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Who? The Canadian Rangers?
Reviewed by Anne Marie Goodfellow Hands up if you’ve heard of the Canadian Rangers. Don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of them either before reading this book. The Canadian Rangers are a component of the Canadian Forces (CF) who operate at a local level with community volunteers in Canada’s sparsely populated northern and coastal areas. As…
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Faster Than a Speeding Canoe: ‘The Superheroes’ of the Fur Trade
By Eve Dutton There’s a certain image that the term “voyageur” conjures up in the Canadian consciousness: bearded, burly, and boastful rascals who prized their independence above all else, accomplished feats of superhuman strength and endurance, and braved the uncharted wilds with a song in their heart. This portrait of the voyageur has a long…
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Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD On the Canadian Prairies
Reviewed by Joanne Epp When University of Saskatchewan professor Erika Dyck began investigating the use of lysergic acid diethylamide (commonly known as LSD) in psychiatric research, she was surprised at what she found. LSD has a bad reputation, to say the least. It’s widely seen as a dangerous drug that leaves its victims permanently damaged and prone…
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Death or Deliverance: Canadian Courts Martial in the Great War
Reviewed by M. Wayne Cunningham On 27 March 1917, a cold wind blew, and showers of sleet rained down on the small village of Mont St. Eloi, located in northern France. On this bleak day, a young Canadian soldier, twenty-one year-old Arthur Lemay, stood before a field general court martial, the army’s highest wartime court.…
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An Unsettling Prairie History: A Review of James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains
By Kevin Plummer “Those Reserve Indians are in a deplorable state of destitution, they receive from the Indian Department just enough food to keep soul and body together, they are all but naked, many of them barefooted,” Lawrence Clarke wrote in 1880 of near-starvation Cree around Fort Carlton. “Should sickness break out among them in…
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Want to Review a Book for ActiveHistory.ca?
Enjoy reading about the experiences of people who lived in the past? Love learning about the history of places that mean something to you? ActiveHistory.ca is looking for people outside of the academic history community to review history books for us. Are you not an academic and a regular visitor to our site? Great! Consider writing…
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“Your revolution is over”: A Review of Stuart Henderson’s Making the Scene
By Kaitlin Wainwright Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s Stuart Henderson University of Toronto Press, 2011 394 pages, Paperback and ebook $29.95, Cloth $70.00 Stuart Henderson’s Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s is an adventure back in time to Yorkville at what many would consider the pinnacle…
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Not All Resource Towns Are Created Alike
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…
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The Wild Ride: A History of the North West Mounted Police 1873–1904
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…
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The Politics of Place: Local History and the Megaproject
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…
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