"In these two volumes, which replace the Reader's Guide to Canadian History, experts provide a select and critical guide to historical writing about pre- and post-Confederation Canada, with an emphasis on the most recent scholarship" -- Cover.

Detroit’s industrial health has long been crucial to the American economy. Today’s troubles notwithstanding, Detroit has experienced multiple periods of prosperity, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the city was the center of the thriving fur trade. Its proximity to the West as well as its access to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River positioned this new metropolis at the intersection of the fur-rich frontier and the Atlantic trade routes. In Frontier Seaport, Catherine Cangany details this seldom-discussed chapter of Detroit’s history. She argues that by the time of the American Revolution, Detroit functioned much like a coastal town as a result of the prosperous fur trade, serving as a critical link in a commercial chain that stretched all the way to Russia and China—thus opening Detroit’s shores for eastern merchants and other transplants. This influx of newcomers brought its own transatlantic networks and fed residents’ desires for popular culture and manufactured merchandise. Detroit began to be both a frontier town and seaport city—a mixed identity, Cangany argues, that hindered it from becoming a thoroughly “American” metropolis.

Booze runs through Canadian social history like rivers through the land. And like rivers with their currents and rapids. backwaters and shoals. booze mixes elements of danger and pleasure. Craig Heron explores Canadians' varied experiences with and shifting attitudes towards alcohol in this revealing. richly illustrated book. Book jacket.

Arguing that past scholarship has provided inadequate methodological tools for understanding ordinary housing in Canada, Peter Ennals and Deryck Holdsworth present a new framework for interpreting the dwelling. Canada's settlement history, with its emphasis on staples exports, produced few early landed elite or houses in the grand style. There was, however, a preponderance of small owner-built 'folk' dwellings that reproduced patterns from the immigrants' ancestral homes in western Europe. As regional economics matured, a prospering population used the house as a material means to display social achievement. Whereas the elites came to reveal their status and taste through careful connoisseurship of the standard international 'high style, ' an emerging middle class accomplished this through a new mode of house building that the authors describe as 'vernacular.' The vernacular dwelling selectively mimicked elements of the elite houses while departing from the older folk forms in response to new social aspirations. The vernacular revolution was accelerated by a popular press that produced inexpensive how-to guides and a manufacturing sector that made affordable standardized lumber and trim. Ultimately the triumph of vernacular housing was the 'prefab' house marketed by firms such as the T. Eaton Company. The analysis of these house-making patterns are explored from the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. Though the emphasis is on the ordinary single-family dwelling, the authors provide an important glimpse of counter currents, such as housing for gang labour, company housing, and the multi-occupant forms associated with urbanization. The analysis is placed in thecontext of a careful rendering of the historical, geographical context of an emerging Canadian space, economy, and society.