The Books of My Life: The Illustrated History of Canada

General histories of nation-states are always kind of hit or miss. They are also probably never completely satisfying to those who teach introductory classes on some particular nation-state. Most of them do the job of introducing students to the broad economic (including class), political, cultural (including race, ethnicity, and gender), demographic, and geographic outlines of the history of a nation-state. At the same time, however, they are selective because they have to be since there is simply too much terrain to cover and too short a compass to cover it in and some scholars and perhaps even some students will likely note that this selectivity often means that important economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic information are missing from these selective introductory histories. Most of the textbooks on US history I used in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, for instance, did not pay as much attention to religion, a cultural phenomenon that is central to the understanding a nation like the United States and even Canada and Russia, as it, in my opinion, deserved given its centrality to the history of the modern nation-state. Additionally, I was never enamoured of the extensive colour illustrations that typified many introductory textbooks, something that drove up the cost of these already uber costly commodities. Nor was I or am I a fan of the anecdotal tales that one often finds at the beginning of contemporary introductory textbooks, something clearly designed to capture the imagination of the student but which rarely does because college textbooks (and the similar stuff produced for online courses) simply cannot compete with the fantasy magic of television and the social media of days past and present.

Editor Craig Brown's The Illustrated History of Canada (Montreal and Kingston, Ont: McGill-Queens University Press, revised edition, 2012) does a very good job of introducing the history of what became the nation-state of Canada. The text very capably takes readers from the era when First Peoples occupied what is today Canada, through to the French settlement of Canada, the English settlement of Canada, (the two founding nations of what is today Canada), the interactions between First Peoples and the French and the English, the development of the fur and cod trades which were central to the economies of the early French and English settlers, the conquest of New France by the British, Dominion status, Confederation, World War I, World War II, the postwar Canadian economic boom, Pierre Trudeau and  the Canadian constitution, and finally to Steven Harper, the prime minister of Canada at the time this revision of the Illustrated History of Canada was published.  

The Illustrated History of Canada touches, if sometimes too briefly but again it is an introductory text aimed, one assumes, at college students and the educated reader who want to know the broad and basic outlines of Canadian history, on key economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic events in Canadian history. It is nicely illustrated with material culture documents that add much, particularly to the cultural and artistic history of Canada. It largely avoids the ethnocentric pat on the back aren't we so wonderful aspects of national mythhistories (and denominational histories) written before the decline (though not disappearance) of nationalist mythhistory after the 1960s.

I highly recommend The Illustrated History of Canada for anyone interested in the broad and basic outlines of Canadian history. Brown has chosen an excellent set of scholars on Canadian history to write on the various periods in Canadian history they are expert in and which comprise the individual chapters of this collection. It is a book that will be useful to those studying Canadian history in college, those interested in the history of Canada in general, and those interested in European settler societies. Like any introductory textbooks it has its limits, as I noted earlier. I, for instance, would like to have seen more on Canadian religion but that said, it does what it sets out to do quite admirably.