National Network for Equitable Library Service

Yuan Shikai (1859–1916) has been both hailed as China’s George Washington for his role in the country’s transition from empire to republic and condemned as a counter-revolutionary. Yuan Shikai: A Reappraisal sheds new light on the controversial history of this talented administrator and modernizer who endeavoured to establish a new dynasty while serving as the first president of the republic, eventually declaring himself emperor.

In 2013, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Canada v. Bedford that key prostitution laws were unconstitutional. Red Light Labour addresses the new legal regime regulating sex work by analyzing how laws and those who uphold them have constructed, controlled, and criminalized sex workers, their clients, and their workspaces. This groundbreaking collection also offers nuanced interpretations of commercial sexual labour from the perspectives of workers, activists, and researchers.

In 1844, seven widows dared to cast ballots in an election in Canada West, a display of feminist effrontery that was quickly punished: the government struck a law excluding women from the vote. It would be seven decades before women regained voting rights in Ontario. Our Voices Must Be Heard explores Ontario’s suffrage history, examining its ideals and failings, its daring supporters and thunderous enemies, and its blind spots on matters of race and class.

The creation of the Canada–US border in the Pacific Northwest is often presented as a tale of two nations, but beyond the macro-political dynamics is the experience of individuals. Before and After the State examines the imposition of a border across a region that already held a vibrant, highly complex society and dynamic trading networks. Allan McDougall, Lisa Philips, and Daniel Boxberger explore fundamental questions of state formation, social transformation, and the (re)construction of identity to expose how the devices and myths of nation building affect people’s lives.

During the 1970s and 1980s, after the Royal Commission on the Status of Women made its far-reaching recommendations, the volunteer Ontario Committee on the Status of Women went head-to-head with the Ontario government of Premier William Davis to fully implement equality for women in Ontario. Areas of concern were in employment, pay and benefits, child care and reproduction rights, education and training, family law, pensions, politics and the civil service, and human rights generally.

"Our country is now as close to crossing the line from democracy to autocracy as it has been in our lifetimes." - E. J. Dionne, Jr. It is the public debate of the moment: is Donald Trump precipitating a crisis of American democracy? For some the answer is an emphatic "yes." Trump's disregard for the institutions and political norms of U.S. democracy is imperiling the Republic. The sooner his presidency collapses the sooner the healing can begin and the ship of state righted. For others Trump is not the villain in this drama.

In this latest RMB Manifesto, Canadian freshwater expert Robert Sandford takes readers to China and shares what it is like to deal with some of the most intractable freshwater problems in the world. It all started out innocently enough: an airliner over the Pacific and a flight attendant passing out bottles of water. What those bottles represented, however, was the depth of China's notorious bottled-water trade and the short-sightedness of the Government of Canada in declaring Canadian water an agricultural product that can be exported in billions of plastic bottles to China.

Throughout human history, great and free nations have been built on noble dreams. Recently, in some once promising nations, dreams of betterment and possibility, have been effectively compromised. The current political landscape, featuring cold partisan interest, calculated distraction, divisive fear mongering, negativity, and voter disillusionment, has enabled a perfect storm of toxic dysfunction. To make matters worse, personal integrity and accountability have become almost non-existent in political leaders.

"Ann Hansen's memoir combines a riveting story with a brilliant exposé of the inner workings of the prison industrial complex. Charged with empathy, courage, and an anarchist passion for justice, Taking the Rap, is a must-read for scholars, activists, and troublemakers." - Allan Antliff, director of the Anarchist Archive, University of Victoria When Ann Hansen was arrested in 1983 along with the four other members of the radical anarchist group known as the Squamish Five, her long-time commitment to prison abolition suddenly became much more personal.

Chosen by Now Magazine as one of the "18 must-read books for fall 2017". Fighting Dirty tells the story of how one small group of farmers, small-town residents, and Indigenous people fought the world's largest waste disposal company to stop them from expanding a local dumpsite into a massive land fill. As one of the experts brought in to assess the impact the toxic waste would have on the community, Poh-Gek Forkert was part of the adventures and misadventures of their decades-long fight.