Although Canadian history has no shortage of stories about disasters and accidents, the phenomena of risk, upset, and misfortune have been largely overlooked by historians. Disasters get their due, but not so the smaller-scale accident where fate is more intimate. Yet such events often have a vivid afterlife in the communities where they happen, and the way in which they are explained and remembered has significant social, cultural, and political meaning. An Accidental History of Canada brings together original studies of an intriguing range of accidents stretching from the 1630s to the 1970s. These include workplace, domestic, childhood, and leisure accidents in colonial, Indigenous, rural, and urban settings. Whether arising from colonial power relations, urban dangers, perils in resource extraction, or hazardous recreations, most accidents occur within circumstances of vulnerability, and reveal precarity and inequities not otherwise apparent. Contributors to this volume are alert to the intersections of the settler agenda and the elevation of risk that it brings. Indigenous and settler ways of understanding accidents are juxtaposed, with chapters exploring the links between accidents and the rise of the modern state. An Accidental History of Canada makes plain that whether they are interpreted as an intervention by providence, a miscalculation, an inevitability, or the result of observable risk, accidents – and our responses to them – reveal shared values.

The Prairie Provinces cover Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

As intellectual engines of the university, professors hold considerable authority and play an important role in society. By nature of their occupation, they are agents of intellectual culture in Canada. Historical Identities is a new collection of essays examining the history of the professoriate in Canada. Framing the volume with the question, 'What was it like to be a professor?' editors Paul Stortz and E. Lisa Panayotidis, along with an esteemed group of Canadian historians, strive to uncover and analyze variables and contexts – such as background, education, economics, politics, gender, and ethnicity – in the lives of academics throughout Canada's history. The contributors take an in-depth approach to topics such as academic freedom, professors and the state, faculty development, discipline construction and academic cultures, religion, biography, gender and faculty wives, images of professors, and background and childhood experiences. Including the best and most recent critical research in the field of the social history of higher education and professors, Historical Identities examines fundamental and challenging topics, issues, and arguments on the role and nature of intellectualism in Canada.