Sir John A. Macdonald had been in politics for four decades and prime minister of Canada for three terms, but he'd never seen anything like the apocalyptic year of 1885.

The issues cascaded relentlessly: threats to the sovereignty of Canada from London and Washington; armed resistance in the North-West; the spectre of starvation among Indigenous peoples; financial crises that endangered the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR); protests over Chinese immigration to British Columbia; nationalist dissent in Quebec; a smallpox epidemic that would claim over 5,000 victims in Montreal; and fierce opposition to Macdonald's drive to expand the right to vote. It was a year like no other in Canadian history.

In this fascinating and authoritative study of a skilled politician at the peak of his powers, political historian Patrice Dutil shows how Macdonald navigated persistent threats to public order, anchored the stability of his government, and ensured the future of his still fragile nation.

What emerges is a compelling portrait of a man who, notwithstanding his personal failings and the sins of his times, was the most enlightened and constructive public figure of early Canadian history.

A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024

From the bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Esprit-Radisson

This is the story of the collision of two worlds. In the early 1600s, the Jesuits--the Catholic Church's most ferocious warriors for Christ--tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. At the centre of their campaign was missionary Jean de Brébeuf, a mystic who sought to die a martyr's death. He lived among a proud people who valued kindness and rights for all, especially women. In the end, Huronia was destroyed. Brébeuf became a Catholic saint, and the Jesuit's martyrdom became one of the founding myths of Canada.

In this first secular biography of Brébeuf, historian Mark Bourrie, bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, recounts the missionary's fascinating life and tells the tragic story of the remarkable people he lived among. Drawing on the letters and documents of the time--including Brébeuf's accounts of his bizarre spirituality--and modern studies of the Jesuits, Bourrie shows how Huron leaders tried to navigate this new world and the people struggled to cope as their nation came apart. Riveting, clearly told, and deeply researched, Crosses in the Sky is an essential addition to--and expansion of--Canadian history.

Sir John A. Macdonald had been in politics for four decades and prime minister of Canada for three terms, but he'd never seen anything like the apocalyptic year of 1885.

The issues cascaded relentlessly: threats to the sovereignty of Canada from London and Washington; armed resistance in the North-West; the spectre of starvation among Indigenous peoples; financial crises that endangered the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR); protests over Chinese immigration to British Columbia; nationalist dissent in Quebec; a smallpox epidemic that would claim over 5,000 victims in Montreal; and fierce opposition to Macdonald's drive to expand the right to vote. It was a year like no other in Canadian history.

In this fascinating and authoritative study of a skilled politician at the peak of his powers, political historian Patrice Dutil shows how Macdonald navigated persistent threats to public order, anchored the stability of his government, and ensured the future of his still fragile nation.

What emerges is a compelling portrait of a man who, notwithstanding his personal failings and the sins of his times, was the most enlightened and constructive public figure of early Canadian history.

Join us in these captivating tales of significant events and interesting characters from Canada's past!

Do you have a keen interest in Canadian history?

Do you want to learn about the historical figures and events that laid the foundations for modern-day Canada?

Are you looking for a guide that appreciates the diversity and complexity of Canadian history?

From indigenous beginnings and European explorations through Confederation and modern challenges - Canada has seen its share of diverse cultural, social, and political events - and this book will guide you through it all.

In this book, you will:

• Dive into the background of Canadian Indigenous communities.
• Learn about the role French explorer Jacques Cartier played in Canadian history.
• Explore the past of the Huron-Wendat people, their society, and their culture.
• Uncover the roots of French-Canadian identity, including their unique cultural heritage, language, and religion.
• Gain a better understanding of the Canadian Confederation from enchanting stories.
• Understand the excitement, challenges, and impacts of the Klondike Fever era.
• Learn about Canada's pivotal role and sacrifice in World War I.
• Explore riveting stories from the Avro Arrow Saga.
• Understand the public reaction resolution, as well as the immediate and long-term impact the October Crisis had on Canadian society, law, and politics.
• Read about how human rights and legislative change in Canada have evolved over recent years.

This book brings together captivating narratives from different eras of the country's history by illuminating key events and influential figures and offering a broad yet intimate understanding of Canada's evolution.

Local author Dennis Rizzo tells the fascinating and diverse history of Orillia, Ontario. First populated by the Huron, Iroquois and Chippewa Nations, Orillia is now a well-loved, year-round recreation destination. Its history is deeply tied to its water. Situated in the narrows where Lake Simcoe flows into Lake Couchiching, Orillia was a gathering place for centuries before Europeans used it to bring furs to market. Sir John Simcoe, first governor of Upper Canada, fostered permanent settlement of the area. A gateway to the Muskoka region, it has been home to lumber, manufacturing, and artistic endeavours. Today, summer cottagers and winter athletes alike enjoy the Sunshine City and its more than twenty annual festivals. Local author Dennis Rizzo tells the fascinating and diverse history of Orillia, Ontario.

The long-awaited, definitive, shocking history of SS Atlantic, the worst shipwreck in Nova Scotia's history, authored by the vessel's recognized authority.

In the pre-dawn hours of April 1, 1873 - as the lookouts looked, the steersman steered, and the captain slept - something was happening to the SS Atlantic. The tide had quietly carried the White Star Line ocean liner twelve miles off course, and land was closer than anybody realized?or was willing to believe.
The wreck of the SS Atlantic would become the worst transatlantic passenger ship disaster before Titanic, and although it happened almost 150 years ago, there are still many unanswered questions.
That is changing.
Ten years after co-authoring the most celebrated book to date on Nova Scotia's worst shipwreck, author Bob Chaulk has uncovered never-reported information that answers the question historians have been grappling with for over a century: why a state-of-the-art steamship, with all equipment in perfect working order, in good weather, and commanded by officers of the world's leading seafaring nation, ended up striking rock outside Halifax and sinking, resulting in some 550 deaths.
Over a five-year period, Chaulk tracked down many descendants of those on the scene and aboard the ship, patiently piecing their stories together to reveal a shocking conclusion.
This richly illustrated work, featuring maps and colour photos, includes many firsthand accounts from passengers, crew, officers, and local rescue people.

Step into the world of sagas, longships and enigmatic Norse explorers with Farley Mowat's captivating historical account, Westviking.

The Viking sagas speak of a land called Vinland, a place of abundant resources and possibilities. Nearly a thousand years after the events those tales describe, Farley Mowat sets out to decipher these ancient accounts and trace their path along the rugged coastlines of the North Atlantic.

In this celebrated classic first published in 1965, Mowat's immersive storytelling brings Viking culture to life as he tells the story of Viking settlement in Vinland--now thought to include areas of Newfoundland and New Brunswick--five hundred years before Christopher Columbus and John Cabot.

With the vivid prose that made him a bestselling author and beloved storyteller, Mowat follows the stories of Norsemen like Erik the Red, Leif Erikson, Bjarni Herjolfsson and Thorfinn Karlsefni, unravelling their struggles and triumphs as they set sail for the uncharted waters of the New World--then face the challenges of a new and unfamiliar land.

Meticulously researched and grippingly told, Mowat infuses his own adventurous spirit into the little-known story of the Viking culture that once took hold on the edges of North America.

Uncharted Waters

It's 1805 and André, now 16, desperately wants to paddle with French-Canadian canoe brigades-maybe his last chance. But choosing to tend to his ailing foster parents, he relinquishes his clerk's position at a fur trade post in the vast Canadian wilderness.

When a British officer taps him to organize and lead a single express canoe headed for a military post on Lake Huron and transport a small boy and his companion instead of trade goods, André leaps at the opportunity. He expects a simple journey-except that this late in the season few voyageurs are available. Except that water levels are much lower than he realized. Except that they're alone, without other canoes to rely on. And he's never led a brigade.

Uncharted Waters is André's third adventure-a teen battling the uncertainties along the rivers-and plumbing his own depths. Waters Like the Sky (Book 1) chronicles his entry into the fur trade to find a long-lost brother. In Treacherous Waters (Book 2), his literacy skills are in demand when a nearby trader dies and André must trek alone across a winter wilderness to head a post of experienced voyageurs.

2017 Robbie Robertson Dartmouth Book Award -- Shortlisted
Paul Chiasson reveals the possibility that early Chinese settlers landed in Cape Breton long before Europeans.

From the very beginning of the European Age of Discovery, Cape Breton was considered unusual. The history of the area even includes early references to the island having once been the land of the Chinese. In 1497, at least a century before any attempt at European settlement in the region, the explorer John Cabot had referred to Cape Breton as the Island of Seven Cities.

The indigenous people of the region, the Mi'kmaq, were the only aboriginal people of North America who had a written language when Europeans first arrived. This writing, clothing, and customs also suggested an early Chinese presence.

In Written in the Ruins, Chiasson investigates the ruins at St. Peters in the southern part of the island, where evidence brought to light supports a theory that could answer all the questions raised by the island's curious, unresolved history.

Jean Morrison has written a fascinating and important book, full of drama and colourful historical figures. Rare paintings, drawings, maps and archival photographs complement her impeccable research and lively text. Superior Rendezvous-Place encompasses the French predecessors of Fort William, Native Peoples of the time and the evolution of the fur trade, with an emphasis on the North West Company era.

This most important work concludes with details of the reconstruction of the fort and the development of Old Fort William, one of Ontario's must see attractions.

Jean Morrison is a natural story teller, and hers is an essential historical document in the compelling history of Fort William, once the centre of the North American commercial universe.
- Peter C. Newman, author of Caesars of the Wilderness

This book is wonderful reading. Jean Morrison's prose is beautiful.
- Carolyn Podruchny, fur trade historian, Newberry Library, Chicago

This is an annually updated presentation of Canada past and present.

L'histoire de la seigneurie laurentienne est-elle la fille du conflit politique ? C'est, entre autres, à cette question que répond Le féodalisme dans la vallée du Saint-Laurent : un problème historiographique. Dans cet ouvrage, Matteo Sanfilippo résume et analyse 250 années (1763-2008) de production historiographique au Canada français et au Canada anglais portant sur le régime seigneurial laurentien.

Sanfilippo remet dans leur contexte historique les discours et les débats sur ce régime, qui sont inextricablement liés aux dynamiques politiques canadiennes.

Le féodalisme dans la vallée du Saint-Laurent est un essai unique dans le paysage historiographique canadien. Il est ici traduit en français pour la première fois. À l'heure d'un renouveau certain de l'histoire seigneuriale laurentienne, lectrices et lecteurs pourront découvrir les enjeux complexes de son écriture en faisant la rencontre de la pensée originale de Matteo Sanfilippo.

Enfin, les historiens Olivier Guimond et Arnaud Montreuil signent une postface dans laquelle ils poursuivent les réflexions de Matteo Sanfilippo entre 2008 et aujourd'hui.

The fascinating story of the Red River Settlement, now Winnipeg, in the years 1813 to 1816, told with archival journals, reports, and letters

Unsettled tells the story of two hundred Highlanders who flee the Scottish Clearances in 1813 to establish a settlement on the Red River in what eventually became Winnipeg. They are sponsored by the Earl of Selkirk, a man who has never been west of Montreal. Families who have never left their Highland crofts take an epic journey over ocean, up wild rivers, and through boundless wilderness, surviving disease and brutal winter only to face the determined opposition of fur barons who want no sodbusters threatening their trade and are prepared to stop at nothing to destroy their dream.

The empty land they've been promised is also anything but, already occupied by First Nations bands and the beginnings of that proud nation soon to be called Métis, whom they must befriend or fight.

Unsettled takes you inside the experience, relying on journals, reports, and letters to bring these days of soaring hope, crushing despair, and heroic determination to life -- to bring their present into ours.

Neary draws material from both public and private sources in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, and Newfoundland. Following a brief summary of major developments in Newfoundland before 1929, he gives an account of the tumultuous events that led to the demise of responsible self-government and the establishment of a British-appointed Commission of Government in 1934. He details and evaluates the major policies of the commission during three distinct phases: the continuing hard times of the 1930s, the boom years of the Second World War, and the period of post-war adjustment. The reasons for constitutional change are examined and Neary explains clearly why Newfoundland became a province of Canada in 1949. Through a fine blending of domestic and international history, he reveals the intricate connections between events in Newfoundland and in the rest of the North Atlantic World, providing a balanced view which takes into account constitutional, political, economic, and social developments. He acknowledges the role of British, Canadian, and American policymakers in determining the course of events in Newfoundland and illuminates the role that Newfoundlanders themselves played at a critical time in their history.

A century after it sank to the bottom of the St. Lawrence River, the ruin of the Empress of Ireland has remained one of the most devastating tragedies in maritime history. Logan Marshall's vivid and detailed reportage was the first account of the disaster and has endured as a classic chronicle of what happened that fateful night.

On May 28, 1914, the grand ocean liner, the Empress of Ireland, left Quebec on the St. Lawrence River, bound for an Atlantic crossing to Liverpool, England. At a few minutes before two o'clock on the morning of Friday, May 29, the Empress sighted the Norwegian collier, Storstad, at the same time as a heavy fog bank was descending. Despite warnings and evasive maneuvers, the Empress was struck on the starboard side by the Storstad, which penetrated its hull by twelve feet. The captain and crew had less than fifteen minutes to save their passengers before the ship slipped under the waves. Of the 1,475 aboard, 1,078 perished in a matter of minutes. It remains the worst peacetime catastrophe in Canadian history.

In addition to his unforgettable account of the sinking, Logan Marshall also presents a gripping retelling of the Titanic disaster, as well as other maritime tragedies. For decades, Marshall's account of the Empress of Ireland has remained the definitive version, comparable to Walter Lord's chronicle of the Titanic sinking, A Night to Remember.

CENTENNIAL EDITION: INCLUDES PHOTOS AND A NEW AFTERWORD UPDATING THE STORY

Volume II of the history of the Canadian Armed forces prior to World War I with complete units histories, uniforms, flags and equipment in color.

Long before Confederation created a nation-state in northern North America, Indigenous people were establishing vast networks and trade routes. Volcanic eruptions pushed the ancestors of the Dene to undertake a trek from the present-day Northwest Territories to Arizona. Inuit migrated across the Arctic from Siberia, reaching Southern Labrador, where they met Basque fishers from northern Spain. As early as the fifteenth century, fishing ships from western Europe were coming to Newfoundland for cod, creating the greatest transatlantic maritime link in the early modern world. Later, fur traders would take capitalism across the continent, using cheap rum to lubricate their transactions. The contributors to Before Canada reveal the latest findings of archaeological and historical research on this fascinating period. Along the way, they reframe the story of the Canadian past, extending its limits across time and space and challenging us to reconsider our assumptions about this supposedly young country. Innovative and multidisciplinary, Before Canada inspires interest in the deep history of northern North America.

Winner of the 2020 Catholic Press Association Book Award in History

Apostles of Empire is a revisionist history of the French Jesuit mission to Indigenous North Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offering a comprehensive view of a transatlantic enterprise with integral secular concerns. Between 1611 and 1764, 320 Jesuits were sent from France to North America to serve as missionaries. Most labored in colonial New France, a vast territory comprising eastern Canada and the Great Lakes region, inhabited by diverse Native American populations. Although committed to spreading Catholic doctrines and rituals and adapting them to diverse Indigenous cultures, these missionaries also devoted significant energy to more worldly concerns, particularly the transatlantic expansion of the absolutist-era Bourbon state and the importation of the culture of elite, urban French society.

In Apostles of Empire Bronwen McShea accounts for these secular dimensions of the mission's history through candid portraits of Jesuits engaged in a range of activities. We see them not only preaching and catechizing in terms borrowed from Indigenous idioms but also cultivating trade and military partnerships between the French and various Indian tribes. McShea shows how the Jesuits' robust conceptions of secular spheres of Christian action informed their efforts from both sides of the Atlantic to build up a French and Catholic empire in North America through Indigenous cooperation.

Un bref survol historique de l'Acadie et un portrait de sa population, mettant en lumi re les v nements qui ont men la D portations, particuli rement les quelque 2600 Acadiens et Acadiennes qui choisirent le Qu bec comme terre d'accueil. Quelles furent les circonstances de leur venue dans la colonie canadienne ? O s' tablirent-ils et quel fut leur sort ? Les textes d' poque relatent le point culminant de la rivalit imp riale en Am rique du Nord qui t moignent de l'enracinement r ussi de milliers d'Acadiens dans la future province de Qu bec.