(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best canadian history books

Okay here we go:

Indians of the Pacific Northwest: From the Coming of the White Man to the Present Day. General information!

Looking At Indian Art Of The Northwest Coast by Hilary Stewart, which has a lot of the common symbolism you see in many coastal tribes. Many other useful books by this woman. Here's her Amazon page. Some of her books are kinda pricy but there are other affordable ones out there!

Indian Relics Of The Pacific Northwest by SG Seaman. Some visual information on tools used by indigenous tribes, dry but good info.

Art In The Life of the Northwest Coast Indian by Erna Gunther. This one is a little more in depth!

Totem poles were a distinct and important part of many NW coast tribes. Lots of books out there on their function and purpose, definitely something to research.

The potlatch was another extremely important aspect of PNW indigenous lives. Some info here and here, but also lots of research papers for free on the internet.

Salmon was a vital food resource for hundreds of tribes. They fished along the Columbia, Pacific, and other major waterways. Here and here is more info.


Indians of the North Pacific Coast by Tom McFeat.

Mythology is a must! There might be some online collections but here and here are a couple books.

Tales of the Northwest is a classic!

Please check out the Vancouver Museum of Anthropology website. They have TONS of information on a variety of indigenous tribes, with a focus on NW coastal tribes. If you ever have a reason to go to Vancouver you MUST visit this beautiful, beautiful museum.

The Seattle Public Library (also a must visit, just a gorgeous library) has an extensive local history section.

Once you've read a couple books and have a better understanding of what you want to study, it's actually much easier to pick a certain tribe or area and find more information that way. Tons and tons of books out there on the Haida, Kwakiutl, Salish, Chinook, etc. I would highly recommend contacting people who study or write about these tribes! For the most part professors and authors love to talk about their work, or can direct you to other resources.

My final recommendation is if you want to write a fictional book about a PNW tribe, please read some fiction out there already written by indigenous Americans! This will help you more intimately understand the emotion and history that is part of these ancient cultures.

Anyway, don't feel too bogged down by all the info. Pick a subject or two you want to learn about and do some internet research before you buy a book. I don't know what kind of access your library might have, but maybe you could rent a few books through them.

Lastly, if you ever have a chance to come visit the PNW, please do! It is absolutely beautiful out here and unlike many parts of the world. It's cool and rainy so we have an extraordinary abundance of wild flora. So many must visit places: Vancouver, Mt Hood National Park, Vancouver Island, Olympic National Park, the San Juan Islands, the Columbia Gorge, Gold Coast, Oregon Coast, Haystack Rock, Redwood Forest - look up any of those and you will start to get an understanding of how indigenous peoples connected with their gorgeous natural environment. You may also start to notice that many of the pictures that appear in r/earthporn are from the West Coast. It's damn pretty out here.

Cheers, mate, and hit me up if you ever make it out here!

It depends on how detailed you want. There's always the dated, but still valuable, Canadian Centenary Series - I use Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook's contribution all the time and it remains one of the best overviews of early 20th century Canada. The rest are of varying quality. Though, they are decades out of date in terms of the most up to date scholarship.

More recent English Canadian scholarship doesn't offer as many overviews outside of textbooks. Like I said, it's hard to find books that do English and French Canadian history together in either history since so often you find Quebec history or English Canadian history. Ramsay Cook has a lot of publications dealing with French Canadian history which often overlaps into general Canadian history, but he's an older historian from the 60-90s. For a good review of English Canadian historical writing, Carl Berger's Writing of Canadian History is the definitive work though, like other works here, a bit dated.

It's kinda the same for Quebecois literature as far as I know. I think an interesting and accessible Quebecois view of Canadian history is Histoire du Quebec contemporain (that's volume 1, there's also volume 2). It's a bit of a textbook, but hits all the major points and has a definitively Quebecois perspective on them. If you're up for a denser work, Yvan Lamonde's Histoire sociale des idees au Quebec (similarly two volumes) is a great exploration of Quebec intellectual landscapes. I've referred to it a lot as it is really frames the response of Quebecois to English Canada within their provincial context. For a good English language overview of Quebec historiography, it's worth checking out Ronald Rudin's Making History in Twentieth Century Quebec too.

Overall, I'd say most of the good comprehensive histories that examine both French and English Canada are either textbooks or decades old. Or, perhaps, in articles and specific studies of certain events or periods. Historians have moved away from larger overviews of Canadian history unfortunately - so unless you move towards more pop history, you won't find much in the academic presses.

If you have any specific areas or time periods you're specifically interested in, I'd love to provide some more detailed works. Though, to be honest, I am well read in political history and 1900-1945 Canada, so my choices here and other suggestions will reflect that.

A good question. Not directly related to my research but I can say a bit.

In some ways the roots are similar. As you note, both the CCF and Social Credit were a response in part to the failures of capitalism (especially during the Great Depression, but during the broader post Great War period, where the promises made to regular people about the world after victory were not kept)

Indeed, before the Social Credit party, there was the social credit theories of CH Douglas, which you can find promotions of within many labour union newspapers in the 1920s. Some people in the labour-left circles though it was quackery, but not all. In the 1920s, for instance, William Irvine and J.S. Woodsworth studies social credit as a theory, but it never really latched on.

I would say that Social Credit had less of a natural 'labour' base than the CCF, but it had a sort of progressive origin despite the party being seen in its later years as a sort of far-right body in the Reform Party vein. It did indeed have some working class support, and it should be known that it was influenced by earlier progressive governments in Alberta (the United Farmers of Alberta, which would eventually hook up with the CCF)

One good book to read here is by Alvin Finkel (https://www.amazon.ca/Social-Credit-Phenomenon-Alvin-Finkel/dp/0802058213), who basically notes that when the SC won in 1935, seeing it was a right-wing party is a pretty simplistic view. Rather, the party over the next decade transformed into a right-of-centre party, but it's origins are in a critique of capitalism, though not in the sort of same systemic manner you saw from the CCF. Still, the first SC government in Alberta governed on economic issues as a more-or-less left of centre party.

I wrote this as a hypothetical "day in the life of..." kind of thing last year for the Museum of Ontario Archaeology. I wrote a whole series of them for each time period, but the 11,000 years ago one (Paleoindian Period) is the only one that's up so far. I don't want to send you the others since I wrote them when I was an employee of the museum, and I don't know how that works copyright wise and all that. I would like to volunteer some time for them to get the others in the series ready to post, but I have other things I need to do more urgently (and procrastinate like mad). We'll see though, maybe I can do something in the next couple months.

Explore the museum's website a bit too, especially under the "discover" tab. There are a few short videos by Chris Ellis, one of the foremost Ontario archaeologists, describing each of the three broad periods in precontact Ontario history. There are also some other links there that have an overwhelming amount of info, especially this site. It's poorly organized and outdated, but there's a lot there. And since you are asking specifically for southwestern Ontario I presume that you are in or near London. If you can, go to the museum. It is inexpensive to get in. To be honest, it's not a great museum and it has a lot of problems, but there are some good people there who are working on it, and they have some great artifacts. They also have a partially reconstructed village at the museum, which is the location of an actual 15th century Iroquoian village.

To answer your question a bit more specifically, the people who lived in this region shortly before direct European contact were an Iroquoian group we call the Neutral or Attawandaron. The French gave them that name since they were neutral in the wars between the five nations of the Iroquois (a confederacy of nations who lived mostly in upstate New York) and the Huron-Petun or Wendat, another Iroquoian group that lived in the Toronto and Lake Simcoe area. But not much is known about the Neutral. The French had first encountered them in the Niagara region, but the neutral had already abandoned southwestern Ontario at that time so this area appeared to be empty and "pristine" when the French first saw it for themselves (had the French come 100 years before they would have found a bustling and populous area with many villages around the Thames and its tributaries, and with fields as far as the eye could see).

So we don't know much about the Neutral, but we do know that they were Iroquoian and spoke an Iroquoian language, so we make assumptions that they lived in a similar way to the Huron, who we do know more about. What about before the Neutral? That is hard to say, and I'll admit here that Ontario is not my main focus and I'm not entirely up to speed on current ideas about populations movements. It is really hard to push ethnicity or group affiliation back very far, at least using archaeological data (oral histories are different and can help do that, but since the Neutral left this area it is hard to trace those stories). And although people in Ontario and neighbouring regions were largely sedentary after about A.D. 1000, there were still large migrations and movements and it is hard to know whether that happened in this region too, and there is some debate about that. We know that the Neutral were here after about A.D. 1400, but it's hard to know who was here before, and impossible to know how people saw their own ethnic identities.

My main source for all this is Before Ontario: The Archaeology of a Province, edited by Marit Munson and Susan Jamieson. It is a great source with chapters written by many of the biggest names in Ontario archaeology, and they are all very readable and informative for non-specialists. Neal Ferris and Gary Warrick have chapters dealing with southwestern Ontario in the more recent precontact period, and Chris Ellis has one dealing with the more ancient stuff (11,000 - 3000 years ago). The museum has a small bookstore and they stock this title as well as others that you may find interesting, if you make it there.

Edit: oh yeah, and you can ask this as well in /r/askanthropology. This question really falls as archaeology rather than history, and there is a greater concentration of archaeologists there. I'm not sure if anyone there is specifically an Ontario archaeologist, but there are some people who are familiar with the archaeology of eastern North America in general.

Just to make it easier to find - it's spelled "Pierre Berton", not "Burton". Also, "Hostages to Fortune" was written by Peter C. Newman, not Pierre Berton (more about Newman below).

Here's Berton's list of books.

Some great foundational stuff about Canada is as /u/MonotheistThrowaway describes, in the 1812 things. There's also other stuff by him that's excellent:

"The National Dream" and "The Last Spike", about the construction of the railroad across Canada.

"The Great Depression", which of course is about the Great Depression.

"Vimy", which is about the Canadians at Vimy Ridge in 1917. It's not especially "scholarly", but it's incredibly accessible and a riveting read.

"The Arctic Grail", which is about the many attempts to find the North-West Passage. See also the Stan Rogers song about this. It's a pretty key piece of Canadian history.

There is lots and lots more in his bibliography. If you go out of your mind and decide to read all of his work, you'll probably know more about Canadian history and identity that 95% of those born here.

Peter Newman wrote similarly great Canadian history. He did a three-volume piece about the Hudson Bay Company, in the books Company of Adventurers, Caesars of the Wilderness and Merchant Princes. There's a sort of a "condensed" version called "Empire of the Bay" that might be a quicker read.

If you ever get bored of reading but you still want to learn Canada's history, check out "Canada: A People's History", an incredible series done by CBC back in 2001. That's a link to a playlist with all episodes. I can't possibly recommend it enough.

Edit to add: Welcome to Canada, friend!

I'm not saying it's the definitive book or anything but I enjoyed Hébert's The Morning After: The 1995 Quebec Referendum and the Day that Almost Was If you want a backrooms retrospective on the referendum, it's pretty interesting to read the perspectives of a lot of the key players...

Also, if you are interested in browsing some essays about the politics of BC over the years, BC Studies journal has a lot of content for free online.

There are a lot of great walking tour books about Calgary. I really suggest everyone pick one up and start exploring some neighbourhoods! They have great information, historical facts, and some pretty interesting stories about early Calgary. If you are not inclined to buy a book (or you don't have a friend to borrow a copy) you could always see if there is a walking tour running while your friend is in town. If not, take them around the communities of Kensington, Inglewood, Mission & 17th Ave. The river walk from Kensington to Princes Island is nice at any time of the year.

About 20 years ago, I remember reading a book, and it was called How to Become Prime Minister, or An A to Z Guide to Being Prime Minister, or something like that. It was a humorous book, not too thick, and the drawings in the book remind me of some political cartoons I've seen in the past, so it may have been authored by a notable political cartoonist. Does anyone have any idea what I'm talking about? I've tried looking for it, but without knowing the exact title, I haven't had much luck. It's at least 20 years old, possibly older.

Bonus question: Anyone ever read Bastards & Boneheads: Canada's Glorious Leaders Past and Present? I recall seeing it in a bookstore years ago and being amused by the title, and I was wondering if it would be worth hunting it down.

Why is everyone suggesting watching Cosmos and the like? I think the problem is right here.

>"She’s been having regular break downs because she can’t find a job despite being bi-lingual and graduating magna cum laude. She feels like she has no structure in her life at the moment and that scares her to death."

She doesn't need to watch videos about "the beauty of nature". She needs to find something that can act as a source of meaning in her life, because it sounds like she feels useless at the moment. Get involved with charity work or political activism. Positively changing the quality of life for a family or a community will make it clear that our actions have significance right now.

Edit: Once again plugging Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe, The Life You Can Save, Hopes and Prospects, and The ABC's of Political Economy

>The most bilingual place in Canada and maybe one or the most in NA is the Montréal region.

I love Quebec, but there are millions more bilingual Spanish-English speakers in California than there are bilingual French-English people in Montreal.

There are more bilingual people in California than the entire population of Quebec, bilingual or otherwise.

>The United States has a strange relationship to language rights. Although the federal government has no official language, in recent decades individual states—California included—have adopted English as an official language, largely in response to a puzzling English-only movement. But, of course, English is not the only significant American language. One-third of California’s residents speak Spanish at home.

https://www.thenation.com/article/california-needs-take-bilingualism-seriously/

There are some interesting shared history between California and Quebec:

>Prudent Beaudry served as the 13th mayor of Los Angeles, California, from 1874 to 1876. A native of Quebec, he was the second French Canadian and third French American mayor of Los Angeles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudent_Beaudry

>Today, Los Angeles is the undisputed megacity of California, but in 1852 L.A. had a population of only about five thousand people, way fewer than San Francisco’s 36,151. And at least some of L.A.’s growth into what it is today is credited to a former French Canadian mayor.
>
>Prudent Beaudry was mayor of Los Angeles from 1876-1878. I learned about him and his brothers from Gaétan Frigon’s chapter in Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America. The Beaudry bros were born outside Montreal. When Prudent Beaudry was 32, he decided to follow his brother Victor to San Francisco, where, Frigon writes, the two Canadian business men set up a business selling — and this is not a joke — syrup and ice.
>
>Two years later in 1852, Beaudry moved to the small town of Los Angeles which counted six hundred French speakers among its population of around five thousand. He began to build his fortune in real estate, buying up and developing “barren” land just north of downtown L.A., including what today are the neighbourhoods of Bunker Hill and Angelino Heights.
>
>“The subdivisions would be worthless, though,” explains Frigon, “unless water could be conveyed to them.” So next he needed to create the Los Angeles City Water Company, which pumped water to his new “upscale residential neighbourhoods.” To design the villas, he turned to “an engineer from the first graduating class of Montreal’s École Polytechnique.”
>
>Twenty four years after he first moved to L.A., in 1876, Beaudry was elected mayor. By at least one account, he was a pivotal one:

https://acresofsnow.ca/the-french-canadian-mayor-of-los-angeles/

If you don't mind a textbook, the Origins and Destinies pair of books is very readable, reasonably concise, and covers a lot of history your teachers never had the time to mention in class.

Since it's history, and a textbook, you can probably find a very cheap earlier edition without sacrificing quality.

Unfortunately, I've never found much in the way of good books covering Canadian history that weren't textbooks of some variety. There is, however, a good graphic novel called Louis Riel which tells the story of the Metis rebel leader in good detail and is available in many libraries. Worth reading.

They aren't online resources, but I can't recommend the Vancouver and BC Historical Atlases by Derek Hayes highly enough:

British Columbia: A New Historical Atlas

Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley

I'm sure you could find them at just about any local bookstore, and I know for certain that they have them at the Granville/Broadway chapters.

Also seconding the recommendations to visit the Vancouver Archives. Good luck in your search!

You might be interested in the book I just published last month which uncovers new proof of what actually happened on Oak Island https://www.amazon.com/Pour-Angélique-Proving-Story-Island/dp/0578403463

The eBook is on sale, Amazon is doing a $5 off promotion which the above book and mine qualify for if you spend $20, and I'm also giving away free copies on goodreads (see www.stirhaven.com).

I think it’s this one, which is a pretty good read if you’re interested in Vancouver history in any event.

Historical Atlas Of Vancouver https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1553651073/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_1gnyCbKM1275Y

la-chanteuse wrote:

If you haven't already, I would recommend you check out Daniel N. Paul's We Were Not the Savages. It talks a lot about the history of the colonization in the Maritimes, and explains in layman's term a lot of the heavily formalized language that can be found in the treaties and policies. The book is much more interesting than anything else I've discovered on the subject, and I appreciate that Danny Paul himself is a Mi'kmaq elder in Nova Scotia. He carefully takes into account the historical research that has been done before him, and compares that to the information which has been passed down to him, in essence filtering a lot of historical misrepresentations by White Europeans to achieve a true understanding of the past.

Anglo/Canadian artillery in Normandy in the summer of 1944 was so efficient many German units became convinced that the Allies had a "super cannon" that was capable of automatic artillery fire. George Blackburn in his book The Guns of Normandy tells the story of a German Colonel coming across the lines with a white flag saying that he and his men would surrender on the condition that he would be allowed to witness the Canadians' "machine gun artillery" in action.

Of course, the Canadians were only using the humble 25pdr and it was their doctrine/training that allowed such massive amounts of firepower to get down range.

edit: Added hotlink to the book. It is one of the most compelling Second World War narratives I've ever read and I recommend it to anyone interested in military history.

Lament for a Nation by George Grant is one I quite enjoyed reading. It was interesting to a perspective on the aspects of Canadian society that were left behind after the Liberals' modernization of Canada in the late 1960's.

I'll ask my friend. He wrote a book on Oak Island:
Pour Angélique: Proving the True Story of Oak Island https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578403463/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_l5SxCb97JX3GR

I'm guessing not related though, seeing as Smith is such a common surname.

The Guns of Normandy.

Follows a Canadian Army medium artillery battery from June 6th to September 30th, 1944.

The author Blackburn was one of the FOO"s ( Forward Observation Officer ) who "called the shots " by radio from the infantry forward positions. 14th Field Artillery supported the Canadian Army through the battles in June August and September og 1944.

This is a book about the soldiers on the ground, not the Generals. Its about being so tired that you fall asleep next to a 25 pounder gun firing at maximum rate, 12 rounds a minute. Or helping to hand carry 1200 rounds of artillery shells for a half a mile, in the dark, after being awake for 36 hours.

True and outright gut wrenching, as well.

link. https://www.amazon.ca/Guns-Normandy-Soldiers-View-France/dp/0771015038

Jim B.

This is a great read about their relationship:

https://www.amazon.ca/Three-Nights-Havana-Pierre-Trudeau-ebook/dp/B0055DLZH4

This is a great book about Heritage Buildings here in Calgary by Harry Sanders. I have worked on many of the buildings in there, so may be biased....
http://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/0889952973

Bastards and Boneheads is hilarious, and surprisingly informative. We actually used it as a textbook in high school.

You're damn right. If you like the essay, I have to plug the book:

https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Roosting-Chickens-Reflections-Consequences/dp/1902593790

He just goes off on the most scathing critique of US empire you've ever read in an extended written ramble, then offers a year-by-year breakdown of every single action of the United States Military from 1776 - 2003 (when the book was published), including the numerous atrocious incursions on Native communities, and offers another year-by-year breakdown of every illegal US action from 1776-2003. Really great book, one of my favorites, and he lost his job at CU Boulder over it.

I haven't read it yet, but I have heard good things:

Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America

Meanwhile, Canada has had delightful business relations with Cuba, and Trudeau The Former said Castro is his "besty".

www.amazon.com/Three-Nights-Havana-Pierre-Trudeau-ebook/dp/B0055DLZH4

www.hrw.org/world-report/2015/country-chapters/cuba

This is such a huge component of our history. I always like to suggest this book as an understanding of our roots.

And in my opinion, this is the closest we would have to the New Yorker

This shouldn't surprise anyone... people have been here for thousands of years, and they used the rivers as their highways.

A great read: http://www.amazon.ca/Before-Ontario-The-Archaeology-Province/dp/0773542086

In terms of the textbooks you should read these (link 1, link 2). They are the standard first year University textbooks that cover the period up to Confederation (1867) and the period after. I took many classes with the Professor who wrote them and they are an excellent introductory resource.

IIRC, there has not been a single year from inception through 2000 that the US wasn't involved in military engagements.

Source: http://www.amazon.com/Justice-Roosting-Chickens-Reflections-Consequences/dp/1902593790 Neat timeline in there.

Chiming in with the other recommendations to watch the Big Short, https://theintercept.com/2015/12/14/go-see-the-big-short-right-now-and-then-read-this/

There is also this documentary, Goldman Sachs: the bank that rules the world, available on Netflix, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2335304/combined?mode=desktop

This article from Al Jazeera,
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/06/goldman-sachs-too-big-rein-20146179548958530.html.

If you're looking for a more in depth read, i would also recommend Chomsky,
https://www.amazon.com/Hopes-Prospects-Noam-Chomsky/dp/1931859965#productDescription_secondary_view_div_1486365715627

In the order that I would rank them--

Lament for a Nation by George Grant


While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World by Andrew Cohen


The Friendly Dictatorship by Jeffrey Simpson


EDIT: These are particularly Canadian politics reads.

This is monstrous. Reminds me of a certain Native Canadian book...

or this one as well I haven't read it yet but was shown this book

For the political ramifications you might enjoy reading about the Clarity Act that was passed not long after the last referendum. That wiki page goes into a bit of detail about the politics at the time and gives a sense of some of the grievances on both sides.

There was also a book published recently called The Morning After about what the different players at the time were planning in case of a "yes" vote (spoiler alert: no one, not even the yes side, had a plan). You can read an AMA with the author here (some French, some English) and an article about the book here.

For more Canadian conservative sources, how about George Grant and Dalton Camp?

> Have you read the storys in this thread, every one of them mentions that the econmy was completly not function!

I noticed most said things were better off under communism -- did you?

> Please show me a list with ever attack of the US to all the socialist stats

That would be pages and pages long. You should Google it. Various people have made such lists. Ward Churchill put together one of the most comprehensive but it's no more than a paragraph or so on each as I recall, although it's a couple of hundred examples. William Blum's Killing Hope covers fewer but in much more detail (a chapter each) and several examples are free to read on line. You might like the chapter on Cuba.

Except you don't read, I forget.

< I dont grammer check for you

Did you mean to say "spell check"?

Noam Chompsky goes into some detail on this and other similar situations in Hopes and Prospects. Very insightful book, but it made me very disappointed at the lesser known details of the past 100 years.

Edit: Incorrectly added a 'p' to Chomsky, but not fixing since it gives relevance to the replies. Not sure why I'm getting downvoted though since it's completely relevant to the topic. Oh well.