A Cold Colonialism
Modern Exploration and the Canadian North
A Cold Colonialism reframes exploration as a modern enterprise – one through which southern Canadians and Americans sought to exert control over northern peoples and their lands.
Discovering Nothing
In Pursuit of an Elusive Northwest Passage
Quests to discover a navigable or usable Northwest Passage ended in failure, but as Discovering Nothing shows, the many attempts to find what nature did not provide led to the construction of its transcontinental equivalent, changing the landscape of North America forever.
Captain Cook Rediscovered
Voyaging to the Icy Latitudes
This first modern study to focus on James Cook’s polar adventures, Captain Cook Rediscovered introduces an entirely new explorer who is more at home along the edge of the polar ice packs than the Pacific’s sandy beaches.
An Ethnohistorian in Rupert’s Land
Unfinished Conversations
These essays Jennifer Brown’s investigations into the surprising range of interactions among Indigenous people and newcomers as they met or observed one another from a distance, and as they competed, compromised, and rejected or adapted to change.
Acts of Occupation
Canada and Arctic Sovereignty, 1918-25
This fascinating tale of the rivalries and intrigues that played out as Canada secured the Arctic illuminates an under-explored era in Canadian foreign policy.
The Hero and the Historians
Historiography and the Uses of Jacques Cartier
This unique exploration of commemoration and memory traces Jacque Cartier’s evolving image over five centuries to show how changing notions of the past have shaped identity formation and nationalism in English- and French-speaking Canada.
The Reluctant Land
Society, Space, and Environment in Canada before Confederation
At the Far Reaches of Empire
The Life of Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra
The most complete study of Bodega and his epoch yet written, At the Far Reaches of Empire is an absorbing narrative of eighteenth-century empire building.
Northern Rover
The Life Story of Olaf Hanson
Undelivered Letters to Hudson's Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830-57
This collection of correspondence – letters sent to Hudson's Bay Company men by their families and loved ones but never delivered – offers a rare and human history of ordinary people, many of whom were the early settlers of the Pacific Northwest.
Strangers in Blood
Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country
The experience of these conscientious objectors offers insight into evolving attitudes about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship during a key period of Canadian nation building.
Gunboat Frontier
British Maritime Authority and Northwest Coast Indians, 1846-1890
Gunboat Frontier presents a different interpretation of Indian-white relations in nineteenth-century British Columbia, focusing on the interaction of West Coast Indians with British law and authority.
A Voyage to the North West Side of America
The Journals of James Colnett, 1786-89
The journal of James Colnett is the last unpublished account of the early maritime fur trade on the Northwest Coast.
Pacific Empires
Essays in Honour of Glyndwr Williams
A new interest in European maritime exploration was aroused with the publication of the first volume of J.C. Beaglehole's edition of The Journals of Captain James Cook in 1955. In the forty-odd years since then ...
Trading Beyond the Mountains
The British Fur Trade on the Pacific, 1793-1843
This books examines the Hudson's Bay company exploration efforts beyond the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean from 1793 to 1843 – which led to the commercial development of the Pacific coast and the Cordilleran interior of western North America.
The Vancouver Island Letters of Edmund Hope Verney
1862-65
This previously unknown collection of letters lets us experience colonial British Columbia through the eyes of a young British naval officer who spent three years on Vancouver Island commanding a Royal Navy gunboat during the Cariboo gold rush.
Paul Kane's Great Nor-West
In this beautifully designed and richly illustrated book, Diane Eaton and Sheila Urbanek re-create Paul Kane's heroic journey across Canada and bring to life the people, places, and events he experienced.
Robert Brown and the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition
The remarkable journal of the 1864 Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition, a four-and-a-half-month journey that describes the island's pristine wilderness, as well as Cowichan, Chemainus, and Comox and the coal-mining town of Nanaimo.
They Call Me Father
Memoirs of Father Nicolas Coccola
These fascinating memoirs of Father Nicolas Coccola, a Corsican-born Oblatean who arrived in British Columbia in 1880, reveal the complexity of the work carried out by ordinary missionary priests.