From Amazon
Canada: Our History, Rick Archbold's original and spirited approach to Canadian history, cleverly brings 15 prominent events of 20th-century Canada to life through the viewpoints of young people between the ages of 10 and 17. Dramatic opening photographs draw the reader into many of the better-known episodes of our nation's past--Hurricane Hazel, Expo 67, the Halifax explosion, the Canada/USSR hockey series, and the FLQ crisis, to name a few. Archbold based many of his fictional characters on people he knows or true stories he has heard or read, and his characters convincingly reflect the perspectives of Canada's diverse cultures. The voices are original, honest, and often surprising. No stereotypes or clichés here.
Many of the riveting archival photos that accompany the stories are bound to elicit comments and questions from young readers. As historian Christopher Moore says in his introduction to the book, "I like old pictures because they're so strange. Look at the way they wore their hair! Imagine getting around in cars like that! What if you had to work in a kitchen like that one?" One small complaint is that the people and locales in many of the photos are not specifically identified. This minor point aside, Canada: Our History is a valuable reference source for young students and their teachers as well as a wonderful enticement for the individual reader. --Martha Johnson
Book Description
In this beautifully illustrated book, fifteen of the most compelling episodes in Canada's past are presented, each by a young narrator who witnessed history being made. Using a key photograph as the starting point for each chapter, the individual narrators lead the reader through an exploration of a particular moment in Canadian history, explaining the photograph and chronicling the events of the decade in which it occurred. Each section also contains 10 to 15 additional captioned images, which help the reader envision the past and enhance his or her experience of the events.
Parents, children and teachers will all benefit from this exciting true story of Canada's past, which promises to become an essential component of every home and school library.
Parents, children and teachers will all benefit from this exciting true story of Canada's past, which promises to become an essential component of every home and school library.
From the Back Cover
"A splendid collection of rare photographs artfully selected and captioned... Past and future collide constantly which gives Canada: Our Century enormous energy." ¾Martin Levin, The Globe and Mail
"Mark Kingwell and Christopher Moore are to be congratulated for avoiding clichés in their choice of old news photographs and for thier telling cutlines." ¾Mordecai Richler, Saturday Night
"Canada: Our Centry is a wondrous thing...clever, canny photography meant to be read and savoured." ¾The Edmonton Journal
About the Author
Rick Archbold has written or co-written 18 non-fiction books including The Discovery of the Titanic, which he co-wrote with Robert Ballard, the man who discovered the wreck in 1985. The book has gone on to sell more than a million copies in its various editions worldwide. Rick's latest publication is Conversations with Mummies. When he's not editing or writing or teaching editing, Rick Archbold is often to be found paddling his canoe in the waters of Lake Joseph, Muskoka.
Christopher Moore is a distinguished historian and writer who specializes in presenting history to general audiences. He is the author of Louisbourg Portraits, winner of the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction, of Story of Canada, and most recently, co-author of the bestselling Canada: Our Century.
Christopher Moore is a distinguished historian and writer who specializes in presenting history to general audiences. He is the author of Louisbourg Portraits, winner of the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction, of Story of Canada, and most recently, co-author of the bestselling Canada: Our Century.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 2: The Day the World Ended
When I looked at Tom, I thought to myself, "Our world has ended." On December 6, 1917, during the disaster called the Halifax Explosion, five-year-old Tom lost both his sight and his power of speech. That afternoon, when I found him in the Camp Hill Hospital, the doctors told me there was still a chance his eyesight would return. I doubted, however, that he would speak again. Tom looked as though the words had simply been blasted right out of him. It was a miracle that he was alive at all.
Tom is my nephew. He was but one of thousands upon thousands of people in Halifax and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, who suffered terrible injuries in the worst explosion human beings would manage to create until the detonation of the first atomic bomb nearly thirty years later. This is my story of the Halifax Explosion.
My last look at Halifax the way I had always known it came early on the morning of December 6 as I walked home long before sunrise. My job in the newsroom at the Halifax Herald kept me up all night. Because of the war against Germany, those of us too young to fight held jobs that usually went to older men. In 1917, I was seventeen years old. Thanks to me and my work-mates, Haligonians awoke each morning to find the latest news about the war crisply folded and neatly placed on their doorsteps.
I arrived home well before the sun rose. I lived alone in those days. Thank God my parents were safe and sound in the house in Truro where I'd lived until I was sixteen. A few hours later, I awoke to find my bed shaking violently, as if from an earthquake. My first thought was, "The Germans are attacking the city!" Above me, I heard pots and pans crashing to the
floor. At the same time I heard an almost musical tinkling. I soon realized that the noise was the shattering of glass. Then I thought of my sister Isabel and young Tom. Were they all right?
I dressed in a frenzy and ran up the stairs. The contents of the kitchen cupboards were strewn everywhere along with shards of broken glass. When I stepped out the gaping front door, which swung on its hinges, I thought at first that it was raining. But when I held out my hand to catch the drops, I discovered they were black. A black rain was falling. (Later I learned this was an oily soot created by the carbon that had not been fully burned in the explosion.) It stuck to my face and clothing almost like liquid tar. In the distance, I could see flames flickering among the houses higher up on the hillside. I thought to myself, "This must be what the battlefields of France look like." That made me cast my mind across the sea to my older brother, James, who was an infantryman stuck somewhere in a muddy trench in France. Then my brotherly instincts took over: Find Isabel and Tom!
I shudder to recount the sight that met my eyes when I reached my sister's house in Richmond. Like all the others in this district, perched on a hillside with nothing between them and the full force of the blast, it lay in smoking ruins. I approached her neighbour, who stood nearby looking dazed and helpless. He told me that she and Tom had only just now been taken by ambulance to the hospital down by the harbour. And so I continued my dreadful errand.
Most of the buildings downtown were still standing, although some had lost their roofs, but the streets were choked with debris among which wounded people wandered like living ghosts. The city, devoid as it was of the ordinary sounds of vehicles and machinery, had taken on a supernatural silence.
The closer I came to the harbour, the worse the damage and the carnage became. Wounded men, women, and children lay dying in the street. Some of those already lifeless appeared not to have a scratch on them. Some of the living had injuries too awful to describe. Later reports put the total number of dead or wounded at more than 10,000.
The harbour itself was a blasted wasteland. Across the Narrows on the Dartmouth shore I could make out the blazing hulk of a freighter. I later learned that this sorry wreck was the Imo, the Belgian relief ship that had accidentally set off the entire disaster.
Just before 9:00 a.m., while I was still soundly sleeping but while most of Halifax was already up and starting its day, a French munitions ship, the Mont Blanc, loaded with explosives, entered the Narrows on its way into the harbour. Meanwhile, the Imo, preparing to exit the harbour, had temporarily stopped its engines so as to avoid hitting a passing barge. But when the barge had passed, the Imo found itself bearing down on the steaming Mont Blanc, and was unable to turn away in time.
The collision was slight, but the friction of metal hull on metal hull sent sparks flying. These sparks ignited one of the barrels of benzine being carried on deck, which ignited the next and the next until the fire spread to the explosives stored below. The resulting conflagration blew the ship to kingdom come. The enormous explosion launched a tidal wave that drowned many people on shore, unleashed a deadly rain of molten metal on the city, and caused a shock wave that did damage all the way to Truro, more than fifty miles away. (My mother later told me that her kitchen window had collapsed onto the table where she and my father had been sitting only moments before.)
Most of the men aboard the Mont Blanc abandoned ship before the blazing deck detonated the explosive cargo, but one straggler was lifted in the explosion's cyclone and deposited, nearly naked, on a nearby hillside. Miraculously, he was unharmed. Not so lucky were the fire boats that had swarmed out from shore to attend to what they believed was nothing more than a burning ship.
I found young Tom in the hospital where many of the injured had been taken, but of my sister's fate I could learn nothing. Men, women, and children of all sorts and classes were literally packed in the wards like sardines in a box. The cots were all occupied, and the floors covered so that it was often difficult to step between them. Since Tom could not speak I couldn't ask him where his mother could be found. I didn't need to ask Tom where his father was. Like my brother, he was in Europe fighting the Germans.
The heavy snow that fell on Halifax that night settled like a dreadful shroud. The air had turned to a more seasonal December cold, and all over the city Haligonians huddled beneath blankets in their unheated cellars, as far as they could get from their gaping windows.
The next day they would begin the long, sad task of finding and burying the dead, including my dear Isabel.
Tom had been found lying in her lifeless arms among the rubble of their modest house. Her body had shielded his.
In the days that followed, I attended more funerals than I can count. The Herald building had survived the blast and we managed to get the paper out on December 7. The headline read SCENES AT MORGUES AND HOSPITALS THAT BAFFLE DESCRIPTION. I'm happy to tell you that people began to rebuild the city and that Tom did eventually regain his speech, although he never regained his sight. He had survived the Halifax Explosion of 1917, but the world we had known had ended for good.
Chapter 7: Off to War
When you kissed your dad goodbye, you could feel the scratchy new wool of his jacket, but you hugged him tight anyway. Your dad looked really handsome in his brand-new Canadian Army uniform. So handsome that he made your mother cry. As he marched down the road in New Westminster, British Columbia, in June 1940, with all the other Canadian soldiers going off to fight the war in Europe, you wanted to hug him one more time. That’s why you ran after him.
World War II changed your life forever, just as it changed the life of every child living in Canada. It wasn’t just that your dad was gone, although that was part of it. It was also that people at home – including your mom – acted differently. If you were a boy or girl living on Canada’s West Coast in 1940, your story of the war might have gone something like this.
After your dad marched away, the news of the war got worse and worse. You didn’t understand why Canada was fighting the Germans, except that it had something to do with the German leader, a cruel dictator named Adolf Hitler who wanted to conquer the world. By the time your dad reached England, Hitler’s army had taken over Holland, Belgium, and France. It looked bad for Great Britain and its allies, including Canada.
At home things went along okay, except that the food got pretty bad. Whenever you complained, your mom reminded you that groceries had to be rationed so that there would be more food for the men overseas. Including your dad. “We all have to do our part,” she would say.
And you did your part. Every day after school you and your friends went from door to door collecting scrap metal and used coat hangers for the war effort. Nothing went to waste. Even empty toothpaste containers – in those days they were made of tin, not plastic – were recycled. You considered it your duty. And it made you feel closer to your dad.
But until December 1941, the war seemed very far away. On December 6, the Japanese navy staged a surprise air raid on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the head-quarters of the American fleet in the Pacific Ocean. The attack sank most of the warships in the harbour. Fortunately for the Americans, their big aircraft carriers were away at sea. Otherwise, the war in the Pacific might have turned out very differently.
After the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan officially joined the war on the side of Germany and Italy. Canada and the other Allies, including Great Britain and Australia, immediately declared war on Japan. So did the United States, which had stayed out of the war until then.
When Japan became Canada’s enemy, your friends at school started to get scared. Japan was a lot closer to Vancouver than Germany. Hawaii was e...
When I looked at Tom, I thought to myself, "Our world has ended." On December 6, 1917, during the disaster called the Halifax Explosion, five-year-old Tom lost both his sight and his power of speech. That afternoon, when I found him in the Camp Hill Hospital, the doctors told me there was still a chance his eyesight would return. I doubted, however, that he would speak again. Tom looked as though the words had simply been blasted right out of him. It was a miracle that he was alive at all.
Tom is my nephew. He was but one of thousands upon thousands of people in Halifax and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, who suffered terrible injuries in the worst explosion human beings would manage to create until the detonation of the first atomic bomb nearly thirty years later. This is my story of the Halifax Explosion.
My last look at Halifax the way I had always known it came early on the morning of December 6 as I walked home long before sunrise. My job in the newsroom at the Halifax Herald kept me up all night. Because of the war against Germany, those of us too young to fight held jobs that usually went to older men. In 1917, I was seventeen years old. Thanks to me and my work-mates, Haligonians awoke each morning to find the latest news about the war crisply folded and neatly placed on their doorsteps.
I arrived home well before the sun rose. I lived alone in those days. Thank God my parents were safe and sound in the house in Truro where I'd lived until I was sixteen. A few hours later, I awoke to find my bed shaking violently, as if from an earthquake. My first thought was, "The Germans are attacking the city!" Above me, I heard pots and pans crashing to the
floor. At the same time I heard an almost musical tinkling. I soon realized that the noise was the shattering of glass. Then I thought of my sister Isabel and young Tom. Were they all right?
I dressed in a frenzy and ran up the stairs. The contents of the kitchen cupboards were strewn everywhere along with shards of broken glass. When I stepped out the gaping front door, which swung on its hinges, I thought at first that it was raining. But when I held out my hand to catch the drops, I discovered they were black. A black rain was falling. (Later I learned this was an oily soot created by the carbon that had not been fully burned in the explosion.) It stuck to my face and clothing almost like liquid tar. In the distance, I could see flames flickering among the houses higher up on the hillside. I thought to myself, "This must be what the battlefields of France look like." That made me cast my mind across the sea to my older brother, James, who was an infantryman stuck somewhere in a muddy trench in France. Then my brotherly instincts took over: Find Isabel and Tom!
I shudder to recount the sight that met my eyes when I reached my sister's house in Richmond. Like all the others in this district, perched on a hillside with nothing between them and the full force of the blast, it lay in smoking ruins. I approached her neighbour, who stood nearby looking dazed and helpless. He told me that she and Tom had only just now been taken by ambulance to the hospital down by the harbour. And so I continued my dreadful errand.
Most of the buildings downtown were still standing, although some had lost their roofs, but the streets were choked with debris among which wounded people wandered like living ghosts. The city, devoid as it was of the ordinary sounds of vehicles and machinery, had taken on a supernatural silence.
The closer I came to the harbour, the worse the damage and the carnage became. Wounded men, women, and children lay dying in the street. Some of those already lifeless appeared not to have a scratch on them. Some of the living had injuries too awful to describe. Later reports put the total number of dead or wounded at more than 10,000.
The harbour itself was a blasted wasteland. Across the Narrows on the Dartmouth shore I could make out the blazing hulk of a freighter. I later learned that this sorry wreck was the Imo, the Belgian relief ship that had accidentally set off the entire disaster.
Just before 9:00 a.m., while I was still soundly sleeping but while most of Halifax was already up and starting its day, a French munitions ship, the Mont Blanc, loaded with explosives, entered the Narrows on its way into the harbour. Meanwhile, the Imo, preparing to exit the harbour, had temporarily stopped its engines so as to avoid hitting a passing barge. But when the barge had passed, the Imo found itself bearing down on the steaming Mont Blanc, and was unable to turn away in time.
The collision was slight, but the friction of metal hull on metal hull sent sparks flying. These sparks ignited one of the barrels of benzine being carried on deck, which ignited the next and the next until the fire spread to the explosives stored below. The resulting conflagration blew the ship to kingdom come. The enormous explosion launched a tidal wave that drowned many people on shore, unleashed a deadly rain of molten metal on the city, and caused a shock wave that did damage all the way to Truro, more than fifty miles away. (My mother later told me that her kitchen window had collapsed onto the table where she and my father had been sitting only moments before.)
Most of the men aboard the Mont Blanc abandoned ship before the blazing deck detonated the explosive cargo, but one straggler was lifted in the explosion's cyclone and deposited, nearly naked, on a nearby hillside. Miraculously, he was unharmed. Not so lucky were the fire boats that had swarmed out from shore to attend to what they believed was nothing more than a burning ship.
I found young Tom in the hospital where many of the injured had been taken, but of my sister's fate I could learn nothing. Men, women, and children of all sorts and classes were literally packed in the wards like sardines in a box. The cots were all occupied, and the floors covered so that it was often difficult to step between them. Since Tom could not speak I couldn't ask him where his mother could be found. I didn't need to ask Tom where his father was. Like my brother, he was in Europe fighting the Germans.
The heavy snow that fell on Halifax that night settled like a dreadful shroud. The air had turned to a more seasonal December cold, and all over the city Haligonians huddled beneath blankets in their unheated cellars, as far as they could get from their gaping windows.
The next day they would begin the long, sad task of finding and burying the dead, including my dear Isabel.
Tom had been found lying in her lifeless arms among the rubble of their modest house. Her body had shielded his.
In the days that followed, I attended more funerals than I can count. The Herald building had survived the blast and we managed to get the paper out on December 7. The headline read SCENES AT MORGUES AND HOSPITALS THAT BAFFLE DESCRIPTION. I'm happy to tell you that people began to rebuild the city and that Tom did eventually regain his speech, although he never regained his sight. He had survived the Halifax Explosion of 1917, but the world we had known had ended for good.
Chapter 7: Off to War
When you kissed your dad goodbye, you could feel the scratchy new wool of his jacket, but you hugged him tight anyway. Your dad looked really handsome in his brand-new Canadian Army uniform. So handsome that he made your mother cry. As he marched down the road in New Westminster, British Columbia, in June 1940, with all the other Canadian soldiers going off to fight the war in Europe, you wanted to hug him one more time. That’s why you ran after him.
World War II changed your life forever, just as it changed the life of every child living in Canada. It wasn’t just that your dad was gone, although that was part of it. It was also that people at home – including your mom – acted differently. If you were a boy or girl living on Canada’s West Coast in 1940, your story of the war might have gone something like this.
After your dad marched away, the news of the war got worse and worse. You didn’t understand why Canada was fighting the Germans, except that it had something to do with the German leader, a cruel dictator named Adolf Hitler who wanted to conquer the world. By the time your dad reached England, Hitler’s army had taken over Holland, Belgium, and France. It looked bad for Great Britain and its allies, including Canada.
At home things went along okay, except that the food got pretty bad. Whenever you complained, your mom reminded you that groceries had to be rationed so that there would be more food for the men overseas. Including your dad. “We all have to do our part,” she would say.
And you did your part. Every day after school you and your friends went from door to door collecting scrap metal and used coat hangers for the war effort. Nothing went to waste. Even empty toothpaste containers – in those days they were made of tin, not plastic – were recycled. You considered it your duty. And it made you feel closer to your dad.
But until December 1941, the war seemed very far away. On December 6, the Japanese navy staged a surprise air raid on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the head-quarters of the American fleet in the Pacific Ocean. The attack sank most of the warships in the harbour. Fortunately for the Americans, their big aircraft carriers were away at sea. Otherwise, the war in the Pacific might have turned out very differently.
After the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan officially joined the war on the side of Germany and Italy. Canada and the other Allies, including Great Britain and Australia, immediately declared war on Japan. So did the United States, which had stayed out of the war until then.
When Japan became Canada’s enemy, your friends at school started to get scared. Japan was a lot closer to Vancouver than Germany. Hawaii was e...
