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Book & Film Reviews
book film review
book film review
An Environmental History of Canada
On the growing list of books on Canadian environmental history, University of Toronto historian Laurel MacDowell’s new textbook An Environmental History of Canada should take a prominent place. The evolution of this field of study...
Pages 121-122
book film review
book film review
Canadians and the Natural Environment to the Twenty-First Century
The field of Canadian environmental history has blossomed over the past two decades. Consequently, instructors of Canadian environmental history courses are becoming increasingly spoiled with good options to choose from for course readers. In all...
Pages 122-124
book film review
book film review
Why Canadian Forestry and Mining Towns are Organized Differently: The Role of Staples in Shaping Community, Class, and Consciousness
Canada’s single industry towns (SITs), especially resource towns, continue to be the focus of considerable academic and policy attention. Canada’s population may be highly urbanized, indeed urbane, with the major metropolitan and even medium-sized urban...
Pages 124-125
book film review
book film review
Ceramic Makers’ Marks
This slim and well-designed identification guide focuses primarily on nineteenth century American and European manufacturers of ceramics for those working to identify ceramic shards. Despite the back cover’s reference to “North American sites,” it draws...
Pages 125-127
book film review
book film review
Russian America: An Overseas Colony of a Continental Empire, 1804-1867
In this important book, Ilya Vinkovetsky of Simon Fraser University places the story of Russia’s American experiment fully within the history of colonialism. Russian America was a unique colonial adventure, he argues, in which the...
Pages 127-128
book film review
Orienting Canada: Race, Empire and the Transpacific
The history of Canada’s Pacific relations has long been a neglected subject. The general consensus was that Pacific relations were not central to understanding the history of the country and its place in the world....
Pages 128-131
book film 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
The history of Canada’s Pacific relations has long been a neglected subject. The general consensus was that Pacific relations were not central to understanding the history of the country and its place in the world....
Pages 128-131
book film review
Above Stairs: Social Life in Upper Class Victoria 1843-1918, More English than the English: A Very Social History of Victoria
In “Tracing the Fortunes of Five Founding Families of Victoria” (BC Studies 115/116 1998/1999), Sylvia Van Kirk revealed the mixed cultural background of some of Victoria’s most important settler families (the Douglases, Tods, Works,...
Pages 131-133
book film review
The Spencer Mansion: A House, a Home, and an Art Gallery
Robert Ratcliffe Taylor’s The Spencer Mansion, A House, a Home and an Art Gallery is, as the title suggests, really two books. One half considers the “life and times” of the five families who made...
Pages 133-134
book film review
book film review
The Life and Art of Ina D.D. Uhthoff
Like many female artists of her generation, Ina D.D. Uhtoff, née Campbell, had a difficult time sustaining a career as a professional artist. The daughter of middle-class Scottish parents, she did not lack opportunity. In...
Pages 134-135
book film review
book film review
Wrong Highway: The Misadventures of a Misplaced Society Girl
Wrong Highway is the memoir of Stella Jenkins, a middle-class mother of four from Victoria, who in 1948, recently divorced, formed a relationship with Bob Smith, a trapper and labourer. Stella left Victoria with her...
Pages 136-137
book film review
Unbuilt Victoria
What if? Ah yes, that perennial question. What would a city look like if the “unbuilt” were actually built? What if a municipality’s proposed plans were followed “to a tee”? Sometimes the rejection of a...
Pages 137-139
book film review
book film review
Making Headlines: 100 Years of the Vancouver Sun
The Vancouver Sun turned one hundred in 2012. To mark this event, reporter Shelley Fralic compiled a (roughly) chronological account of goings-on in the city and at the paper itself. It is not so much...
Pages 139-141
book film review
book film review
Selwyn Pullan: Photographing Mid-Century West Coast Modernism
Architecture has been a key site in the evolution of cultural Modernism; the elevator is often cited as an important early Modernist manifestation, and the idea that function creates its own form is a key...
Pages 141-142
book film review
book film review
Dalton’s Gold Rush Trail: Exploring the Route of the Klondike Cattle Drives
Although the Chilkoot Trail is the most famous trail to the Klondike, there were a wide variety of other routes that gold seekers used to reach the interior of the Yukon between 1896 and 1900....
Pages 142-143
book film review
book film review
Tse-loh-ne (The People at the End of the Rocks): Journey Down the Davie Trail
Keith Billington has had a long career as a nurse in British Columbia and the Yukon as well as being Band Manager for the Fort Ware Sekani/Kaska band (later known as Kwadacha Nation). The first part...
Pages 143-144
book film review
book film review
Hearts and Minds: Canadian Romance at the Dawn of the Modern Era, 1900-1930
In Hearts and Minds, Dan Azoulay includes part of a 1913 letter from a young woman lamenting her lack of companionship: “although I like Vancouver very much I am not acquainted with many people, and...
Pages 144-145
book film review
book film 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...
Pages 145-147
book film review
book film review
Train Master: The Railway Art of Max Jacquiard
Train Master: The Railway Art of Max Jacquiard, the new book by the noted transportation historian Barry Sanford, looks at British Columbian railways from 1925 to 1955, as depicted in ninety-nine paintings by Jacquiard. The...
Pages 147-148
book film review
book film review
Backspin: 120 Years of Golf in British Columbia
Arv Olson’s second edition of Backspin expands readers’ acquaintance “with accounts of some of the people, places, and events” that shaped the 120 year history of golf in British Columbia (11). A journalist and golf...
Pages 148-149
book film review
book film review
Raising the Workers’ Flag: The Workers’ Unity League in Canada, 1930-1936
The struggle to build trade unions in the extractive and manufacturing industries of Canada — mining, forestry, fishing, clothing, furniture, and others — was meteoric and its demise equally rapid. Raising the Workers’ Flag provides...
Pages 149-151
book film review
book film review
The Art of the Impossible: Dave Barrett and the NDP in Power, 1972-1975
This book is splendid work of popular political history, biography, and related media study that co-authors Geoff Meggs (a former communications director to Premier Glen Clark) and Rod Mickleburgh (a veteran of the west coast...
Pages 151-154
book film review
book film review
In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing
The twelfth and most recent volume in NeWest Press’s Writer as Critic series, Roy Miki’s In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing, like others in the series, approaches writing as praxical intervention. Beginning with...
Pages 154-155
book film review
book film review
People’s Citizenship Guide: A Response to Conservative Canada
People’s Citizenship Guide: A Response to Conservative Canada is just that. It uses Discover Canada, the new Canadian Citizenship Guide, as a launch pad for critiquing the current federal government’s ideological leanings, leanings expressed in...
Pages 156-157
book film review
book film review
Ghost Dancing with Colonialism: Decolonization and Indigenous Rights at the Supreme Court of Canada
In this book, Grace Li Xiu Woo, a retired member of the BC Bar, steps away from a standard case law analysis and instead analyzes Supreme Court decisions related to Aboriginal and treaty rights based...
Pages 159-164
Bibliography of BC
Contributors
Contributors
Hugh Johnston is a professor emeritus in history at Simon Fraser University and recent author of Jewels of the Qila: The Remarkable Story of an Indo-Canadian Family (2011).
Richard McCandless is a retired senior BC government public servant with an interest in history and public policy. He was the lead government facilitator of the transfer of the driver licensing program to ICBC in the early 1990s. He has a history degree from the University of Victoria and a Master of Public Administration from Queen’s University, and lives in Saanich, BC.
Robert McCandless began his professional career in oil and gas and mining exploration. For several years while living in the Yukon, he was a contract researcher and writer, which led to his publishing Yukon Wildlife: A Social History (University of Alberta Press, 1985). He later worked for Environment Canada mainly on pollution prevention in mining, and also for several years advising on Aboriginal affairs including treaty negotiations.
Isabel Wallace is a doctoral candidate at Queen’s University. Her research focuses on South Asians and public health in BC and the Pacific Coast states in the early twentieth century.
LiLynn Wan is a potter who completed her PhD in history at Dalhousie
University. She has a particular interest in the history of race and First Nations in British Columbia, where she is originally from. She is currently the proprietor of WaterDragon Pottery, which operates out of her studio in Herring Cove, Nova Scotia.