Index
Results (158)
Review
In Twilight and in Dawn: A Biography of Diamond Jenness
At last there is a comprehensive biography of Diamond Jenness, perhaps Canada’s greatest anthropologist, and it’s an excellent one. Barnett Richling has risen to the task with a clear understanding of the man, his remarkable...
BC Studies no. 179 Autumn 2013 | Page(s) 222-224
Review
The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea
Lissa Wadewitz’s The Nature of Borders offers valuable insights into the shifting nature of boundaries on the Salish Sea and their significance for the Pacific salmon swimming through it. These fish traverse the sea on...
BC Studies no. 177 Spring 2013 | Page(s) 178-80
Review
The W̲SÁNEĆ and Their Neighbours: Diamond Jenness on the Coast Salish of Vancouver Island, 1935
Anthropologist Rolf Knight launched a new chapter of Indigenous history in 1978 with the publication of his book, Indians at Work: An Informal History of Native Indian Labour in British Columbia, 1858-1930.[1] In contrast to...
BC Studies no. 197 Spring 2018 | Page(s) 169-72
Review
Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917.
E.A Heaman has produced a decided masterpiece on a topic too often thought to be dry as a bone. Taxation, with its underlying legitimacy of consent, is the lifeblood of the state, supplying it with...
BC Studies no. 197 Spring 2018 | Page(s) 177-8
Review
One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests
One Step Over the Line is the second published collection of papers drawn from a conference held at the University of Calgary in 2002 (the first, Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women’s History, was...
BC Studies no. 161 Spring 2009 | Page(s) 127-30
Review
Makuk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations
Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations is a thorough treatment of a significant subject in BC history. Lutz has examined the history of exchanges of things, labour, and ideas between Aboriginal peoples and immigrants...
BC Studies no. 163 Autumn 2009 | Page(s) 133-4
Review
Undelievered Letters to Hudson’s Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830-57
In Undelivered Letters, editors Judith Hudson Beattie and Helen M. Buss provide a voice for those North American fur trade people usually thought to be voiceless. This publication of over 200 undelivered letters to men who...
BC Studies no. 148 Winter 2005-2006 | Page(s) 129-30
Review
Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia
The first edition of Go Do Some Great Thing was indeed a “first” in 1978. No book-length survey of the subject then existed, and Kilian’s volume was welcomed as an opportunity for British Columbians to...
BC Studies no. 40 Winter 1978-1979 | Page(s) 86-91
Review
Myra’s Men: Building the Kettle Valley Railway, Myra Canyon to Penticton
In August 2003, the Okanagan Mountain Park fire southeast of Kelowna destroyed or damaged the Myra Canyon trestles, eighteen railroad structures, and the roadbed between them. This 5.5-mile (8.9-km) elevated path around a mountainous amphitheatre...
BC Studies no. 162 Summer 2009 | Page(s) 200-1
Review
Into the House of Old: A History of Residential Care in British Columbia
Megan Davies’s carefully worked study on residential care for the aged in British Columbia does in deed take us into the “house of old.” And it is a sad journey, made more resonant to many...
BC Studies no. 149 Spring 2006 | Page(s) 87-9
Review
Front Lines: Portraits of Caregivers in Northern British Columbia
“I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours….”[1] So said Prime Minister Winston Churchill to Vice President Richard Nixon, in June 1954, at a British...
BC Studies no. 177 Spring 2013 | Page(s) 197-98
Review
Danger, Death and Disaster in the Crowsnest Pass Mines, 1902-28
The Crowsnest Pass coal-mining communities serve as the backdrop for Karen Buckley’s study of danger, death, and disaster. Her objective is to examine personal and community responses to death and to “gain a clearer understanding...
BC Studies no. 147 Autumn 2005 | Page(s) 129-31
Review
Militia Myths: Ideas of the Canadian Citizen Soldier, 1896-1921
The Canadian Scottish (Princess Mary’s) regiment recently celebrated its 100th anniversary. Popularly known as the Can Scots, it is the only militia unit on Vancouver Island. The regiment had previously been honoured with the freedom...
BC Studies no. 178 Summer 2013 | Page(s) 145-147
Review
Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada
Retail Nation is a thought-provoking study of the intersection between a rapidly growing consumer economy and the formation of culture and identity in Canada between 1890 and 1940. During this period, argues Donica Belisle, department...
BC Studies no. 176 Winter 2012-2013 | Page(s) 169-70
Review
A Sisterhood of Suffering and Service: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland During the First World War
When it comes to the history of women in wartime Canada, the Second World War has so far attracted the most attention from scholars. Perhaps surprisingly, given the otherwise-abundant scholarship on Canada’s Great War, those...
BC Studies no. 177 Spring 2013 | Page(s) 183-84
Review
Commerce by a Frozen Sea: Native Americans and the European Fur Trade
This may be the most important book on the history of the fur trade in the Hudson’s Bay Company Territories published in a generation. Although its purview does not include British Columbia, all historians of...
BC Studies no. 173 Spring 2012 | Page(s) 143-45
Review
Never Shoot a Stampede Queen: A Rookie Reporter in the Cariboo
Never Shoot a Stampede Queen tells the story of a twenty-two-year-old university graduate from Vancouver adapting to life in Williams Lake in the 1980s after he accidentally landed a job there as a community newspaper...
BC Studies no. 165 Spring 2010 | Page(s) 112-3
Review
The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture
Tim Bowling, who spent his child-hood on the west coast of British Columbia and now lives in Edmonton, is perhaps better known as a poet than a prose writer. He has published seven collections of...
BC Studies no. 158 Summer 2008 | Page(s) 128-130
Review
Mudflat Dreaming: Waterfront Battles and the Squatters Who Fought them in 1970s Vancouver
Liminal spaces make places. This is the central theme of Jean Walton’s book, Mudflat Dreaming, an unconventional work of literary nonfiction that weaves together memoir, film studies, and Vancouver history in the 1970s, a pivotal...
BC Studies no. 202 Summer 2019 | Page(s) 190-192
Review
Orienting Canada: Race, Empire and the Transpacific, Pacific Connections: The Making of the US-Canada Borderlands, Chasing the Dragon in Shanghai: Canada’s Early Relations with China, 1858-1952
Pacific Connections: The Making of the US-Canada Borderlands
Chasing the Dragon in Shanghai: Canada's Early Relations with China, 1858-1952
BC Studies no. 178 Summer 2013 | Pages 128-131
Review
Children of the Kootenays: Memories of Mining Towns
Shirley D. Stainton’s Children of the Kootenays: Memories of Mining Towns describes her own and her brother Ray’s childhoods in West Kootenay mining communities during the 1930s and 1940s. Stainton’s father, Lee Hall, was a cook...
BC Studies no. 204 Winter 2019/20 | Page(s) 213-214
Review
This Was Our Valley
The 2019 edition of This Was Our Valley by Shirlee Smith Matheson and Earl K. Pollon continues a longstanding conversation about the impacts of large dams in northern British Columbia. This story, told in three acts,...
Review
Bluebacks and Silver Brights: A Lifetime in the BC Fisheries From Bounty to Plunder
For sixty years the Campbell Avenue fish dock on Burrard Inlet was the hub of Vancouver’s fishing industry, home to numerous fish plants, smokehouses, and floats where the boats tied up. The Safarik family business,...
BC Studies no. 180 Winter 2013-2014 | Page(s) 187-189
Review
The Freshwater Fishes of British Columbia
I have good reason to be eternally grateful to the author of this book on BC’s freshwater fishes. Many years ago in my first university post, when desperately seeking interesting material with which to enliven the...