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"[Macdonald] is always drunk now, I am sorry to say, and when some one went to his room the other night, they found him in his night shirt, with a railway rug thrown over him, practising Hamlet before a looking glass." So appears Canada's first prime minister in a contemporary diary entry found in
Canada: A People's History, the book version of the CBC/Société Radio-Canada TV series. This ambitious production was designed to present a definitive take on Canadian history for the new millennium and, at the same time, bolster the cash-strapped CBC with video sales to schools and other lucrative spin-offs. The show achieved strong ratings and sparked wide-ranging discussion of Canadian history.
The book, a handsome and lavishly illustrated volume with text by journalists Don Gillmor and Pierre Turgeon, has many of the strengths of the show. Archival illustrations, including sketches and photographs, are the book's most valuable feature and complement the live enactments of the show. Later chapters effectively use first-person and anecdotal material to keep the narrative engaging. But the quick cuts and abrupt segues so effective on TV are just confusing on the page, and many of the sidebars provided with the visual material either duplicate or contradict the main body of the text.
Despite the claim of the title, this is not a "people's history." The details may be vivid, as in the Macdonald anecdote above, but they remain focused on the "great men" who have been history's traditional subject. Before the mid-19th century, when this first volume ends, there was no universal education. Almost anyone who became literate was by definition a member of the middle or upper class, so the first-person narratives here and in the show reflect the viewpoint of the European elite who presided over the settlement of northern North America. Canada: A People's History remains deeply conventional despite its nods to Native peoples, blacks, and other apparently marginal characters. Disappointingly, it fails to demonstrate the fact that there is more to history than battles, truces, constitutional conferences, and great men, drunk or sober. --Robyn Adams Gillam
Product Description
How can we know where we’re going if we don’t know where we are coming from? This question applies as much to nations as it does to travellers, and it rings especially loudly in the ears of Canadians.
Canada: A People’s History doesn’t tell us where we are going, but it shows us where we have come from
This richly illustrated book, the first of two volumes, tells the epic story of Canada from its earliest days to the arrival of the industrial age in the 1870s. Here is the story of the people who created this vast nation. The courageous explorers who tracked the vast wilderness; the adventurous settlers, many of them exiles from their homelands; the native peoples, crucial allies in the Europeans’ wars for possession of this land; the visionary politicians, and the shortsighted ones; but most of all the ordinary people who rose to the extraordinary challenge of building Canada. These people are all given voice here, their stories blending with accounts of the major events of the day.
This is the story of Canada for the new millennium, one that draws on solid scholarship and presents the human drama and excitement of days gone by, one that makes past times memorable.
