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The Social Credit Movement had a Broad and significant impact on the social and political history of Alberta. A number of authors have examined this phenomenon, usually focusing on the economic and social conditions that influenced Social Credit's rise to power. Major Douglas and Alberta Social Credit Ideology, however, is the first work dedicated expressly to the intellectual history of the Social Credit government of the 1930s and 1940s. Bob Hesketh challenges us to revise previous thinking about Social Credit by placing new emphasis on the influence of Major C.H. Douglas's conspiracy-based ideology on the Aberhart and Manning governments. The author is the first to contend that Douglas's beliefs were strongly influenced by the infamous anti-Semitic book, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Douglas believed that a Jewish financial conspiracy with the single goal of enslaving mankind was orchestrating world events. Hesketh analyses the shared ground between Douglas's conspiratorial thinking and the fundamentalism of Aberhart and Manning. He suggests that both Premiers understood and applied Douglas's teachings to a wide variety of government policies, from the famous monetary bills to numerous lesser known economic diversification initiatives. This book develops important new interpretations of Social Credit's behaviour as a movement, party, and government, providing an unprecedented focus on ideology. It will be an essential reference for historians and political scientists concerned with the history of Social Credit in Alberta.

For years scholars have maintained that Social Credit was a protest on the part of small-scale farmers, who fought against their disadvantaged position in advanced capitalism by rejecting central Canada's control of the prairie region. The protest is usually described as conservative and its supporters portrayed as small agrarian capitalists who combined their opposition to regional exploitation with a firm commitment to capitalism. Based on a review of census materials on occupations, election results, and the party's statements and appeals, Bell reveals that this traditional interpretation is misguided on several counts. He provides a greatly revised picture of the movement's popular class base and its goals and motives, and shows that it was far more radical than commonly believed. The theory of social movements Bell draws from this analysis is applicable not only to Social Credit but to social movements in general. Social Classes and Social Credit in Alberta will be of particular interest to sociologists, political scientists, and historians concerned with Canadian social movements and elections and the political history of the Great Depression.

Forging Alberta’s Constitutional Framework analyzes the principal events and processes that precipitated the emergence and formation of the law and legal culture of Alberta from the foundation of the Hudson’s Bay in 1670 until the eve of the centenary of the Province in 2005. The formation of Alberta’s constitution and legal institutions was by no means a simple process by which English and Canadian law was imposed upon a receptive and passive population. Challenges to authority, latent lawlessness, interaction between indigenous and settler societies, periods (pre- and post-1905) of jurisdictional confusion, and demands for individual, group, and provincial rights and recognitions are as much part of Alberta’s legal history as the heroic and mythic images of an emergent and orderly Canadian west patrolled from the outset by red coated mounted police and peopled by peaceful and law-abiding subjects of the Crown. Papers focus on the development of criminal law in the Canadian west in the nineteenth century; the Natural Resources Transfer Agreement of 1930; the National Energy Program of the 1980s; Federal-Provincial relations; and the role and responsibilities of the offices of Justices of the Peace and of the Lieutenant-Governor; and the legacies of the Lougheed and Klein governments.