National Network for Equitable Library Service

Bon Echo: The Denison Years documents the era when famous artists, intellectuals and theatrical personalities visited the strikingly beautiful Lake Mazinaw area in Ontario’s rugged Land O’ Lakes district, to both play and work. From the construction of Bon Echo Inn by American Dr. Weston Price to the creation of today’s Bon Echo Provincial Park, the author has been privy to the "inside" story.The struggles and ideals of the early Toronto feminist Flora MacDonald Denison and her author-playwright son, Merrill, are well recorded in this important book.

Black Creek Pioneer Village: Toronto’s Living History Village is a recreation of a typical crossroads community found in Southern Ontario during the 1800s. Nestled on 56 acres of tranquility, the village is a step-back-in-time, a respite from the towering buildings and bustling traffic of the 21st century. Here, visitors discover the joys and daily realities of living in early Ontario. Here at the village, the sights, sounds and smells are tangible reminders of our past. Meet the blacksmith, the tinsmith, the weaver, the miller, the printer ….

In 1842 at York Factory, the English-born missionary James Evans built a lightweight tin canoe that glittered and shone in the sunlight. Wherever he went, Native peoples called the canoe his "Shining Island" or "His Island of Light."Travels in the Shining Island chronicles important events in the life of the extraordinary Methodist missionary, James Evans (1801-1846). It was Evans who created a written alphabet in native languages that remains in use to the present time.

As She Began, an illustrated introduction to Loyalist Ontario, provides a general guide to the most crucial period in Ontario’s history, 1775 to 1800, when thousands of refugees from the American Revolution streamed into the land between the lakes, giving Ontario its geographic shape and political destiny. Concentrating on the personal and social aspect of the loyalist migration, Bruce Wilson looks at the origins, the background, the motives, and the later successes of the men and women who were on the losing side of a civil war and were forced to start life over again in a wilderness.

Set at the turn of the twentieth century and spread across the enormous canvas of Russia itself, Another Winter, Another Spring is a tale of love and loyalty tested against great hardship and suffering.

The Almaguin Highlands, an extensive territory covering a 90 km corridor from Huntsville, north to Callander, west to Dunchurch and east to the Algonquin Park border, is a land rich with lakes, rivers and a lively history.

The Yonge Street as conceived by Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe is celebrated, from its beginning as a First Nation's Trail, to the Yonge Street we know today, extending from Toronto to Innisfil. Augustus Jones, the surveyor assigned by Simcoe, the French, the German pioneers, the Loyalists – all were to influence the building of Yonge Street. With the building of a route came tolls, inns, villages, more immigrants and ultimately an avenue of economy serving as the key transportation route for the people, goods and services that represent our province.

During World War II, thousands of Canadians left our country to fight for our Allies. Where they went and what they did has always been a question for some. Perhaps this book will give some answers. It deals with the experiences of an ordinary airman, a radio telephone operator, one of the many "ordinary people" who served their country in time of war. Ernest Monnon was a keen amateur photographer, who used to exchange his cigarettes for film and developing, and many of the pictures in the book are his.

The days when Aberdeen’s "fast sailing and copper-bottomed" ships carried emigrant Scots to Canada are brought to life in this fascinating account of the northern Scotland exodus during the sailing ship era. Taking readers through new and little-used documentary sources, Lucille H. Campey finds convincing evidence of good ships, sailed by experienced captains and managed by reputable people, thus challenging head on the perceived imagery of abominable sea passages in leaking old tubs.

It’s been said that without Harold A. Innis there could have been no Marshall McLuhan. Empire and Communications is one of Innis’s most important contributions to the debate about how media influence the development of consciousness and societies. In this seminal text, he traces humanity’s movement from the oral tradition of preliterate cultures to the electronic media of recent times. Along the way, he presents his own influential concepts of oral communication, time and space bias, and monopolies of knowledge.