Peoples of Canada: A Post-Confederation History, Vol. 2

Summary: This long-awaited history of Canada--the first survey by a single scholar in many years--is the result not only of 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. In this book the first period, 1885 to 1921, hi...ghlights the development of imperial sentiment in English-speaking Canada; a great wave of social reform connected chiefly with industrialism; a shift in the nature of Canadian immigration and urbanization; the First World War, which exerted a powerful force on the Canadian economy; and the quest for female equality. The next period, 1921-1945--which includes the Great Depression and the Second World War--is characterized by what Stephen Leacock called "the Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice." The war itself brought national sovereignty to Canada and gave birth to the welfare state. The growth and affluence that followed, along with striking changes in lifestyles and headlong developments in the arts, are described for the period 1945-1972. The 1970s to the present, when all the givens of the past--liberalism, centralism, nationalism--were attacked from several directions and began to unravel, are brilliantly surveyed by Bumsted. But his fresh look at this history--in an engaging text, generously illustrated--is both illuminating and inspiring. [read more]