Rudin’s exceptional narrative skills draw the reader into the story of the largest forced removal of people – and one of the last – to create a national park. Most of the 1200 people removed to create Kouchibouguac National

ATLANTIC REGIONPatrick Mannion, A Land of Dreams: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Irish in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Maine, 1880-1923 Patrick Mannion’s book compares three Irish-Catholic diasporic communities in port cities across the transborder northeast: St. John’s, Newfoundland; Halifax, Nova Scotia; Portland, Maine.  Joining such scholars as Mark McGowan, John Belcham, Willeen Keough, Carolyn Lambert, and

Atlantic Region Bonnie Morgan. Ordinary Saints: Women, Work, and Faith in Newfoundland. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. Ordinary Saints is a richly detailed study of lived religiosity among working-class Anglican women in the parishes of Foxtrap and Hopewell in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Using an impressive array of primary material — including private diaries, published journals,

Atlantic Region Atlantic Provinces Andrea Procter. A Long Journey: Residential Schools in Labrador and Newfoundland. St John’s, NL: ISER Books, 2020. Andrea Procter’s remarkable book, A Long Journey: Residential Schools in Labrador and Newfoundland, and part of the province’s Healing and Commemoration project, is a model of engaged collaborative scholarship with the Inuit, NunatuKavut, and

Atlantic Region Ruth Compton Brouwer,  All Things in Common: A Canadian Family and Its Island Utopia.  University of Toronto Press, 2021. In 1909, an extended family of Comptons, with residential hubs in Belle River and Bangor, Prince Edward Island, pooled their resources and began operating a cluster of communally owned businesses, subsequently incorporated as “B.