A century ago, the golden age of magazine publishing coincided with the beginning of a golden age of travel. Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture centres on Canada, where commercial magazines began to flourish in the 1920s alongside an expanding network of luxury railway hotels and ocean liner routes. The leading monthlies—among them Mayfair, Chatelaine, and La Revue Moderne—presented travel as both a mode of self-improvement and a way of negotiating natio... [READ MORE]

“Windburned, eyes closed, this: beneath the keening of bergs, a deeper thresh of glaciers calving, creaking with sun. Sound of earth, her bones, wide russet bowl of hips splaying open. From these sere flanks, her desiccating body, what a sea change is born.”

From the endangered Canadian boreal forest to the environmentally threatened Svalbard archipelago off the coast of Norway, Jenna Butler takes us on a sea voyage that connects continents and tra... [READ MORE]

When civilizations first encounter each other a cascade of change is triggered that both challenges and reinforces the identities of all parties. Making Contact revisits key encounters between cultures in the medieval and early modern world-Europe and Africa, the multiple ethnicities of greater Poland, Christians and Jews, Jesuits and Japanese, Elizabethans vs. aboriginals and vagrants, English and Algonquians, Pierre Radisson and the Iroquois, and the Spaniards in America... [READ MORE]

This unique political and biographical document records the words of T.C. Douglas, one of Canada's first and foremost Socialist leaders, in a series of transcribed interviews conducted in 1958 with political journalist Chris Higginbotham.

The making of modern Ukrainian identity is often reduced to a choice between "Little Russia" and "Ukraine." In this collection of essays, Zenon Kohut shows that the process was much more complex, involving Western influences and native traditions that shaped a distinct Ukrainian political culture and historiography. He stresses the importance of the early modern period and analyzes the development of Ukrainian historiography. Among the topics singled ou... [READ MORE]

In Making Wonderful, Martin M. Tweedale tells how an ideology in the West energized an economic expansion that has led to ecological disaster. He takes us back to the rise of cities and autocratic rulers, analyzing how respect for custom and tradition gave way to the dominance of top-down rational planning and organization. Then in response came a highly attractive myth of an eventual future rid of all of humankind's ills, one in which life would be “made wonderful.&... [READ MORE]

The style of my book must be in small pieces, as my life has been in pieces. (Jalal Barzanji)

From 1986 to 1988 poet and journalist Jalal Barzanji endured imprisonment and torture under Saddam Hussein's regime because of his literary and journalistic achievements-writing that openly explores themes of peace, democracy, and freedom. It was not until 1998, when he and his family took refuge in Canada, that he was able to consider speaking out fully on these topi... [READ MORE]

Our parents always taught us well. They told us to look on the good side of life and to accept what has to happen.

The Man Who Lived with a Giant is a collection of traditional and personal stories told by Johnny Neyelle, a Dene Elder from Déline, Northwest Territories. Johnny used storytelling to teach Dene youth and others to understand and celebrate Dene traditions and knowledge. Johnny’s voice makes his stories accessible to readers young and ol... [READ MORE]

A Map of the Island is an extended poetic meditation upon a boy's youth in Trinidad. In these verses we hear the cadences of the West Indies spoken from the distance of the Canadian prairies.

This catalogue showcases some of the treasures of the University of Alberta's Map and Special Collections, as well as other U of A Libraries, particularly in terms of resources to aid in the study of the cultures of Medieval and Early Modern Europe. The curators have focused on "facsimiles," and one of the ways to view the exhibit is in terms of the art of the facsimile, from early twentieth-century black-and-white photographs to twenty-first-century colour, digi... [READ MORE]

Mapper of Mountains follows the career of Dominion Land Surveyor Morrison Parsons Bridgland, who provided the first detailed maps of many regions of the Canadian Rockies. Between 1902 and 1930, this unheralded alpinist perfected phototopographical techniques to compile a series of mountaintop photographs during summers of field work, and spent his winters collating them to provide the Canadian government, tourists, and mountain climbers with accurate topographical maps. Br... [READ MORE]

Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland—one of Canada’s most beloved writers and one of Canada’s most significant publishers—enjoyed an unusual rapport. In this collection of annotated letters, readers gain rare insight into the private side of these literary icons. Their correspondence reveals a professional relationship that evolved into deep friendship over a period of enormous cultural change. Both were committed to the idea of Canadian writing; i... [READ MORE]

Margaret Laurence instinctively turned to the epic mode to create archetypal narratives of loss, exile, and redemption. Drawing on the Bible, Dante, and Milton, Laurence absorbed the epic structure and populated it with the Manawaka world of Hagar Shipley, Rachel Cameron, Stacey MacAindra, and Morag Gunn. Paul Comeau traces the development of Margaret Laurence's voice from its tentative beginnings in her African fiction to its culmination in the Manawaka Cycle. According t... [READ MORE]

Meaning "provided with marginal annotations," marginated neatly describes the items featured in this extensively researched catalogue. From presentation inscriptions to readers' commentaries to children's doodles, the variety of annotations that appear in these 17th-century books gives unique insight into the lives of their readers-and, indeed, into the lives of the books, as they passed from owner to owner. This catalogue was published to accompany a 2010 exhibi... [READ MORE]

This book focuses upon the hunting of seals and whales in the North Atlantic region, and how the activities of urban-based environmentalism has prompted responses from diverse northern peoples associated with self-determination, human rights, and sustainable development. However, the relevance of an expanding environmentalism implicitly challenges the interests and very survival of local peoples and their distinctive cultures. An historical analysis of these hunting societ... [READ MORE]

Merging poetry and historical records, Zits masterfully (re)creates a poetic view of the Frog Lake Massacre of April 2, 1885. His collage and cut-up techniques challenge the histories penned by the event’s recorders and reflect upon the difficult and painful complexities of past and present. He weaves together voices of Métis and First Nations participants, settlers, and military officials, using tape transcripts, historical accounts, memoirs, and footnotes to c... [READ MORE]

In Masters and Servants, Scott P. Stephen reveals startling truths about Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) workers. Rather than dedicating themselves body and soul to the Company’s interests, these men were hired like domestic servants, joining a “household” with its attendant norms of duty and loyalty. The household system produced a remarkably stable political-economic entity, connecting early North American resource extraction to larger trends in Britis... [READ MORE]

Of interest to theoretical biologists, as well as mathematicians, physical scientists or anyone concerned with problems in growth, chemical ecology and the developmental biology of form, these essays on biological modelling by American, British and Canadian researchers provide an interesting geometric excursion to the frontiers of contemporary mathematical biology.

Although controversial Bavarian composer Max Reger eventually became well established as a composer for organ music, his piano music is virtually unknown. This book discusses the solo piano pieces that show Reger's most original creation in this genre, are rewarding concert pieces, or have substantial pedagogical value.

Paris remains one of the most fascinating cities in the world. It provides a measure of excellence in many areas of culture, and it is itself constantly being measured, both by its lovers and by its critics. This book presents a series of studies on the images of Paris presented by writers (mostly Canadian, from John Glassco to Mavis Gallant to Lola Lemire Tostevin), but also in such other areas as social history and personal memoir. The result is a wide-ranging discussion... [READ MORE]