Donald Creighton

A member of the same intellectual generation as Harold Innis, Northrop Frye, and George Grant, Donald Creighton (1902–1979) was English Canada’s first great historian. The author of eleven books, including The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence and a two-volume biography of John A. Macdonald, Creighton wrote history as if it “had happened,” he said, “the day before yesterday.” And as a public intellectual, he advised the prime minister of Canada, the premier of Ontario, and – at least on one occasion – the British government. Yet he was, as Donald Wright shows, also profoundly out of step with his times. As the nation was re-imagined along bilingual and later multicultural lines in the 1960s and 1970s, Creighton defended a British definition of Canada at the same time as he began to fear that he would be remembered only “as a pessimist, a bigot, and a violent Tory partisan.” Through his virtuoso research into Creighton’s own voluminous papers, Wright paints a sensitive portrait of a brilliant but difficult man. Ultimately, Donald Creighton captures the twentieth-century transformation of English Canada through the life and times of one of its leading intellectuals.

This sweeping historical narrative by award-winning historian Donald Creighton recounts the personalities and events behind Canada's confederation. First published to celebrate Canada's centenary, The Road to Confederation is now being reissued to mark the 150-year anniversary of nationhood.

Creighton examines the trading system that developed along the St. Lawrence River and argues that the exploitation of key staple products by colonial merchants along the St. Lawrence River system was key to Canada's economic and national development.

This is a new release of the original 1960 edition.

Volume XVIII of the Canadian Centenary Series Now available as e-books for the first time, the Canadian Centenary Series is a comprehensive nineteen-volume history of the peoples and lands which form Canada. Although the series is designed as a unified whole so that no part of the story is left untold, each volume is complete in itself. Canada’s declaration of war against Germany in 1939 marked the beginning of a significant period in the history of the nation. By the end of the Liberal regime in 1957 the country had undergone immense growth in human and material resources. The experience of the Second World War had been followed by participation in the Korean War and the Cold War. The Great Depression had given way to a boom, which had continued through an exchange crisis, inflation, and minor recessions. In addition, new life had been generated in the arts. The new road Canada chose to follow led directly to a new world of planning and management, of economic controls, and social equalization. In The Forked Road, Donald Creighton sheds light on the major issues, events, and political personalities which dictated Canada’s direction since the Second World War. First published in 1976, Professor Creighton’s important contribution to the Canadian Centenary Series is available here as an e-book for the first time.

Johnny Bower came to be known as one of the greatest Toronto Maple Leafs of all time, but he started from humble beginnings. He taught himself to play hockey on the frozen rivers of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, using a tree branch his father had sharpened into a stick and a cut-up old mattress for goalie pads. He’d spend hours in the frigid air, learning to catch the puck in mittened hands, never dreaming he would one day share the same ice as his Saturday-night idols. But share it he did, dominating the Leafs net for four Stanley Cup victories in the 1960s. He spent eleven seasons with the Leafs, playing well into his forties, although many believed he was older. In Bower, bestselling author Dan Robson shares the never-before-told stories of Johnny’s life and career, drawing on extensive interviews with his wife, Nancy, and his immediate family, close teammates such as Leaf greats George Armstrong and Bobby Baun, and the friends who knew him and loved him best.

Harold Adams Innis died a quarter century ago. At the time of his death in 1952 he was Canada's pre-eminent scholar in the field of the social sciences. His reputation was based on his monumental contributions to Canadian economic history and the role of the means of communication in shaping history. As so often happens, his ideas were not greatly followed up, except by Marshall McLuhan, for some years after his death, but there is no growing recognition among Canada's scholars of the depth of his perceptions and the fruitfulness of his thought for understanding of Canada's and of world history. A close friend of Innis at the University of Toronto was Donald G. Creighton, who wrote this memoir of his life in the summer of 1953. To this paperback edition of that work, Professor Creighton has added a new introduction on its origins in the university conditions of its time. A personal tribute, the book is written in Creighton's distinctive and elegant style; it is a skilful biography which will serve well to introduce the career, character, and thought of Harold Adams Innis to a new audience. Donald Creighton himself is recognized as one of the outstanding scholars of his time. Like Innis, he has reinterpreted Canadian history in his many books and this finely crafted memoir reveals the gifts of both the biographer and his subject.

Canada is not one nation, but three: English Canada, Quebec, and First Nations. Yet as a country Canada is very successful, in part because it maintains national diversity through bilingualism, multiculturalism, and federalism. Alongside this contemporary openness Canada also has its own history to contend with; with a legacy of broken treaties and residential schools for its Indigenous peoples, making reconciliation between Canada and First Nations an ongoing journey, not a destination. Drawing on history, politics, and literature, this Very Short Introduction starts at the end of the last ice age, when the melting of the ice sheets opened the northern half of North America to Indigenous peoples, and covers up to today's anthropogenic climate change, and Canada's climate politics. Donald Wright emphasizes Canada's complexity and diversity as well as its different identities and its commitment to rights, and explores its historical relationship to Great Britain, and its ongoing relationship with the United States. Finally, he examines Canada's northern realities and its northern identities. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.