National Network for Equitable Library Service

A unique look at Canadian history, this book captures these milestones and many more in ten chapters outlined with sidebars, biographies, quotes, trivia and illustrations. It is the story of the people, places and events that have shaped the country.

A Brush Full of Colour is the story of a boy whose passion for learning would save him from a life in the coalmines. The books by the American writer Jack London and Canadian poet Robert Service fired his imagination with scenes of the wilderness and the Klondike Gold Rush. He trained as an artist, and a stint in the British Intelligence Service allowed him to travel. But Ted never stopped dreaming of the North, and when he saw an advertisement for teachers in Northern Alberta, he jumped at the chance to emigrate to Canada, where the biggest adventure of his life would begin.

Eleven-year-old Nora K. received Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World as a birthday present, and in it she read about Plato’s theory of ideas. One problem especially intrigued her: What about the platonic idea of the dinosaur? Ideas are timeless and cannot die. The dinosaurs, however, became extinct ages ago. Does the idea of the dinosaur still exist all the same? Could it even be that the material world is a dream and time an illusion? Moreover, is there such a thing as free will, or is everything predetermined? Is the soul eternal? Do animals have a consciousness? Is the universe infinite?

Though it was discovered almost 500 years ago, few people have visited Sable Island. Despite modern naviational tools, excessive fog and stormy weather still make travelling to Sable a challenge. Add government restrictions limiting visitors to the remote island and prohibitive travel costs, and Sable is virtually inacessible to most.

Thousands of years ago in the village of Kitkatla, four hunters leave home in the spring to harvest seaweed and sockeye. When they arrive at their fishing grounds, exhaustion makes them lazy and they throw their anchor overboard without care for the damage it might do to marine life or the sea floor.

Looks at the experiences of a young Inuit girl returning from a residential religious school, where she is not recognized by her mother and is seen as an outsider.

Chronicles the long history of the fight for women's voting rights, beginning in 1848, with a focus on the years between 1913 and 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, and includes profiles of notable women in the struggle.

Bausum revisits 1968 Memphis, Tennessee, to examine how the sanitation workers' strike set the scene for one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s greatest speeches. It would also be the site of his tragic death, an event that dramatically altered the face of the Civil Rights Movement.

Describes how their different political views caused friends Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to become rivals, until they learned to set aside their differences for the sake of their friendship.

Profiles Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, who made great strides in the invention of flight.