National Network for Equitable Library Service

The Scots in Canada made their mark as explorers, fur traders, soldiers, business leaders, prime ministers and more. Ex-pat Paul Cowan marks their journey from his native land to the New World.

This collection of articles by Canadian scholars adds to a growing literature that examines the nature of the entrepreneurial process at the national and regional levels.

John Rae is best known today as the first European to reveal the fate of the Franklin Expedition, yet the range of Rae’s accomplishments is much greater. Over five expeditions, Rae mapped some 1,550 miles (2,494 kilometres) of Arctic coastline; he is undoubtedly one of the Arctic’s greatest explorers, yet today his significance is all but lost. John Rae, Arctic Explorer is an annotated version of Rae’s unfinished autobiography.

The Canadian government's 1983 decision to allow U.S. cruise missile testing in this country resulted in intense political fallout. The controversial program was kept quiet for as long as possible, but when key secrets were leaked, the powers that be faced harsh criticism from activists, opposition parties, Washington, and the Canadian public.

In Luther H. Holton: A Founding Canadian Entrepreneur, Henry Klassen has made accessible the story of one of early Montreal's most remarkable citizens. Rising from humble origins, Luther H. Holton became an entrepreneur extraordinaire, with interests in real estate, railway building, steamboats, and banking. From the success of his various business ventures, Holton moved easily into the world of politics.

Magic Off Main chronicles the life and art of Esther Warkov, a visual artist of Jewish heritage who lives in Winnipeg and paints in a surrealistic and postmodern style. It considers Warkov's art through an understanding of her life and the palpable effect her life as a Jewish woman growing up on the Canadian prairies has had on her art. By tracing the development of Warkov's art over forty years, Rasporich addresses aspects of biography, social and cultural history, and art history in a cohesive volume.

Through a unique combination of biography, memoir, and autobiography, Cherie Smith traces four generations of her immigrant family and, in doing so, charts the very course of Russian-Jewish immigration to the Canadian prairies over the last one hundred years. Mendel's Children: A Family Chronicle begins in the shtetles of Poland and Latvia in the 1890s and follows an often wild and woolly assortment of relatives as they strive to become Canadians.

Mother Earth Essentials was founded by Carrie Armstrong. Her passion is sharing Aboriginal culture and the vehicle for her message is her products. Carrie has based a philosophy steeped in respect and honor for the environment and the beautiful plants used in her luxurious bath, body and beauty line. Carrie blends the finest essential oils, berries, medicinal, and ceremonial plants that Mother Earth provides with the teachings she learned as a young girl.

"Picturesque," "immense," "fantastic," and "sublime" are a few of the ways early British travellers described the landscape of the Rocky Mountains and the surrounding terrain. As part of a long tradition of British travellers' tales, these tourists-explorers, sportsmen, writers, scientists, artists, missionaries, and merchants-sought ways to describe the vastness and strangeness of the North American landscape to a British audience.

Critical forces of culture and nature collide in this comprehensive history of Ellesmere Island in the age of contact. Surveying the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lyle Dick presents an impressive treatment of European-Inuit contact in the High Arctic (the area of what is now the Quttinirpaaq National Park) while considering the roles of the natural environment and cultures as factors in human history.