Canada Day 2024

This Canada Day, make sure you know your Canadian history. Here are some recommendations to read this summer.

Happy reading!

An Accidental History of Canada

Edited by Megan J. Davies and Geoffrey L Hudson

An Accidental History of Canada explores accidents, their causes, consequences, and afterlife, in colonial, Indigenous, and urban contexts, from the 1630s to the 1970s. These investigations make plain that accidents have significant social, cultural and policy meaning, and reveal aspects of precarity and inequity.

Before Canada

Northern North America in a Connected World

Edited by Allan Greer

The story of Canada stretches back over centuries and millennia, well before the emergence of the modern nation-state. It features the complex evolution of Indigenous societies as well as the incursions of Europeans fishers, explorers and colonizers. In Before Canada, archaeologists, historians and literary scholars combine to reveal the latest research findings on this fascinating early period.

Atiqput

Inuit Oral History and Project Naming

Edited by Carol Payne, Beth Greenhorn, Deborah Kigjugalik Webster and Christina Williamson
Foreword by Jimmy Manning

Atiqput is the first book-length study of Project Naming, the photo-based history research initiative established by the Inuit school Nunavut Sivuniksavut in collaboration with Library and Archives Canada. Through oral testimony and photography, Atiqput rewrites settler societies’ historical record and challenges a legacy of colonial visualization.

Harriet’s Legacies

Race, Historical Memory, and Futures in Canada

Edited by Ronald Cummings and Natalee Caple

Harriet’s Legacies articulates new critical terrain for the historic freedom fighter Harriet Tubman by recuperating the significance of Tubman’s time in Canada as not just an interlude in her American narrative but another site for thinking about Black diasporic mobilities, possibilities, and histories.

Statesman of the Piano

Jazz, Race, and History in the Life of Lou Hooper

Edited by Sean Mills, Eric Fillion and Désirée Rochat

Jazz pianist Lou Hooper (1894–1977), Paul Robeson’s first accompanist and teacher to Oscar Peterson, came to prominence near the end of his life for his exceptional career. Statesman of the Piano makes his unpublished autobiography widely available for the first time, with commentary from historians, archivists, musicians, and cultural critics.

Picturing the Game

An Illustrated Story of Hockey

By Don Weekes

Picturing the Game showcases the gifted, forward-thinking graphic journalists throughout hockey’s history whose bold aesthetic and deft draughtsmanship could always make the butt of their satire look perfectly asinine. Their work embodied a truly acerbic spirit that was nothing short of groundbreaking, and the game is better for it.