Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Statesman, 1944–1965
Max and Monique Nemni

This groundbreaking biography continues the story begun in Young Trudeau, taking Canada's legendary Prime Minister from his pro-fascist youth all the way to his entry into federal politics as a crusading Liberal democrat. When he went to Harvard in 1944, Pierre Trudeau was twenty-five, a recent graduate of the University of Montreal Law School; true to his elite Catholic-French education, he had been till recently pro-fascist, and he disliked democracy. Years of graduate study at Harvard, then the Sorbonne, then the London School of Economics exposed him to new ideas, as did his hitchhiking travels around the world. Returned to Quebec as a new man, he engaged in educating workers and other jobs that made him a famous defender of federal democracy. He entered Parliament in 1965, within three years of rocketing, Obama-like, to the very top.

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Selling Canada: Three Propaganda Campaigns that Shaped the Nation
Daniel Francis

It has been said that a nation is a group of people who share the same illusions about themselves. This book is a further investigation of that aphorism. The book examines how images of Canada were marketed to encourage immigration, participation in the war effort, and tourism. This process of "selling Canada" to Canadians and to outsiders generated a wide variety of visual materials evoking dominant images of the country, images that did not always, or even very often, match reality. Instead they matched an idealized version of Canada: a Canada of fruitful farmland and happy families, of loyal soldiers and supportive women, of stupendous scenery, wide open spaces, picturesque native people and colourful, well-integrated ethnic groups. This naive version of Canada papered over many of the social problems that disturbed the country.

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Manufacturing National Park Nature: Photography, Ecology, and the Wilderness Industry of Jasper
J. Keri Cronin

National parks occupy a prominent place in the Canadian imagination, yet we are only beginning to understand how their visual representation has shaped and continues to inform our perceptions of ecological issues and the natural world. J. Keri Cronin draws on historical and modern postcards, advertisements, and other images of Jasper National Park to trace how various groups and the tourism industry have used photography to divorce the park from real environmental threats and instead package it as a series of breathtaking vistas and adorable-looking animals. Manufacturing National Park Nature demonstrates that popular forms of picturing nature can have ecological implications that extend far beyond the frame of the image.

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1812: The Navy’s War
George C. Daughan

At the outbreak of the War of 1812, America's prospects looked dismal. It was clear that the primary battlefield would be the open ocean—but America's war fleet, only twenty ships strong, faced a practiced British navy of more than a thousand men-of-war. Prizewinning historian George C. Daughan tells the thrilling story of how a handful of heroic captains and their stalwart crews overcame spectacular odds to lead the country to victory against the world's greatest imperial power. A stunning contribution to military and national history, 1812: The Navy's War is the first complete account in more than a century of how the U.S. Navy rescued the fledgling nation and secured America's future.

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Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada
Donica Belisle

The experience of walking down a store aisle — replete with displays, salespeople, and infinite choice — is so common we often forget retail has a short history. Retail Nation traces Canada's transformation into a modern consumer society back to an era (1890–1940) when department stores such as Eaton's ruled the shopping scene and promised to strengthen the nation. Department stores emerge as agents of modern nationalism, but the nation they helped to define — white, consumerist, middle-class — was more limited, and contested, than nostalgic portraits of the early department store suggest.

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Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900–1967
Dale Barbour

During the first half of the twentieth century, Winnipeg Beach proudly marketed itself as the Coney Island of the West. Located just north of Manitoba's bustling capital, it drew 40,000 visitors a day and served as an important intersection between classes, ethnic communities, and perhaps most importantly, between genders. In Winnipeg Beach, Dale Barbour takes us into the heart of this turn-of-the-century resort area and introduces us to some of the people who worked, played and lived in the resort. Through photographs, interviews, and newspaper clippings he presents a lively history of this resort area and its surprising role in the evolution of local courtship and dating practices, from the commoditization of the courting experience by the Canadian Pacific Railway's "Moonlight Specials," through the development of an elaborate amusement area that encouraged public dating, and to its eventual demise amid the moral panic over sexual behaviour during the 1950s and '60s.

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