History of the Americas Books

First published in the early 20th century, this book contributed significantly to an understanding of the forces at work in the evolution of family institutions in the United States. The first of a three-volume series, the text describes the American...

Scott Prudham investigates a region that has in recent years seen more environmental conflict than perhaps anywhere else in the country--the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. Prudham employs a political economic approach to explain the social...

Until relatively recently, comparatively little attention was paid to the perspectives, daily experiences, hopes, and especially the political ideas of the enslaved who played such a central role in the making of the Atlantic world. Over the past...

A creative and unique approach to the history of African American religion, offering a reader-friendly depiction of the major themes and issues confronted by African Americans involved in a variety of traditions.

This book explores the relationship between three African American women's dance-art-music sensibilities within the context of a Pan African aesthetic. Its purpose is three-fold: to show commonalities between Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Nina...

This study engages with the emerging field of energy humanities to provide close readings of several early American oriental-observer tales. The popular genre of orientalism offered Americans a means to critique new ideas of identity, history, and...

This book traces the myth of Anglo-Saxonism as it crosses from Britain to the New World as both a cultural construct and ideological nation-building tool. Through extensive investigations of both early American and English cultural attitudes toward...

This book analyzes the stance of international communism towards nationality, anti-colonialism, and racial equality as defined by the Communist International (Comintern) during the interwar period. Central to the volume is a comparative analysis of the...

The Nixon or Guam Doctrine of 1969 stressed the importance of progress towards regional cooperation and Asian collective security, indicating that Asian countries themselves should take the initiative in creating programs in which the United States could...

This book focuses on alternative types of slave narratives, especially courtroom testimony, and interrogates how such narratives were produced, the societies (both those that were majority slave societies and those in which slaves were a distinct...

The key to the future of the United States relations with its sister republics in South and Central America may well be found in this exhaustive study of Chile-United States relationships. The South American nation's relatively small population belies...

On May 25, 1961, President John Kennedy declared:  "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth." Over his remaining time in the White...

Richly told and deeply troubling, this book collects personal narratives of Muslim immigrants to the United States who were racially profiled, detained indefinitely, and mistreated following the September 11 attacks. From descriptions of physical abuse...

The Old Lion Departs The Great Adventure Begins A Lion Roars in East Africa White Rhino and Giant Eland Down the Nile; Khartoum to Cairo European Whirl Peace Emissary Last Rites: England The Old Lion is Dead: Epilogue and Dramatis Personae

From Victoria Day to Labour Day, for seventy-nine years Gary Cole has lived at and wandered the sands of Bowmanville's West Beach. During that time he has garnered an immense amount of knowledge about that magical place. In this book, Gary shares this...

Trevor Green spent his long life beside the Cowichan River. Born in 1912, he lived at Greendale, his family's homestead just east of the village of Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island. The location seemed enchanted, offering enormous scope for an...

Longtemps considérée comme une rébellion mineure, la tentative de révolution de 1837 a en réalité secoué l'ensemble de l'Amérique du Nord, menaçant de renvoyer le pouvoir britannique hors du continent, mais également d'inaugurer une expérience...

From the expansionist fervour of the late nineteenth century through both world wars and the Cold War, a varied and ever-changing group of dreamers campaigned for Canada's union with the British Caribbean colonies. They hoped to diversify Canada's...

Most Canadians assume they live under some form of democracy. Yet confusion about the meaning of the word and the limits of the people's power obscures a deeper understanding. Constant Struggle looks for the democratic impulse in Canada's past to...

The quarter century that followed the end of the Second World War was marked by intense social and economic transformation: the changing face of postwar capitalism, a revolution in communications technology, the rise of youth culture, and the pronounced...

Until the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, Mackenzie King prided himself on never publicly saying anything derogatory about Hitler or Mussolini, unequivocally supporting the appeasement policies of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and regarding...

Mitigating the destruction and chaos wrought upon the civilian populations of northwest Europe during the latter years of the Second World War became the focus of Civil Affairs, a little-known branch of the First Canadian Army. Comprising a motley...

The Enlightenment Atlantic was awash in deep feelings. People expressed the ardour of patriots, the homesickness of migrants, the fear of slave revolts, the ecstasy of revivals, the anger of mobs, the grief of wartime, the disorientation of refugees, and...

When strange signs appeared in the sky over Québec during the autumn of 1660, people began to worry about evil forces in their midst. They feared that witches and magicians had arrived in the colony, and a teenaged servant named Barbe Hallay started to...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European settlers from diverse backgrounds transformed Ontario. By 1881, German speakers made up almost ten per cent of the province's population and the German language was spoken in businesses,...

For generations eastern Nova Scotia was one of the most celebrated Roman Catholic constituencies in Canada. Occupying a corner of a small province in a politically marginalized region of the country, the Diocese of Antigonish nevertheless had tremendous...

The fur trade was the heart of the French empire in early North America. The French-Canadian (Canadien) men who traversed the vast hinterlands of the Hudson Bay watershed, trading for furs from Indigenous trappers and hunters, were its cornerstone.Though...

The Royal Society of Canada's mandate is to elect to its membership leading scholars in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences, lending its seal of excellence to those who advance artistic and intellectual knowledge in Canada. Duncan...

In the early twentieth century, the eugenics movement won many supporters with its promise that social ills such as venereal disease, alcoholism, and so-called feeble-mindedness, along with many other conditions, could be eliminated by selective human...

Covering a period that runs from the founding of the colony in the early seventeenth century to the conquest of 1760, People, State, and War under the French Regime in Canada is a study of colonial warriors and warfare that examines the exercise of state...

Portrait of an English Migration recounts the history of those who left North Yorkshire for North America between the eighteenth century and the early twentieth century. Focusing on individual stories of migrants and their families, this book provides...

In Inequality in Canada Eric Sager considers one of the defining - but hardest to define - ideas of our era and traces its different meanings and contexts across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Sager shows how the idea of inequality arose in the...

Beyond redrawing North American borders and establishing a permanent system of governance, the Quebec Act of 1774 fundamentally changed British notions of empire and authority. Although it is understood as a formative moment - indeed part of the...

Born in 1907, Ida Martin spent most of her life in Saint John, New Brunswick. She married a longshoreman named Allan Robert Martin in 1932 and they had one daughter. In the years that followed, Ida had a busy and varied life, full of work, caring for her...

On 7 October 1825, a massive forest fire swept through northeastern New Brunswick, devastating entire communities. When the smoke cleared, it was estimated that the fire had burned across six thousand square miles, one-fifth of the colony. The Miramichi...

Discover the lost meaning of Liberty that was at the heart of the American Revolution and how this one idea united a nation and resulted in the Constitution. Tyrants were supposed to be bound by the "chains of the Constitution", but today it is the...

In June of 1876, the U.S. government's plan to pressure the Lakota and Cheyenne people onto reservations came to a dramatic and violent end with a battle that would become enshrined in American memory. In the eyes of many Americans at the time, the...

On the eve of America's entry into World War II, African American leaders pushed for inclusion in the war effort and, after the war, they mounted a concerted effort to integrate the armed services. Harry S. Truman's decision to issue Executive Order 9981...

The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World provides an important overview of the main themes surrounding the history of childhood in the West from antiquity to the present day. By broadly incorporating the research in the field of Childhood...

Histories of the Self introduces students and researchers to scholarly approaches to diaries, letters, oral history and memoirs as sources that give access to intimate aspects of the past. Supported by case studies, it is essential reading for students...

On July 6, 1892, three hundred armed Pinkerton agents arrived in Homestead, Pennsylvania to retake the Carnegie Steelworks from the company's striking workers. As the agents tried to leave their boats, shots rang out and a violent skirmish began. The...

Revised Lives examines self-representation in U.S. culture from the American Revolution through the nineteenth century. Drawing on studies of the history of the book, Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, and ethnic and gender revisionism, this book focuses on...

Examines the lived experiences of women criminals in Pennsylvania from 1820 to 1860, mainly as they navigated the nineteenth-century legal and prison systems.