In the early twentieth century a movement flourished in the Midwestern states bordering the Great Lakes to champion the St. Lawrence route as the answer to easily transporting goods in and out of the centre of the continent. Internal rivalries in the United States and Canada held back the project for fifty years until Canada suddenly decided to build a seaway alone, pressuring the American Congress to co-operate. The building of the Seaway and its completion in 1959, involved engineering o...

Voyageur Classics is a series of special versions of Canadian classics, with added material and new introductory notes. In this bundle we find five biographical and autobiographical titles that shed light on some of Canada’s most important figures at crucial times in the country’s development. William Kilbourn brings to life the rebel Canadian hero William Lyon Mackenzie: able political editor, first mayor of Toronto, and the gadfly of the House of Assembly. The Scalpel, the Sword...

In The Firebrand, William Kilbourn brings to life the rebel Canadian hero William Lyon Mackenzie. A skilled historian and an entertaining writer, Kilbourn reveals Mackenzie’s complex character: able political editor, shrewd recorder of his times, efficient first mayor of Toronto, and gadfly of the House of Assembly.Kilbourn vividly recreates the ill-fated Mackenzie-led march on Toronto during the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, an uprising of brave but comical farmers unprepared to...

To commemorate the bi-centenary of the War of 1812, Anchor Canada brings together Pierre Berton's two groundbreaking books on the subject. The Invasion of Canada is a remarkable account of the war's first year and the events that led up to it; Pierre Berton transforms history into an engrossing narrative that reads like a fast-paced novel. Drawing on personal memoirs and diaries as well as official dispatches, the author has been able to get inside the characters of the men who fo...

The 1920s were one of the wildest decades in Canada's history a time of frivolous fads shocking crimes and political and social changes that definitively yanked the country out of the 19th century and into the modern age. In Strange Days Ted Ferguson revisits dozens of stories that could only have happened in the '20s tales of serial killers athletes con men crackpots prime ministers bathing beauties and more all of them nearly too amazing to believe and too entertaining to be for...

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the British Empire is engaged in a titanic war with Napoleonic France for global supremacy. The American Republic is quickly expanding its territory along the western frontier, while native peoples struggle to protect their lands from the relentless wave of new settlers.Bestselling author and scholar James Laxer offers a fresh and compelling view of this decisive war, by bringing to life two major contests: the native peoples' Endless War to e...

Ottawa Book Award 2015 — ShortlistedBetween 1918 and 1921 a great storm blew through Canada and raised the expectations of a new world in which all things would be possible.|The years after World War I were among the most tumultuous in Canadian history: a period of unremitting change, drama, and conflict. They were, in the words of Stephen Leacock, “a time such as there never was before.”The war had been a great crusade, promising a world made new. But it h...

The gripping, marvel-filled account of how a native son took a casual walk up a mountain on Cape Breton Island and made an archeological discovery of world-shaking proportions.In the summer of 2002, at home for his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, Paul Chiasson decided to climb a mountain he had never explored on the island where eight generations of his Acadian family had lived. Cape Breton is one of the oldest points of exploration and settlement in the Americas, with a his...

From rumble seats and running boards to power tops and tailfins, 60 Years Behind the Wheel captures the thrill of motoring in Canada from the dawn of the twentieth century to 1960. There are intriguing stories of cars with no steering wheels, and fascinating photographs of historic vehicles from across the country. From the Studebaker to the Lincoln-Zephyr, from the showroom to the scrapyard, here are over 150 vehicles owned and driven by Canadians.

Staking Claims to a Continent is a highly readable examination of how Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, and Sir John A. Macdonald took part in a daring game of nation building that has impacted the global order to the present day.Three political leaders presided over the reshaping of the North American continent during the fiery 1860s. Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were both born in Kentucky, Davis in June 1808 and Lincoln the following February. Joh...

Tragedy and farce, bravery and cowardice, intelligence and foolishness, sense and nonsense - all these contradictions and more have characterized the War of 1812. The real significance of the series of skirmishes that collectively made up the war between 1812 and 1814 is the enormous impact they have had on Canadian and American views of themselves and of each other.The publication of The War of 1812: The War That Both Sides Won in 1990 provided a contemporary look at the ...

During the Roaring Twenties, Ben Kerr was known as the "King of the Rumrunners." The U.S. Coast Guard put him at the top of the most-wanted list and offered a reward of $5,000. But ending up in Club Fed was not Kerr's only worry - he had to contend with Hamilton crime lords Rocco and Bessie Perri.Whisky and Ice takes the reader back to the Prohibition era, when Canada and the United States were obsessed with "demon liquor" (not to mention the endless posturing by politicia...