When Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King died in 1950, the public knew little about his eccentric private life. In his final will King ordered the destruction of his private diaries, seemingly securing his privacy for good. Yet twenty-five years after King’s death, the public was bombarded with stories about "Weird Willie," the prime minister who communed with ghosts and cavorted with prostitutes. Unbuttoned traces the transformation of the public’s knowledge and opinion of...

“There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” Pierre Elliott Trudeau told reporters. He was making the case for the most controversial of his proposed reforms to the Criminal Code, those concerning homosexuality, birth control, and abortion.In No Place for the State, contributors offer complex and often contrasting perspectives as they assess how the 1969 Omnibus Bill helped shape sexual and moral politics in Canada by examining the bill’s origins, social...

In 1864, thirty-three delegates from five provincial legislatures came to Quebec City to pursue the idea of uniting all the provinces of British North America. The American Civil War, not yet over, encouraged the small and barely defended provinces to consider uniting for mutual protection. But there were other factors: the rapid expansion of railways and steamships spurred visions of a continent-spanning new nation.Federation, in principle, had been agreed on at the Charlottetown ...

As one of the most difficult periods of the twentieth century, the Great Depression left few Canadians untouched. Using more than eighty interviews with women who lived and worked in Toronto in the 1930s, Breadwinning Daughters examines the consequences of these years for women in their homes and workplaces, and in the city's court rooms and dance halls.In this insightful account, Katrina Srigley argues that young women were central to the labour market and family economie...

With a landmass of approximately 7000 square kilometres and a population of roughly five million, the Greater Toronto Area is Canada's largest metropolitan centre. How did a small nineteenth-century colonial capital become this sprawling urban giant, and how did government policies shape the contours of its landscape?In Toronto Sprawls, Lawrence Solomon examines the great migration from farms to the city that occurred in the last half of the nineteenth century. During this...

This is the story of Rene M. Caisse of Bracebridge, Canada and describes her extraordinary perseverance to obtain official recognition of her herbal cancer remedy she called Essiac, her name spelled backwards. Rene Caisse was thrust into a life-long medical-legal-political controversy that still persists since her death in 1978. Rene wrestled with the Hepburn government of Ontario over the operation of her Bracebridge cancer clinic during 1935 to 1941 and her use of Essiac. She refused to ...

Almost since Champlain's men first settled on St. Croix Island in 1604, the French and the English fought for control of Acadia, a huge area consisting of today's Maritime Provinces and parts of Quebec and Maine. The British assault on Fort Beauséjour in 1755 was the final act in this long struggle. The frontier between the two imperial powers lay along the Chignecto Isthmus, the neck of low, fertile marshlands and parallel ridges joining Nova Scotia to the mainland. Of great strategic imp...

In the spring of 1912, Anishinaabe guide Billy Magee received a letter from future conservationist Ernest Oberholtzer asking Magee to accompany him on a journey. Soon after the two set off on a five-month canoe expedition following the old way north, a largely unmapped territory that would test both their endurance and their friendship.Tracing the route of the Oberholtzer-Magee expedition, The Old Way North transports readers through the history of this challenging wilderness and i...

Another classic converted by eBooksLib.com. Louisbourg was no mere isolated stronghold which could be lost or won without affecting the wider issues of oversea dominion. On the contrary, it was a necessary link in the chain of waterside posts which connected France with America by way of the Atlantic, the St Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi. But since the chain itself and all its other links, and even the peculiar relation of Louisbourg to the Acadians and the Conquest, have ...

This important collection of essays expands the geographic, demographic, and analytic scope of the term genocide to encompass the effects of colonialism and settler colonialism in North America. Colonists made multiple and interconnected attempts to destroy Indigenous peoples as groups. The contributors examine these efforts through the lens of genocide. Considering some of the most destructive aspects of the colonization and subsequent settlement of North America, several essays address I...

Many family researchers with Ontario roots discover they have ancestors who were teachers. Those with no teachers in the family may have ancestors who were part of the Ontario education system as students. Today there are numerous varied resources available to find information on teachers, pupils, schools, textbooks, and curricula in historical Ontario.Education and Ontario Family History outlines the resources available for education from about 1785 to the early twentieth...

Breakfast at the Hoito brings together a collection of stories and essays on the dreamlike world of Lake Superior’s north shore … on wilds and wildlife, people and places.Spend a day in the kitchen of the famed Hoito Restaurant in Thunder Bay. Discover the secret life of ravens; the passions of the blueberry picker; the thrills and fears of the novice ice climber. Tour Silver Islet, an eccentric summer community that has evolved from the relics of what was once the world’s richest ...