Alan Taylor The editors invited me to respond to the review by Todd Webb of my book American Republics, which is the third in a series examining the emergence of the United States in a continental context. Webb’s review is so generous that I have no hairs to split with him. He aptly notes the… Continue Reading
Latest in: Reviews
-
-
A Review of Alan Taylor’s American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021). Todd Webb This bleak and brilliant book offers a history of the antebellum United States in the wider context of its North American neighbours. That story, for Alan Taylor, was dominated by three processes: the… Continue Reading
-
Review of Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 2021) 502 pp. $35.00. Elizabeth Mancke and Adam Nadeau[1] In the conventional metanarrative of modernity, written constitutions symbolize progressive trends, political events that were considered “benevolent and normally acted as… Continue Reading
-
M. Max Hamon Rough Justice: Policing, Crime, and the Origins of the Newfoundland Constabulary, 1729-1871, by Keith Mercer (St. John’s: Flanker Press, 2021). Drawing out ambiguities of the “police before the police” is an excellent way to explore the past as a different country in the classroom. For instance, a great hook to tell students… Continue Reading
-
Olivier Guimond Benoît Grenier (dir.) (coll. Alain Laberge et Stéphanie Lanthier), Le régime seigneurial au Québec : fragments d’histoire et de mémoire (Sherbrooke, Les Éditions de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 2020). L’abolition du régime seigneurial, en 1854, a paradoxalement « consacré le maintien de la propriété seigneuriale[1] » au Québec. En effet, la Loi seigneuriale a prévu, pour les… Continue Reading
-
Olivier Guimond Benoît Grenier, ed. Le régime seigneurial au Québec: fragments d’histoire et de mémoire. In collaboration with Alain Laberge and Stéphanie Lanthier. (Sherbrooke: Les Éditions de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 2020). The abolition of the seigneurial regime in 1854 has, paradoxically, “ratified the maintenance of seigneurial property”[2] in Quebec. Indeed, in addition to a compensation… Continue Reading
-
Dale Barbour Jessica Dunkin, Canoe and Canvas: Life at the Encampments of the American Canoe Association, 1880-1910. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Canadians are drawn to the canoe. While it leaves barely a ripple in the historiography of nation building, colonialism, and leisure in other countries, Canadian historians have dug deep into the role… Continue Reading
-
Todd Webb Scott McLaren, Pulpit, Press, and Politics: Methodists and the Market for Books in Upper Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019) By the early 1860s, Methodism had become the largest Protestant denomination in the future provinces of Ontario and Quebec, in terms of membership. It was also a dominant cultural presence, with its… Continue Reading
-
[This review, by an American-based scholar, is the second in a two-part series on Revolutions across Borders; a first, by a Canadian-based scholar, appeared on 13 January – Editors.] Mark R. Cheathem Maxime Dagenais and Julien Mauduit, eds., Revolutions across Borders: Jacksonian American and the Canadian Rebellion (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). If… Continue Reading
-
[This review, by a Canadian-based scholar, is the first in a two-part series on Revolutions across Borders; a second, by an American-based scholar, will appear on 20 January – Editors.] Stephen R. I. Smith Maxime Dagenais and Julien Mauduit, eds., Revolutions across Borders: Jacksonian American and the Canadian Rebellion (Montreal andKingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019).… Continue Reading
Borealia 