National Network for Equitable Library Service

Many Canadians believe their nation fell on the right side of history in harbouring escaped slaves from the United States. In fact, in the wake of the American Revolution, many Loyalist families brought slaves with them when they settled in the Maritime colonies of British North America. Once there, slaves used their traditions of survival, resistance, and kinship networks to negotiate their new reality.

Chinese Comfort Women is the first English-language book featuring accounts of the “comfort station” experiences of women from Mainland China, forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War. Through personal narratives from twelve survivors, this book reveals the unfathomable atrocities committed against women during the war and correlates the proliferation of “comfort stations” with the progression of Japan’s military offensive.

As environmental deterioration became a major social and political issue near the end of the twentieth century, activists in Nova Scotia stood together to defend the places they called home. Political radicals and conservatives alike worked to achieve legislative and social success, even as they disagreed over fundamental principles. In Defence of Home Places examines the diversity of this movement, its early accomplishments, and the disagreements that caused its eventual weakening and division.

The Canadian Rangers stand sentinel in the farthest reaches of our country. For more than six decades, this dedicated group of citizen-soldiers has quietly served as Canada's eyes, ears, and voice in isolated coastal and northern communities. Drawing on official records, interviews, and participation in Ranger exercises, Lackenbauer argues that the organization offers an inexpensive way for Canada to "show the flag" from coast to coast to coast.

The image of a rough frontier – where working men were tempted away from church on Sundays by more profane concerns – was perpetuated by postwar religious leaders troubled by the decline in church involvement. Tina Block debunks the myth of a godless frontier, revealing a Pacific Northwest that rejected organized religion – but not necessarily God. Not just working men but also women, families, and middle-class communities helped to shape the region’s secular identity.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the region of Liangshan in southwest China was plagued by violence. Indigenous Nuosu communities clashed with Han migrants, the Qing and Republican states, and local warlords. The first English-language history of Liangshan, A Frontier Made Lawless challenges the view that ongoing violence was the result of population pressures, opium production, and the growth of local paramilitary groups.

The First Nations of British Columbia, now in its third edition, is a concise and accessible overview of BC’s First Nations peoples, cultures, and issues. Robert J. Muckle familiarizes readers with the history, diversity, and complexity of First Nations to provide a context for contemporary concerns and initiatives. This latest edition of the classic work has been fully revised, with new chapters added and previous ones rewritten, arguments reframed in light of current developments, and resources brought right up to date.

Laura Holland and Mildred Forbes, an inseparable duo, set off from Montreal in June 1915 to serve as nursing sisters in the Great War. Over the next four years, the two cared for each other through sickness and health, air raids and bombings, unrelenting work, and adventurous leaves. This thoughtfully curated collection of their letters home paints a vivid account of nursing through the battles of Gallipoli, Passchendaele, and beyond.

This cultural history of the amateur military tradition traces the origins of the citizen soldier ideal from long before Canadians donned khaki and boarded troopships for the Western Front. Before the Great War, Canada’s military culture was in transition as the country navigated an uncertain relationship with the United States and fought an imperial war in South Africa.

Jean Barman rewrites the history of the Pacific Northwest from the perspective of the French Canadians involved in the fur economy, the Indigenous women whose presence in their lives encouraged them to stay, and their descendants. For half a century, French Canadians were the region’s largest group of newcomers, facilitating early overland crossings, driving the fur economy, initiating non-wholly-Indigenous agricultural settlement, and easing relations with Indigenous peoples.