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History and geography

  • Auteur:
    Johnson, Steven
    Sommaire:

    From the New York Times-bestselling author of How We Got to Now and Where Good Ideas Come From, a look at the world-changing innovations we made while keeping ourselves entertained. This lushly illustrated history of popular entertainment takes a long-zoom approach, contending that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. Steven Johnson argues that, throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused. Johnson's storytelling is just as delightful as the inventions he describes, full of surprising stops along the journey from simple concepts to complex modern systems. He introduces us to the colorful innovators of leisure: the explorers, proprietors, showmen, and artists who changed the trajectory of history with their luxurious wares, exotic meals, taverns, gambling tables, and magic shows. Johnson compellingly argues that observers of technological and social trends should be looking for clues in novel amusements. You'll find the future wherever people are having the most fun.

  • Auteur:
    Day, Francis Martin, Spence, Phyllis, Ladouceur, Barbara
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    In these Red Cross memoirs, thirty women tell their stories of volunteer work with the Canadian Red Cross Corps in overseas postings during World War Two and the Korean War. These dramatic narratives take us across oceans infested with enemy submarines to witness Canadian women on duty in the U.K., in Europe and in Asia. Laced with humour and filled with grace, these stories are a testament to the vital yet often overlooked responsibilities that thousands of women gallantly accepted for the Allied war effort. Women Overseas is a companion volume to the national bestseller Blackouts to Bright Lights: Canadian War Bride Stories.

  • Auteur:
    Norton, Wayne
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    Women on Ice is the first book to focus upon the vibrant world of women's ice hockey in western Canada during the First World War and through the 1920s. The Vancouver Amazons were one of the most important teams during this perod. Their championship laurels and their association with hockey's famous Patrick brothers distinguish the Amazons from other women's hockey teams of the era. They were one of several teams that met during the annual Banff winter carnivals to compete for what was sometimes officially (and sometimes unofficially) regarded as the women's ice hockey championship of western Canada. With the support of more than three dozen photographs, many of which are published here for the first time, Women on Ice< follows the fortunes of the Vancouver women as they encountered teams that deserve to be legendary, but are now largely forgotten. Also profiled are teams from what was the geographic heart of women's hockey in British Columbia until the First World War; the Kootenays; as well as some of the dominant teams of the post-war years from Alberta. As is the case with so much in Canadian history, the western hockey story differs radically from the experience of Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada. The curious decline of women's hockey in the 1930s consigned to obscurity the history of these and of all women's teams in western Canada. Women on Ice attempts to rescue some of that fascinating history and will appeal to anyone interested in the past, present or future of women's ice hockey.

  • Auteur:
    Campbell, Olivia M.
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    For fans of Hidden Figures and Radium Girls comes the remarkable story of three Victorian women who broke down barriers in the medical field to become the first women doctors, revolutionizing the way women receive health care. In the early 1900s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and even painful. In addition, women faced stigma from illness--a diagnosis could greatly limit their ability to find husbands, jobs or be received in polite society. Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Lizzie Garret Anderson and Sophie Jex-Blake fought for a woman's place in the male-dominated medical field. For the first time ever, Women in White Coats tells the complete history of these three pioneering women who, despite countless obstacles, earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same. Though very different in personality and circumstance, together these women built women-run hospitals and teaching colleges--creating for the first time medical care for women by women. With gripping storytelling based on extensive research and access to archival documents, Women in White Coats tells the courageous history these women made by becoming doctors, detailing the boundaries they broke of gender and science to reshape how we receive medical care today.

  • Auteur:
    Goudie, Elizabeth
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    Originally published in 1973 and now a Nimbus Classic, Woman of Labrador is Elizabeth Goudie’s enduring and candid story of her pioneering life as a trapper’s wife in the early 1900s. She was left alone much of the year to rear eight children while her husband worked the traplines, providing furs for their meager income. Independent and resourceful, Elizabeth fulfilled multiple roles as homemaker , doctor, cook, hunter, shoemaker, and seamstress for her growing family, who provided companionship during long winters of isolation and her husband’s absence.

  • Auteur:
    Strange, Kathleen
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    Mrs. Strange was thrust, unprepared, into hard farm life on a Canadian ranch, with a background of London, gentle upbringing, a bit of the rough with the smooth in her war experiences, but with no training for hard labor and domestic slavery on an ill-equipped, rough frontier farm. But the fight challenged her -- and she made good. Her account of the experience is stimulating.

  • Auteur:
    Sledge, E. B.
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    A personal account of the vitality and bravery of the U.S. Marines at the battles of Peleliu and Okinawa.

  • Auteur:
    Williams, David R.
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    Beginning with the 1868 shooting of politician Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Williams chronologically examines the trials of Louis Riel in 1885, Ernest Chenoweth in 1900, Wilbert Coffin in 1953, Steven Truscott in 1959, and Peter Demeter in 1974. Williams concludes that there is no reason to doubt the justice of the verdict in any of the six casses.

  • Auteur:
    Campey, Lucille H.
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    New Brunswick’s enormous timber trade attracted the first wave of Scots in the late 18th century. As economic conditions in Scotland worsened, the flow of emigrants increased, creating distinctive Scottish communities along the province’s major timber bays and river frontages. While Scots relied on the timber trade for economic sustenance, their religion offered another form of support. It sustained them in a spiritual and cultural sense. These two themes, the axe and the bible, underpin their story. Using wide-ranging documentary sources, including passengers lists and newspaper shipping reports, the book traces the progress of Scottish colonization and its ramification for the province’s early development. The book is the first fully documented account of Scottish emigration to New Brunswick ever to be written.Most Scots came in small groups but there were also great contingents such as the Arran emigrants who settled in Restigouche and the Kincardine emigrants who settled in the Upper St. John Valley. Lowlanders were dispersed fairly widely while Highlanders became concentrated in particular areas like Miramichi Bay. What factors caused them to select their various locations? What problems did they face? Were they successful pioneers? Why was the Scottish Church so important to them? In tracing the process of emigration, author Lucille H. Campey offers new insights on where Scots settled, their overall impact and the cultural legacy which they left behind. With axe and bible Scots overcame great hardship and peril and through their efforts created many of the province’s most enduring pioneer settlements.

  • Auteur:
    Wilson, Gretchen
    Sommaire:

    Born in 1889, Gertrude Harding spent a boistrous childhood on a Welsford, New Brunswick, farm. She travelled to Hawaii to live with her sister, and, when her sister moved to London in 1912, Harding went with her. One day, from the top of a London bus, she saw a parade of women carrying large white posters. Attended by a policeman, they walked in single file on the street close to the curb as passersby stared and shouted rude remarks. It was a poster-parade of Militant Suffragettes demanding votes for women; after more than two decades of mild action, the Suffragettes were on the warpath. Gertrude Harding couldn't wait to join them. After a short initiation, Harding and a comrade-in-arms hit conservative Englishmen in a very tender spot: they smashed up the orchid house at Kew Gardens. Then, to counter government violence, Harding organized a cadre of women who learned jujitsu and wore Indian clubs on their belts. This bodyguard had two jobs: to deter the policemen who tried to haul Suffragettes off to prison, and to arrange escapes for Suffragettes on the run. When the politicians changed tactics and the bodyguard's work decreased, Harding served as a private secretary to Christabel Pankhurst, the movement's strategist. Then, as World War I intensified, Harding became the publisher of the Suffragette newspaper, again staying one jump ahead of the police. During the War, Harding found her second career: she became a social worker among women labourers in a munitions plant. Afterwards, she did social work in industrial New Jersey. When she retired, she gardened and sold jam, and she also wrote her memoirs, which she illustrated with sketches and snapshots. Finally, old and ill, she returned to Rothesay, New Brunswick, where she died in 1977.

  • Auteur:
    Schanzer, Rosalyn
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    Recounts in electrifying detail the true events of the 17th-century witch trials in Salem Village, Massachusetts. After two girls exhibit strange behavior, the colonial town's doctor concludes their symptoms are the result of witchcraft. Even today, the chilling events of this period remain one of the most disturbing passages of U.S. history.

  • Auteur:
    Downie, Mary Alice, Robertson, Barbara, Errington, Elizabeth Jane, Gordon, Ishbel Marua
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    This selection of writings by twenty-nine women, known and unknown, professional and amateur, presents a unique portrait of Canada through time and space, from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, from the Maritimes to British Columbia and the Far North. There is a range of voices from high-born wives of governors general, to an Icelandic immigrant and a fisherman’s wife in Labrador. A Loyalist wife and mother describes the first hard weather in New Brunswick, a seasick nun tells of a dangerous voyage out from France, a famous children’s writer writes home about the fun of canoeing, and a German general’s wife describes habitant customs. All demonstrate how women’s experiences not only shared, but helped shape this new country.

  • Auteur:
    Penn, Thomas
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    Profiles Henry VII as an enigmatic and ruthless king of a country ravaged by decades of conspiracy and civil war, discussing the costs of establishing a Tudor monarchy and the ways he set the stage for Henry VIII's reign.

  • Auteur:
    Reardon, Terry, Turner, John N.
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    The story of the complex relationship between two world leaders during one of the greatest crises in human history. Born just two weeks apart in 1874, Winston Churchill and William Lyon Mackenzie King had much in common. Both forged long parliamentary careers, and each led his country to victory in World War II. A BBC poll deemed Winston Churchill the greatest Briton of all time, and Mackenzie King has been judged by a group of historians as the greatest Canadian prime minister.  Their parallel careers fostered a working relationship that lasted almost fifty years. It was not always an easy relationship, however. Churchill, famous for his drink and cigars, was impetuous and charismatic, an extrovert; King, a teetotaller during WWII, was noted for considering all options before cautiously proceeding. Fate threw this ill-matched pair together. For the first time, the vital relationship between these two very different men is explored in depth. It is the story not just of two extraordinary leaders, but also of the changing bonds between Britain and Canada. 

  • Auteur:
    Blanchard, Jim
    Sommaire:

    From the local bestselling author of Winnipeg 1912 comes the riveting next chapter in the city's history. Winnipeg's Great War picks up in 1914, just as the city is regrouping after a brief economic downturn. War comes unexpectedly, thoughts of recovery are abandoned, and the city digs in for a hard-fought four years. Using letters, diaries, and newspaper reports, Jim Blanchard brings us into the homes and public offices of Winnipeg and its citizens to illustrate the profound effect the war had on every aspect of the city, from its politics and economy, to its men on the battlefield, and its war-weary families fighting on the home front. We witness the emergence of the city's social welfare services through the work of women's volunteer organizations; the political scandals that led to the fall of the Rodmond Roblin government; and the clash between independent jitneys and the city's private transit company, And we hear the conflicted emotions that echoed in the city's streets, from anti-foreign sentiment and labour unrest, to patriotic parades, and a spontaneous Victory Day celebration that refused to end.

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    Founded in 1913, the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba was one of the earliest architecture programs in Canada. With a reputation for providing a solid Beaux-Arts education, and with the promotion of John A. Russell to the position of Dean, the school became a leader in North America for disseminating Modernist principles. Russell, an American trained at MIT, immediately began hiring first-rate faculty internationally, including James Donahue, who studied under Gropius at Harvard; Wolfgang Gerson, who trained in Bristol; and the Scottish Jim Christie. Russell also encouraged his students to do graduate work at top schools around the world, including working with London's Arup Associates--the firm responsible for the engineering of the Centre Georges Pompidou--and Mies van der Roche, at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The direct influence of Mies in Winnipeg resulted in an extraordinarily large number of buildings that are characterized by a strict adherence to the Modernist principles of truth to material, structural expression, and purity of form.

  • Auteur:
    Barbour, Dale
    Sommaire:

    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.

  • Auteur:
    Blanchard, Jim
    Sommaire:

    At the beginning of the last century, no city on the continent was growing faster or was more aggressive than Winnipeg. No year in the city's history epitomized this energy more than 1912, when Winnipeg was on the crest of a period of unprecedented prosperity. In just forty years, it had grown from a village on the banks of the Red River to become the third largest city in Canada. In the previous decade alone, its population had tripled to nearly 170,000 and it now dominated the economy and society of western Canada. As Canada's most cosmopolitan and ethnically diverse centre, with most of its population under the age of forty, it was also the country's liveliest city, full of bustle and optimism." "In Winnipeg 1912, Jim Blanchard guides readers on a tour through this golden year when, as the Chicago Tribune proclaimed, "all roads lead to Winnipeg." Beginning early New Year's Day, as the city's high society rang in 1912 at the Royal Alexandra Hotel, he visits the public and private side of the "Chicago of the North." He looks into the opulent mansions of the city's new elite and into its political backrooms, as well as into the crowded homes of Winnipeg's immigrant North End. From the excited crowds at the summer Exhibition to the turbulent floor of the Grain Exchange, Blanchard gives us a picture of daily life in this fast-paced city of new millionaires and newly arrived immigrants. Illustrated with over seventy period photographs, Winnipeg 1912 captures a time and place that left a lasting impression on Canadian history and culture.

  • Auteur:
    White, David Fairbank
    Sommaire:

    The incredible, untold story behind the rise of the P-51 Mustang, the World War II fighter plane that destroyed the Luftwaffe and made D-Day possible “ Aviation buffs will cheer this high-flying saga.”— Publishers Weekly &bull; “[A] fascinating book about passion and innovation.”—Walter Isaacson &bull; “A n essential book for those who appreciate tales of military bravery, and also for all seeking understanding of decision-making under pressure. A major contribution. ” —E. J. Dionne, Jr. When the P-51 Mustang began tearing across European skies in early 1944, the Allies had been losing the air war for years. Staggering numbers of bomber crews, both British and American, had been shot down and killed thanks to the Luftwaffe’s superior fighter force. Not only did the air war appear grim, but any landing of troops in France was impossible while German fighters hunted overhead. But behind the scenes, a team of visionaries had begun to design a bold new type of airplane, one that could outrun and outmaneuver Germany’s best.     Wings of War is the incredible true story of the P-51 Mustang fighter and the unlikely crew of designers, engineers, test pilots, and army officers who brought it from the drafting table to the skies over World War II. This is hardly a straightforward tale of building an airplane—for years, the team was stymied by corruption within the defense industry and stonewalled by the Army Air Forces, who failed to understand the Mustang’s potential. But when squadrons of Mustangs were finally unleashed over Hitler’s empire, the Luftwaffe was decimated within months, clearing the skies for D-Day. A compelling, character-focused narrative replete with innovation, determination, and bravery, Wings of War is the never-before-told story of the airplane that truly changed the course of World War II.

  • Auteur:
    Pigott, Peter
    Sommaire:

    From the eccentric Fairey Battle to the lethal-looking CF-18, from modern airliners that have no defects (and no character) to the classic North Star (which had both), here is the ultimate line-up of the aircraft that have served Canadians in the last century. With over one hundred photographs of fifty historic planes, Wings Across Canada is a retrospective of Canada’s aeronautical technology. This book does not compare the planes, nor claim that all are "classics" in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, it is a celebration of a love affair with aircraft that all served a purpose in their own time.

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