Set in the late 1800s, this well-researched biography takes us into the heart of newly settled Upper Canada, and the rich beginnings of Haliburton County, Ontario. We get a thoughtful and thorough look at the history of the area as we meet Alexander Niven; surveyor, politician, farmer, adventurer, educator, and influential businessman in a blossoming locale. We meet Niven’s contemporaries, who alongside this versatile surveyor, formed and shaped this “back woods” settlement into the beautiful area we are familiar with today. This very informative and entertaining biography will immerse you in the exciting and sometimes trying times of the period, and paint a picture of early settlement in Haliburton County.

A study of place, identity, music, politics and regionalism which calls for a radical restructuring of the British Isles. In the early twenty-first century, "Englishness" suddenly became a hot topic. A rash of art exhibitions, pop albums and coffee table books arrived on the scene, all desperate to recover England’s lost national soul. But when we sweep away the patriotic stereotypes, we begin to see that England is a country that does not — and perhaps should not — exist in any essential sense. In this provocative text combining polemic and memoir, Alex Niven argues that the map of the British Isles should be torn apart completely as we look towards a time of radical political reform. Rejecting outdated nationalisms, Niven argues for a renovated model of culture and governance for the islands — a fluid, dynamic version of regionalism preparing the way for a new "dream archipelago".

In the 1880s the provincial government dispatched land surveyors to explore the northern Ontario hinterland in preparation for settlement.

Oasis's incendiary 1994 debut album Definitely Maybe managed to summarize almost the entire history of post-fifties guitar music from Chuck Berry to My Bloody Valentine in a way that seemed effortless. But this remarkable album was also a social document that came closer to narrating the collective hopes and dreams of a people than any other record of the last quarter century. In a Britain that had just undergone the most damaging period of social upheaval in a century under the Thatcher government, Noel Gallagher ventriloquized slogans of burning communitarian optimism through the mouth of his brother Liam and the playing of the other Oasis 'everymen': Paul McGuigan, Paul Arthurs and Tony McCarroll. On Definitely Maybe, Oasis communicated a timeworn message of idealism and hope against the odds, but one that had special resonance in a society where the widening gap between high and low demanded a newly superhuman kind of leaping. Alex Niven charts the astonishing rise of Oasis in the mid 1990s and celebrates the life-affirming, communal force of songs such as “Live Forever,” “Supersonic,” and “Cigarettes & Alcohol.” In doing so, he seeks to reposition Oasis in relation to their Britpop peers and explore one of the most controversial pop-cultural narratives of the last thirty years.

For David Cameron and ‘Big Society’ Tories, folk culture means organic food, nu-folk pop music, and pastoral myths of Englishness. Meanwhile, postmodern liberal culture teaches us that talking about a singular ‘folk’ is reductive at best, neo-fascist at worst. But what is being held in check by this consensus against the possibility of a unified, oppositional, populist identity taking root in modern Britain? Folk Opposition explores a renewed contemporary divide between rulers and ruled, between a powerful elite and a disempowered populace. Using a series of examples, from folk music to football supporters’ trusts, from Raoul Moat to Ridley Scott, it argues that anti-establishment populism remains a powerful force in British culture, asserting that the left must recapture this cultural territory from the far right and begin to rebuild democratic representation from the bottom up. ,

The mid nineteenth century founders of the foundation of institutionalised public accountancy in the English-speaking world were public accountants practicing in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. Their historical legacy is a respected profession world-wide. This book aims to celebrate this legacy in biographies of 138 accountants.