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The end of the War of 1812 brought with it great political, economic, and social upheaval. The sixth and final book of the Upper Canada Preserved - War of 1812 series, The Ashes of War examines in detail the closing stages of the war on the Northern Frontier, including the two-month siege of Fort Erie, the engagement at Cook's Mills, the American attempt to recapture Michilimackinac (Mackinac), the tale of the Nancy, and the American raids into southwestern Upper Canada. It explores the impact t...

“This way, General, this way!” With these words, Major General Henry Procter was ushered off the field of battle. It was the 5th of October 1813, and the British commander—having abandoned his army and Indigenous allies—had just lost not only the Battle of Moraviantown (or the Battle of the Thames as it was known to the victorious Americans) but also a military career spanning more than three decades. Unwilling to take responsibility for the disastrous loss, Procter pressed for a court martial...

Few historians are as qualified as C.P. Stacey to address the questions underlying Canada and the Age of Conflict. This volume completes his authoritative and magisterial general history of Canada's relations with the outside world. The basic theme of the work is that foreign policy, like charity, begins at home. To this end Professor Stacey emphasizes how changing social, economic, and political conditions within Canada have dictated her reactions to external problems. Volume II begins with the...

Over a three-year period from 1837 to 1939, operating from a base-camp at Fort Confidence on Great Bear Lake, the expedition achieved its goal. Despite serious problems with sea ice, Dease and Simpson, in some of the longest small-boat voyages in the history of the Arctic, mapped the remaining gaps in a model operation of efficient, economical, and safe exploration. Thomas Simpson's narrative, the standard source on the expedition, claimed the expedition's success for himself, stating "Dease is...

In the sequel to Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna Moodie portrays the relatively sophisticated society springing up in the clearings along Lake Ontario. During a trip from Belleville to Niagara Falls, Moodie acts as a meticulous observer of the social customs and practices of the times. Invaluable as social history and as a candid self-portrait, Life in the Clearings versus the Bush chronicles, with wit and wisdom, Canadian society in the mid-19th century. The NCL edition is an unabridged repr...

On 13 September 1759, British and French forces fought one of the most decisive battles in history, on the Plains of Abraham outside the Canadian capital, Quebec. The British force decisively routed the French, seizing the city and, ultimately, all of Canada. But the struggle for Quebec was far more than one climactic battle: the campaign involved an immense military and naval operation, an eighteenth-century D-Day. Matthew Ward has researched extensively in archives in Britain and Canada to loo...

On 24 June 1497 John Cabot landed somewhere on the eastern seaboard of what is now Canada, yet even today, five hundred years later, no one knows precisely where. Once an issue in diplomatic negotiations over title to a continent, Cabot's landfall has also been the subject, especially in centennial years, of competing attempts to appropriate the meaning of the event.Beginning with the historical context of Cabot's journey, Pope traces the various landfall theories which have placed his landing i...

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French colonists and their Native allies participated in a slave trade that spanned half of North America, carrying thousands of Native Americans into bondage in the Great Lakes, Canada, and the Caribbean. In Bonds of Alliance, Brett Rushforth reveals the dynamics of this system from its origins to the end of French colonial rule. Balancing a vast geographic and chronological scope with careful attention to the lives of enslaved individuals, this book...

These journals comprise one of the principal sources of information on early European settlement in BC and provide a remarkable and unique record of the establishment of Fort Langley. Although the journals record such day-to-day details as weather, trade, and visitors, they also contain a wealth of information about social and administrative life at the fort.