Frank Underhill (1889-1971) practically invented the role of public intellectual in English Canada through his journalism, essays, teaching, and political activity. He became one of the country's most controversial figures in the middle of the twentieth century by confronting the central political issues of his time and by actively working to reform the Canadian political landscape. His propagation of socialist ideas during the Great Depression and his criticism of the British Empire and British foreign policy almost cost him his job at the University of Toronto. In Frank Underhill and the Politics of Ideas, Kenneth Dewar demonstrates how Underhill's thought evolved from his days as a student at Toronto and Oxford, to his drafting of the Regina Manifesto - the founding platform of the leftist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation - to his support of his long-time friend Lester Pearson’s Liberals in the 1960s. Not willing to be bound by partisan loyalties, his later shift toward the political centre dismayed many of his former allies. The various issues Underhill confronted, Dewar argues, were connected by the pioneering role he played as an intellectual and by his social democratic vision of politics. Dewar also reassesses Underhill’s historical work, focusing on how it differed from the new professional history practised by his younger colleagues. Intelligently written and thoroughly researched, Frank Underhill and the Politics of Ideas delivers important insights into twentieth-century political life and innumerable lessons for twenty-first century Canada.

The story of the bloody 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge is, according to many of today’s tellings, a heroic founding moment for Canada. This noble, birth-of-a-nation narrative is regularly applied to the Great War in general. Yet this mythical tale is rather new. “Vimyism”— today’s official story of glorious, martial patriotism—contrasts sharply with the complex ways in which veterans, artists, clerics, and even politicians who had supported the war interpreted its meaning over the decades. Was the Great War a futile imperial debacle? A proud, nation-building milestone? Contending Great War memories have helped to shape how later wars were imagined. The Vimy Trap provides a powerful probe of commemoration cultures. This subtle, fast-paced work of public history—combining scholarly insight with sharp-eyed journalism, and based on primary sources and school textbooks, battlefield visits and war art—explains both how and why peace and war remain contested terrain in ever-changing landscapes of Canadian memory.

Loyalty evolved as the central political idea in Upper Canada during the first half of the nineteenth century. It formed the basis of political legitimacy and acceptance into provincial society. David Mills examines the evolution and development of the concept of loyalty, placing special emphasis on the contribution of moderate reformers.

Covering issues from the resistance in universities to Darwinist thought, to the experience of women and ethnic minorities, to "economic" and "political correctness," from 1860 to the present.

War, depression, secularization, urbanization, and the rise of industry – between 1900 and 1945 Canada struggled with all these developments, and from them was born the modern welfare state. New services were created, along with new taxes to pay for them and expanded bureaucracies to administer them. Government activity grew enormously; so did government expenditures. The role of the state in a modern industrialized society became the focus of a lively and continuing debate for two generations of intellectual reformers. Doug Owram looks back at that debate and the academics, civil servants, and political activists who engaged in it. Adam Short, W.L. Grant, Frank Underhill, W.C. Clark, Harold Innis, and many others exchanged ideas – sometimes cautiously, sometimes passionately – about the wisdom of planning and reform, and on practical schemes for their realization. Owram explores the reforming impulse and its political dimension: the impact of warm and depression on attitudes to the state, the League of Social Reconstruction and its relations with the CCF, R.B. Bennett’s New Deal, and the various changes of heart experienced over forty years by Mackenzie King. The Canada that emerged from the Second World War was very different from the one that had existed at the turn of the century relations between the individual and the state had altered drastically and irrevocably. The people examined in this book and the social and political movements in which they believed helped shape Canada’s response to powerful forces that were changing its way of life forever.