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.

This history analyzes over one hundred years of complex interactions between the Mi’kmaw, Wabanaki, Peskotomuhkati, Wolastoqiyik, French, and English to show the continuity of Indigenous independence from the European newcomers.

Converging Empires weaves a compelling history of the convergence of Indigenous peoples, Japanese immigrants, and colonial expansion in the Northern Pacific – encounters that made and remade these borderlands.

Religion at the Edge shows how the distinctive social and physical landscape of the Pacific Northwest proves fertile ground for an expansive exploration of contemporary spirituality and secularity.

Investigates the groundbreaking role American women played in commemorating those who served and sacrificed in World War I.

Long considered a natural wonder, the world’s most famous waterfall is anything but. Fixing Niagara Falls reveals the engineering and politics behind the transformation of Niagara Falls.

Offering fresh insights and raising important questions, this historical exploration of appropriation traces the ways in which gender and race were negotiated through the popular culture of the Civil Rights Era.

The first full-length historical exploration of individual violence in the automotive industry, Blood, Sweat, and Fear taps the class, race, and gendered roots of the workplace as battleground.

Not Fit to Stay reveals how officials used panic about public health concerns as a basis for excluding early twentieth-century South Asian immigrants from entering Canada and the United States.

In this enthralling study of the ethereal, the scientific, and the strange, Beth A. Robertson investigates the gendered world of the seance, a place where self-proclaimed “psychic researchers” laid claim to objectivity and where spiritual mediums and the spirits they channeled resisted their methods.

The first history of black slavery in the Maritimes, North to Bondage is a startling corrective to the enduring myth of Canada as a land of freedom at the end of the Underground Railroad.

A fascinating look at the symbiotic relationships between the US security state and the US culture industry, and their drive to promote the US Empire as a way of life through the production, packaging, and selling of cultural commodities in world markets.

A landmark account of the background, motivations, and experiences of African Canadian volunteers in America’s Civil War.

A compelling, highly readable study of American migration to the West Kootenays and of the counterculture values that created a vibrant society in the Canadian wilderness.

Murdering Holiness explores the story of the "Holy Roller" sect led by Franz Creffield, a charismatic, self-styled messiah, in the early years of the 20th century.

Now available in paperback for the first time, From Maps to Metaphors, the classic on Vancouver's voyage, illuminates the European and Native experience of the “discovery” of the Pacific coast.

The first comprehensive history of the agricultural development of the Oregon Country.

Few American towns went untouched by World War II, even those in remote corners of the country. During that era, the federal government forever changed the lives of many northern Arizona citizens with the construction of the U.S. Army ordnance depot at Bellemont, ten miles west of Flagstaff. John Westerlund now tells how this ...

Galen Perras shows how that changed with the Japanese occupation of the western Aleutians, which climaxed in the horrendous battle for Attu during the Second World War.

Newcomers to Tucson know the Santa Cruz River as a dry bed that can become a rampaging flood after heavy rains. Yet until the late nineteenth century, the Santa Cruz was an active watercourse that served the region's agricultural needs—until a burgeoning industrial society began to tap the river's underground flow.

The Lessening Stream reviews the changing human use of the Santa Cruz River and its aquifer from the earliest human presence in the valley to today. Michael Logan examines the social, cultural, and political history of the Santa Cruz Valley while interpreting the implications of various cultures' impacts on the river and speculating about the future of water in the region.

Logan traces river history through three eras—archaic, modern, and postmodern—to capture the human history of the river from early Native American farmers through Spanish missionaries to Anglo settlers. He shows how humans first diverted its surface flow, then learned to pump its aquifer, and today fail to fully understand the river's place in the urban environment.

By telling the story of the meandering river—from its origin in southern Arizona through Mexico and the Tucson Basin to its terminus in farmland near Phoenix—Logan links developments throughout the river valley so that a more complete picture of the river's history emerges. He also contemplates the future of the Santa Cruz by confronting the serious problems posed by groundwater pumping in Tucson and addressing the effects of the Central Arizona Project on the river valley.

Skillfully interweaving history with hydrology, geology, archaeology, and anthropology, The Lessening Stream makes an important contribution to the environmental history of southern Arizona. It reminds us that, because water will always be the focus for human activity in the desert, we desperately need a more complete understanding of its place in our lives.

When Americans migrated west, they carried with them not only their hopes for better lives but their religious traditions as well. Yet the importance of religion in the forging of a western identity has seldom been examined. In this first historical overview of religion in the modern American West, Ferenc Szasz shows the important role that organized religion played in the shaping of the region from the late-nineteenth to late-twentieth century. He traces the major faiths over that time span, analyzes the distinctive response of western religious institutions to national events, and shows how western cities became homes to a variety of organized faiths that cast only faint shadows back east. While many historians have minimized the importance of religion for the region, Szasz maintains that it lies at the very heart of the western experience. From the 1890s to the 1920s, churches and synagogues created institutions such as schools and hospitals that shaped their local communities; during the Great Depression, the Latter-day Saints introduced their innovative social welfare system; and in later years, Pentecostal groups carried their traditions to the Pacific coast and Southern Baptists (among others) set out in earnest to evangelize the Far West. Beginning in the 1960s, the arrival of Asian faiths, the revitalization of evangelical Protestantism, the ferment of post-Vatican II Catholicism, the rediscovery of Native American spirituality, and the emergence of New Age sects combined to make western cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco among the most religiously pluralistic in the world. Examining the careers of key figures in western religion, from Rabbi William Friedman to Reverend Robert H. Schuller, Szasz balances specific and general trends to weave the story of religion into a wider social and cultural context. Religion in the Modern American West calls attention to an often overlooked facet of regional history and broadens our understanding of the American experience.

This is the story of the 1988 Free Trade Agreement negotiations between Canada and the US, the preparations for and conduct of the negotiations, as well as the ideas and issues behind them.

On the Northwest is the first complete history of commercial whaling in the Pacific Northwest from its shadowy origins in the late 1700s to its demise in western Canada in 1967.