National history is a category that fits remarkably little Canadian history written by the generation of Canadian historians working in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The ‘nation’ has not been a popular conceptual framework for historians in Canada and elsewhere because nations are pre-eminently political, and political history has not been fashionable recently. Moreover, Canada seems less a ‘nation’ than it did in the 1950s and early 1960s. Ian McKay, in a thoughtful essay (Labour/Le travail1991) that examines how Marxist historians have tended ‘to marginalize questions of belonging’ which do not arise from class, suggests that Canadian historians face...

In an earlier edition of this book, this chapter began with the words, ‘The scholarly literature on foreign and defence policy in Canada is still not large.’ Decades of effort by political scientists, economists, and historians have undermined this observation. The study of Canadian external relations is now formidable in bulk, even if it is unevenly distributed and some of it, alas, so academic as to be almost incomprehensible.

This bibliography is necessarily selective as to quantity and quality, especially as we approach the present. It is always difficult deciding between the illustrative and pertinent, and the merely ephemeral; equally,...

Workers were once described as being on the margins of Canadian history. Now they spill all over the pages. A flood of books, articles, and theses over the past twenty years has brought their particular history into the full light of historical reflection, and into the mainstream of Canadian historical writing. Most history departments in Canadian universities now offer courses on Canadian labour history. Academic conferences invariably offer sessions on working-class history that attract large audiences and stimulate lively discussion. And the main academic mouthpiece for the field,Labour/Le Travail,published by the Canadian Committee on Labour History, continues to...

Business and economic history are separate, although related, as is evident in the way these fields developed. Business history is a recent area of specialization in Canada. There was an initial impulse at organizing a self-conscious subdiscipline in the late 1960s and early 1970s; this submerged, to reappear more effectively and strongly in 1984 and beyond. Business history before the 1970s was primarily an offshoot of economic history, or consisted of journalistic biographies of businessmen and companies, most of them commissioned.

The traditions of professional economic history are much more deeply rooted. In Canada, this kind of history had its...

Although the roots of Canadian intellectual and cultural history can be traced back to the early twentieth century, it is only since the 1960s that the field has been sufficiently developed to be distinguished as a separate area of study. As with other subfields the line between it and other areas is often blurred. Traditionally intellectual history has been described as having two subfields. One, termed the history of ideas, has an affinity with philosophy and is interested in tracing the lineage and origins of ideas. A discussion of the major Canadian thinkers on the question of Darwinian thought, for...

The fields of Native history and of the history of Native/non-Native relations have grown dramatically in recent years. In fact, when an earlier edition of thisGuidewas published a decade ago, it was not considered essential to include a section of works on these themes. However, if it was possible to overlook Native subjects in 1982, it is not now. The involvement of Indian, Inuit, and Métis in constitutional confrontations, as well as more spectacular conflicts at such places as Akwesasne and Kanesatake, has catapulted Native peoples into the consciousness of the general public. And the explosion of historical...

Women’s history is one of most exciting and vibrant areas of current historical research and has posed major challenges to the discipline of history. It has broadened the topics of historical research to include the family, the body, life cycles, sexuality, and unpaid work. Women’s history has also expanded the definition of historical source material, as much of it has incorporated the methodology of both material and oral history. Most significantly, as suggested by Sylvia Van Kirk in ‘What Has the Feminist Perspective Done for Canadian History?’ in Ursula Franklin et al.,Knowledge Reconsidered: A Feminist Overview(O: Canadian Research...

Urban history has long wrestled with the problem of how to define itself, which poses numerous problems for the compilation of a reading guide. Mounds of historical studies explore events, developments, and processes that occurred largely, or even exclusively, in cities. But although they illuminate urban history, the attention of their authors has been on some other major theme, and there has been no conscious attempt to link their topics to the specific physical and human environment that we know as urban. This tendency has increased in recent times. From its birth in the days of D.C. Masters and others...

The past twenty-five years have witnessed a golden age of historical writing on the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland. Before 1965 historical studies of the region in the post-1867 period were few and often spotty in coverage. Most were the work of dedicated amateur historians writing for local and provincial historical societies. The remainder were unpublished and often inaccessible MA theses. The work of professional historians was overwhelmingly concerned with the careers of politicians and political administrations. In 1965 the existing literature could not sustain any attempt to write a synthetic history of the region in modern times.

All of this...

Each generation writes its own history. This is all the more true when the generations experience a war, or a quiet revolution, or important political or demographic changes. New subjects become worthy of historical enquiry; old ones call for a reinterpretation in the light of newly uncovered documents of contemporary concerns. In Quebec historiography, we have witnessed the shift from political history to broader social considerations and the study of social institutions and social groups; we have seen labour history moving from labour organization and political action to the experience of the working class. In this account of the essential...

Ontario is the largest, most powerful, and wealthiest province in Canada; yet it has been called the ‘unknown province.’ Peter Oliver wrote in an earlier edition of thisGuide: ‘There has been surprisingly little effort by Canadian historians consciously to write the regional history of Ontario. As a result, while there has been much history written by Ontario historians and while there is much about Ontario in that work, there does not at the moment exist a historical literature devoted to Ontario in the sense that such may be said to exist for other Canadian regions.’¹ But Ontario does not...

The differences in the three versions of thisReader’s Guideattest to the constant shifting of historians’ paradigms. The original 1974Guidecombined British Columbia and the Prairie provinces as one chapter and ignored the North. The outpouring of regional history in the 1970s was reflected by separate chapters on British Columbia, the Prairie provinces, and the North in the 1982Guide. In this edition of theReader’s Guide,one chapter must now serve all three regions. The task is difficult; it is not impossible only because several topics which would once have been included in individual regional chapters have...