Standing but a stone's throw from the continent's western shoreline, Samuel Hill, a Quaker devoted to peace and a road builder rolling in wealth, addressed 4,000 celebrants gathered at the United States-Canada border on the Fourth of July, 1915. There, they celebrated a century of international peace and the opening of the Pacific Highway, now known simply as the I-5. As the ceremony closed, one member of the crowd stood and proposed construction of an international arch of peace at the site whereon they stood. Hill agreed and acted upon the proposal. Six years later, on September 6, 1921, Samuel Hill stood before a crowd estimated at 10,000 or more, and dedicated the International Peace Arch to the cause of world peace. War satisfies neither the victors nor the vanquished, he said, opening his dedicatory address. Perfect peace alone satisfies. For more than 80 years, the Peace Arch has stood between freeway lanes where millions of travelers, heading south into Washington state or north into British Columbia, have seen it as a symbol of peace. resident of Blaine, Washington, whose home is but one block from Peace Arch State Park, completed an exhaustive manuscript after fifteen years of research. The Peace Arch, standing on beautiful international parkland, has also been enshrouded with myths and mysteries that Clark has uncovered in the course of his research. Peace Arch devotees, long forgotten, have been restored to remembrances they have long deserved. Vital facts, long lost, have been recovered and given merited recognition. The Peace Arch has been the setting of devotion and demonstrations, queens and quarrels, marriages and marching bands. But in its history, so notably marked by variation ranging from violence to indifference, peace has remained its ongoing theme.

'Canadians are not accustomed to thinking of censorship, secret intelligence, and propaganda as a single entity. Much less do they consider that these covertly militaristic activities have anything to do with culture.' So writes Mark Krismanson in this important study of the intertwining activities and careers of those involved in Canada's security agencies and in the state-sanctioned culture industry during the delight of the Cold War. The connections between secret intelligence and culture might appear to be merely coincidental. Both the spies and the arts people worked with words, with symbols and hidden meanings, with ideas. They had regular informal luncheons together in Ottawa. Some members of the intelligence community even found careers in the arts. Less than a decade after defecting, the Russian Igor Gouzenko wrote a pulp fiction Cold War spy novel- for which he received a Governor General's award. And Peter Dwyer, Britain's top security official in North America during World War II, was a playwright who after the war worked in Canada's intelligence community before drafting the founding for the Canada Council and becoming its first director. But Plateaus of Freedom details much more than a casual relationship between security and the arts. As Kristmanson demonstrates, 'the censorship-intelligence-propaganda complex that proliferated in Canada after World War II played a counterpoint between national culture and state security, with the result that freedom, especially intellectual freedom, plateaued on the principle of nationality.' The security and cultural policy measures examined here, from the RCMP investigations at the National Film Board that led to numerous firings, to the harassment of the extraordinary African-American singer and Soviet sympathizer Paul Robeson, 'attest to the fragility and the enduring power of art to effect social change'.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for the University of Idaho Press What Happened Here? Travelers interested in history want to know about the history of the sites that they pass in the Evergreen State. Who but veteran author Bill Gulick could write the premier historical travel book on Washington?