Founded in 1841 by a royal charter, Queen’s University evolved into a national institution steeped in tradition and an abiding sense of public service. Propelled initially by its Presbyterian instincts and an attachment to Gaelic culture, Queen’s has prospered and adapted over the years to match Canada’s ever-changing dynamics. In this third volume of Queen’s University’s official history, Duncan McDowall demonstrates that the late twentieth century was a contest between expediency and tradition waged through crisis and careful evolution. Testing Tradition calibrates the durability of Queen’s vaunted traditions in the face of shifts in the broader Canadian society. During this time of massive postsecondary expansion, Queen’s grew sevenfold from a small, collegial campus of 3,100 students to a sprawling cosmopolitan place of more than 20,000 students from over 120 countries engaged in undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs. Measuring Queen’s University’s responses to concerns over social diversity, human rights, and gender equity through the eyes of its trustees, administrators, students, faculty, and the Kingston community, this volume pays particular attention to the experiences of women and visible minorities at the university. Copiously illustrated with photographs of important people, events, and aspects of campus life, this volume shows how Queen’s, in having its traditions tested, has worked to retain the best of its past, while accepting the inevitability of change.

How a national institution steeped in tradition adjusted to the momentous social, pedagogic, and cultural pressures of the late twentieth century.

Football at Queen’s University has one of the richest and longest histories of any sport in Canada. The Golden Gaels have been a presence in Canadian football at both the amateur and professional levels since 1882. Gael Force traces this history, chronicling the team’s ups and downs and integrating them within the history of the university, the country, and the sport in general. Providing a wealth of interesting facts and engaging anecdotes as well as profiles and photographs of the coaches, captains, and players, Merv Daub takes the reader through more than a century of Queen’s football. Drawing from a wealth of sources, Daub recounts the team’s key milestones including their first Dominion championship in 1893 with “Curtis and his boys,” three consecutive Grey Cup wins in the 1920s, the 1934–35 victory of the “Fearless Fourteen,” the 1955 season when Gus Braccia, Ronnie Stewart, Gary Schreider, Lou Bruce, Al Kocman, “Jocko” Thompson, and the rest of that “band of merry men” brought Queen’s back into the limelight, the golden years of the 1960s, and the 1978 and 1992 Vanier Cup championship seasons. Adding twenty more years of football history since Gael Force was first published in 1996, this new edition includes the 2016 season played at the revitalized Richardson Stadium. It is both a tribute to a long-standing football legacy at Queen’s and an important historical and sociological study of college sport in Canada.

The essays in Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian Academy make visible the submerged stories of Black life in academia. They offer fresh historical, social, and cultural insights into what it means to teach, learn, research, and work while Black. In daring to shift from margin to centre, the book’s contributors confront two overlapping themes. First, they resist a singular construction of Blackness that masks the nuances and multiplicity of what it means to be and experience the academy as Black people. Second, they challenge the stubborn durability of anti-Black tropes, the dehumanization of Blackness, persistent deficit ideologies, and the tyranny of low expectations that permeate the dominant idea of Blackness in the white colonial imagination. Operating at the intersections of discourse and experience, contributors reflect on how Blackness shapes academic pathways, ignites complicated and often difficult conversations, and reimagines Black pasts, presents, and futures. This unique collection contributes to the articulation of more nuanced understandings of the ways in which Blackness is made, unmade, and remade in the academy and the implications for interrelated dynamics across and within post-secondary education, Black communities in Canada, and global Black diasporas.

In 1958 Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts proclaimed at the University of New Brunswick that "Canada and the United States have carefully maintained the good fences that help make them good neighbours." He could not have foreseen that his presidency would be marked not just by some of the tensest moments of the Cold War but also by the most contentious moments in the Canadian-American relationship. Indeed, the 1963 Canadian federal election was marked by charges that the US government had engineered a plot to oust John Diefenbaker, Canada's nationalist prime minister. Camelot and Canada explores political, economic, and military elements in Canada-US relations in the early 1960s. Asa McKercher challenges the prevailing view that US foreign policymakers, including President Kennedy, were imperious in their conduct toward Canada. Rather, he shows that the period continued to be marked by the special diplomatic relationship that characterized the early postwar years. Even as Diefenbaker's government pursued distinct foreign and economic policies, American officials acknowledged that Canadian objectives legitimately differed from their own and adjusted their policies accordingly. Moreover, for all its bluster, Ottawa rarely moved without weighing the impact that its initiatives might have on Washington. At the same time, McKercher illustrates that there were significant strains on the bilateral relationship, which occurred as a result of mounting doubts in Canada about US leadership in the Cold War, growing Canadian nationalism, and Canadian concern over their country's close economic, military, and cultural ties with the United States. While personal clashes between the two leaders have become mythologized by historians and the public alike, the special relationship between their governments continued to function.