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In the spring of 2016, the world watched as wildfire ravaged the Canadian town of Fort McMurray. Firefighters named the fire "the Beast" because it behaved in seemingly sinister and often unpredictable ways. Many of them hoped that they would never see anything like it again. Yet it's not a stretch to suggest that megafires like the Beast have become the new normal. A glance at international headlines shows a remarkable increase in higher temperatures, stronger winds, and drier lands- a trifecta for igniting wildfires like we have rarely seen before.

The immense eighteenth-century scientific journey, variously known as the Second Kamchatka Expedition or the Great Northern Expedition, from St. Petersburg across Siberia to the coast of North America, involved over 3,000 people and cost Peter the Great over one-sixth of his empire's annual revenue. Led by the legendary Danish captain Vitus Bering, the ten-year voyage, which included scientists, artists, mariners, soldiers, and laborers, discovered Alaska, opened the Pacific fur trade, and, thanks to the brilliant naturalist Georg Steller, discovered dozens of New World plants and animals.

Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.

For decades, the Chinese Rescue Home was a feature of the landscape of Victoria, British Columbia. Originally a refuge for Chinese prostitutes and slave girls rescued from captivity, it became a residence and school where the Methodist Women's Missionary Society attempted to reform Chinese and Japanese girls and women. They did so, in part, by teaching them domestic skills meant to ease their integration into Western society.

In the 1960s, a youthful and ambitious lesbian movement began taking shape in Canada. After decades of being pathologized, disparaged, or erased from public view, lesbians were ready to make a scene – both by calling attention to themselves and by creating places to come together and forge their own culture. Making a Scene tells this story, revisiting the spaces lesbians created across rural and urban Canada, from physical locations, such as bars, bookstores, and members’ clubs, to ephemeral sites, such as conferences, festivals, and protest marches.

We Still Demand! recovers vibrant and unsung histories of sex and gender activism across Canada from the 1970s to the present. Departing from conventional accounts, this book demonstrates the varied nature of resistance and the productive power of remembering sex and gender struggles. In attending to the records and accounts that have slipped out of view, it also redraws the boundaries between activism and scholarship. The first part of the book remembers these struggles.