Passion to Dance: The National Ballet of Canada
James Neufeld

Passion to Dance is the story of the National Ballet of Canada — the people who dreamt the company into existence, the determination needed to keep it afloat, the bumps on the road to its success, and above all, its passion for dance as a living, evolving art form. One hundred and fifty photographs from the company's archives illustrate this definitive history, filled with eyewitness accounts, backstage glimpses, and fascinating detail. This is a record of one of Canada's boldest cultural experiments, a book to enjoy now and keep forever.

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Hearts and Minds: Canadian Romance at the Dawn of the Modern Era, 1900–1930
Dan Azoulay

What was romance like for Canadians a century ago? What qualities did men and women look for in prospective mates? How did they find suitable partners in difficult circumstances such as frontier isolation and parental disapproval? How did courtship proceed in the immediate post-Victorian era, when traditional romantic ideals and etiquette were colliding with the modern realities faced by ordinary people? Searching for answers, Dan Azoulay has turned to a variety of primary sources, in particular letters to the "correspondence columns" of two leading periodicals of the era, Montreal's Family Herald and Weekly Star, and Winnipeg's Western Home Monthly. Examining over 20,000 such letters, Azoulay has produced the first full-length study of Canadian romance in the years 1900 to 1930, a period that witnessed dramatic changes, including massive immigration, rapid urbanization and industrialization, western settlement, a world war that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of young Canadians, and a virtual revolution in morals and manners.

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Committing Theatre: Theatre Radicalism and Political Intervention in Canada
Alan Filewod

Committing Theatre offers the first full-length historical study of political intervention theatre and theatrical spectatorship in English Canada. Building on twenty years of research and engagement in the field, this book's historical narrative frames close-up examples of how theatre artists have intervened in and engaged with political struggle from the mid-19th century to the present. Lumber-camp mock trials, Mayday parades and street protests, the Workers Theatre Movement, agitprop theatre, the counter-culture theatre of the 1960s and 1970s, and more recent anarchist theatre collectives all played a role in a vibrant and unique radical theatre culture that went largely unnoticed, unrecorded, and undocumented by the professional theatre establishment.

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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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The First Stampede of Flores LaDue
Wendy Bryden

The true love story of Florence and Guy Weadick, in celebration of the Centenary of the Calgary Stampede, 1912–2012. The love story of rodeo promoter Guy Weadick and trick roper Flores LaDue began among the rough-and-tumble vaudevillians who preserved the frontier way of life in the first Wild West shows. Their love endured through North American performances in the small-time and big-time circuits, to the audiences of Europe , and culminated in 1912 with the most spectacular of accomplishments — the establishment of the greatest outdoor show on earth, the Calgary Stampede.

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