By Kayla Jonas Galvin Company Towns: Corporate Order and Community Neil White University of Toronto Press, 2012 Cloth $55.00, ebook $54.95 I chose to review Neil White’s Company Towns: Corporate Order and Community because of my recent involvement in an interesting project within a company town, Kapuskasing, Ontario. For those unfamiliar with the term, a company town is one that… Read more »
Review by Emily Beliveau The Wild Ride: A History of the North West Mounted Police 1873–1904 Charles Wilkins Stanton Atkins & Dosil Publishers Soft cover $24.95, Hardcover $45.00 The Wild Ride: A History of the North West Mounted Police 1873–1904 is an engaging and handsomely illustrated book directed at general readers. Author Charles Wilkins is a writer whose previous books… Read more »
By Pete Anderson Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environment, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 Joy Parr University of British Columbia Press Paperback, 304 pages, $32.95 Just as all politics can be viewed as local, so, too, can history. Joy Parr’s Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953–2003 (UBC Press, 2010) explores local reactions to a series of “megaprojects,” with a focus on… Read more »
By Ruthann LaBlance Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900–1967 Dale Barbour University of Manitoba Press Paperback, 264 pages, $24.95 Dale Barbour’s Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900–1967 chronicles the rise and fall of a Manitoba resort community. Not only does Barbour craft a history of Winnipeg Beach, he explores how ideas of… Read more »
By Paul W. Bennett A Review of Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada R. Blake Brown The Osgoode Society/ University of Toronto Press Hard Cover, 349 pages, $70.00 Guns in and around children in schools are frightening. That is why gun culture and firearms control totally dominated the news media in the wake of the horrific… Read more »
Esyllt Jones and Adele Perry, eds. People’s Citizenship Guide: A Response to Conservative Canada (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2011). Reviewed by E.L. Payseur I was asked to write a review of the People’s Citizenship Guide as someone who has fairly recently taken the Canadian citizenship test, and not as the historian I am. It is extremely difficult to separate these… Read more »
Enjoy reading about the experiences of people who lived in the past? Love learning about the history of places that mean something to you? If so, then you might want to review a book for us at ActiveHistory.ca. We are looking for new book reviewers – people who are currently outside of university history departments who will read and comment… Read more »
This is the first of four blog posts originally posted on THEN/HiER’s Teaching the Past blog reviewing the edited collection New Possibilities for the Past: Shaping History Education in Canada (UBC Press) and responding to the question: “Is our conception of history education “evolving” or is today’s focus simply a historical trend once again in vogue?”
Today we are publishing ActiveHistory.ca’s tenth book review. This month Ken Reynolds, an historian with the Department of National Defence, reviews Kevin Spooner’s recent book about Canadian peacekeeping in the Congo: Notes prepared for Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s attendance at a Commonwealth conference in March 1961 summed up Canada’s position on Africa, noting that Canada had “no territories in Africa… Read more »