• Questions of Order: Confederation and the Making of Modern Canada – A Review

    Peter Price, Questions of Order: Confederation and the Making of Modern Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021). Steve Penfold As an historical event, Canadian Confederation is very confusing. Multi-leveled, contradictory, endlessly complex – it has meant, and continues to mean, different things to a ridiculously wide range of scholars, politicians, and citizens. The British… Continue Reading

  • “Miseries in the name of Liberty”

    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

  • De-sanctifying Written Constitutions

    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

  • Calling the Police before the Police in Newfoundland

    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

  • Histoire et mémoire du régime seigneurial au Québec

    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

  • History and memory of the seigneurial regime in Quebec

    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

  • Jacksonian America and the Canadian Rebellion – A Review by Mark R. Cheathem

    [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