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Book & Film Reviews
book film review
The Life and Art of Mildred Valley Thorton
Sheryl Salloum’s new book The Life and Art of Mildred Valley Thornton explores why this important BC artist has generally been ignored in the historical record and cultural landscape of this province. Given that she...
Pages 181-2
book film review
Kilts on the Coast: The Scots Who Built BC
Despite the title, this is not a comprehensive history of the Scots in British Columbia. The best overview remains the BC chapter in Ferenc Morton Szasz, Scots in the North American West, 1790-1917 (2000), which...
Pages 161-3
book film review
Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America, 1792: Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra and the Nootka Sound Controversy
The heart of this work, and its raison d’être, is the report of Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, dated 2 February 1793 at San Blas, Mexico. This document is not a diary or...
Pages 155-7
book film review
Taking My Life
In 2008, when researching Canadian women authors, Linda Morra discovered an unpublished autobiography written by Jane Rule in the 1980s, just before her retirement from writing, in which she recounts with frankness and humour her...
Pages 185-7
book film review
Lillian Alling: The Journey Home
In 1929, Lillian Alling reached the coast of Alaska on her way to Siberia. Her three-year walk across North America began in New York City and ended at Cape Wales where her footsteps disappeared after...
Pages 175-6
book film review
I Just Ran: Percy Williams, World’s Fastest Human
A feature attraction at the 2012 London Olympics will be Jamaican Usain Bolt’s attempt to repeat his feat from four years ago in Beijing of winning gold medals in both the men’s 100m and 200m...
Pages 176-7
book film review
The Sunshine Coast from Gibsons to Powell River
Heather Harbord’s Texada Tapestry: A History is the only one of these three books that calls itself “a history.” Yet together they illustrate the remarkable range of local histories coming out of coastal British...
Pages 188-90
book film review
The Good Hope Cannery: Life and Death at a Salmon Cannery
Until post-war technology allowed for the centralization of salmon canning, the industry relied on numerous canneries located close to the fishing grounds. More than 200 canneries were scattered along the BC coast, and apart from...
Pages 170-1
book film review
Creative Subversions: Whiteness, Indigeneity, and the National Imaginary
In Creative Subversions, Margot Francis starts from the premise that some of the key images that inform Canadian national identity, such as the beaver, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), national parks, and Indians are “public...
Pages 168-9
book film review
Long Beach Wild: A Celebration of People and Place on Canada’s Rugged Western Shore
Long Beach Wild is the kind of book that academics are often quick to dismiss. It’s popular history, after all (academics, of course, preferring unpopular histories), by a freelance writer whose many previous works include...
Pages 187-8
book film review
Caring and Compassion: A History of the Sisters of St. Ann in Health Care in British Columbia
Today, Mount St. Mary Hospital, an extended care facility in Victoria, is one of the last visible legacies of the Sisters of St. Ann’s contributions to health care in British Columbia. But for more than...
Pages 163
book film review
Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West
Nayan Shah observes that historians get it wrong when they privilege permanent populations over transient, the nuclear family over other domestic arrangements, and polarized rather than various gender roles. He complains – fairly —...
Pages 174-5
book film review
Is it a house? Archaeological Excavations at English Camp, San Juan Island, Washington
Synthesizing archaeological research results from the Salish Sea can be a time-consuming task because of the international boundary that currently divides the region. This is further complicated by the rise of cultural resource management archaeology...
Pages 157-9
book film review
V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
V6A is a postal code prefix in Vancouver. It is, thus, an artificial geographical space defined by a bureaucracy housed far from V6A itself. It runs from Burrard Inlet south to False Creek and Great...
Pages 178-80
book film review
Edward S. Curtis, Above the Medicine Line: Portraits of Aboriginal Life in the Canadian West
Of all the dozens of professional photographers who have directed their cameras at North America’s first human settlers, no name is more synonymous with the words Indian and photographer than that of Edward S. Curtis...
Pages 184-5
book film review
The Opening Act: Canadian Theatre History 1945-1953
The writing of Canadian Theatre History, as an academic field of study, is a latecomer, with the first wave of academic articles and books appearing only in the mid-1970s along with the founding the Association...
Pages 182-3
book film review
Architecture and the Canadian Fabric
Broad in scope and filled with both insight and intriguing fact, Architecture and the Canadian Fabric positions itself in a productive cleft between architectural and political discussion — discussion largely attentive to the perennial interest...
Pages 183-4
book film review
The Principal’s Office – And Beyond, Volumes 1 (1849-1960) and Volume 2 (1961-2005)
This study considers the development of public education in British Columbia mainly from the perspective of school principals. The author is a prominent scholar in the field of education history and a provocative critic of...
Pages 164-5
book film 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...
Pages 169-70
book film review
The Library Book: a History of Service to British Columbia
Accepting the challenge to produce, within a fixed deadline, a comprehensive overview of the evolution of libraries in British Columbia must have been daunting. Works of this sort are most often destined to grow old,...
Pages 165-6
book film review
Liberalism, Surveillance, and Resistance: Indigenous Communities in Western Canada, 1877-1927
The negotiation and signing of the numbered treaties with First Nations groups in Western Canada, followed shortly thereafter by the opening of the territory to Euro-Canadian settlement, served to consolidate the country’s sovereignty over the...
Pages 167-8
book film review
The Encyclopedia of Commercial Drive to 1999
Cafes, pasta and pizza restaurants, very affordable produce markets, carnivalesque community events, and grassroots political demonstrations: all of these are the kaleidoscope one envisions when picturing the East side Vancouver neighbourhood of Grandview. The retail...
Pages 180
book film review
Exploring Fort Vancouver
This fine volume is truly a “must” for those with more than a passing interest in the origins of the multi-ethnic area of the Pacific Northwest Coast, from the Aboriginal inhabitants to the eighteenth and...
Pages 159-60
book film review
Our Friend Joe: The Joe Fortes Story
As one Daily Province journalist put it in 1916, “to write an article about English Bay without referring to Joe Fortes, would be like Hamlet without the Prince” (118). For nearly forty years the legendary...
Pages 172-4
book film review
Canada’s Entrepreneurs: From the Fur Trade to the 1929 Stock Market Crash: Portraits from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
The editors of Canada’s Entrepreneurs assembled this book to appeal to a wide variety of Canadian readers (including non-academics), to inspire instructors to incorporate more business history into their courses, and to showcase the Dictionary...
Pages 160-1
Bibliography of BC
Contributors
Contributors
Sara Giest is a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, in the Department of Political Science. She holds an MA in Society, Science and Technology Studies from Aalborg and Lund University followed by a completion of an MA at Bonn University in the field of Political Science. Her research focuses on the effectiveness of network management for cluster development and policies. As a research assistant she is looking at the use of place-based tools in climate change networks in cooperation with the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (pics).
Barry Gough, PhD, DLit, is a private scholar living in Victoria, BC. Author of histories and biographies dating from his The Royal Navy and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1810-1914: A Study of British Maritime Ascendancy, which inaugurated UBC Press in 1971, his most recent book is Juan de Fuca’s Strait: Voyages in the Waterway of Forgotten Dreams (Harbour 2012). He prepared the historical claims dossier for the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council in the Meares Island case Moses Marting et al. v. H.M. the Queen et al. He is Emeritus Professor of History, Wilfrid Laurier University.
Michael Howlett (Professor) BSocSci.(Hon)(Ott), MA(Br Col), PhD (Queen’s) is Burnaby Mountain Chair in the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University and Yong Pung How Chair Professor in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He specializes in public policy analysis, political economy, and resource and environmental policy. He is the author of Canadian Public Policy (2013) and Designing Public Policy (2011), and coauthor of The Public Policy Primer (2010), and Integrated Policymaking for Sustainable Development (2009), among other books.
Ian Pooley is an Okanagan historian. He recently published a study in the Okanagan Historical Society 76th Report on early railway barge transportation in the Okanagan and is currently working on a project on Okanagan social history.
Richard Rajala is an associate professor of History at the University of Victoria where he teaches British Columbia, Canadian, and environmental history. His current research focus is on the history of tourism in Vancouver Island resource-dependent communities.