Product Description

This long-awaited history of Canada - the first survey by a single scholar in many years - is the result not only of Professor Bumsted's experience of teaching Canadian history and discussing it with his students over twenty-five years, but also of his assimilation of post-1970s historiography. He has written a highly readable and richly detailed new synthesis for the present time. Professor Bumsted explains in his Preface to Volume I that he has broken with the traditional model of Canadian historical surveys, which concentrated on such 'masculine' subjects as political constitutional, military issues, and the stages of nation-building (though these things are certainly not ignored), in favour of emphasizing the economy and particularly society, the family, and culture - the people themselves: he describes at some length many interesting people who were neither politicians nor administrators. A further departure from the traditional mode of writing Canadian history is that the country is not seen wholly in terms of its bilingual/bicultural development based in Ontario/Quebec. Not only other regions, but many cultural identities also have an important place in the text. Volume I describes the First Peoples before contact with the first European visitors, and discusses exploration; settlement in the St Lawrence valley and the Atlantic regions; the Conquest and its aftermath; the development of British North America and its societies; agricultural and commercial growth; the political changes that brought about the federation of four provinces of British North America in the Dominion of Canada; and the expansion of Canada's domain and its economic growth to 1885.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2410953 in Books
• Published on: 1992-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 456 pages

Review
"Incorporates recent research on immigration and migration, settlement and land policy, town and country, rich and poor, and the best of social and economic geography, the whole illustrated with seven maps and an abundance of pictures chosen with uncommon care....Bumsted presents what facts and statistics there are and sets them firmly in a human framework by sketching biographies of typical individuals, an effective combination that few writers could improve upon."--William and Mary Quarterly