Past Time Past Place

Collects essays about historical questions that can now be answered through geographic information systems, as well as the problems and limitations of using GIS technology.

Halley finds herself thrown back in time to 21st century Australia, where her only hope of returning home is to await first contact with the enigmatic aliens who have discovered time travel. Picking up where Time Future—the first book in the series—left off, Halley finds herself thrown back in time to 21st-century Australia, where her only hope of returning home is to await first contact with the enigmatic aliens who have discovered time travel. Meanwhile, back in her “home time,” a universe of warring alien species finds itself at a flashpoint, fighting over control of the time travel technology.

For nearly 100 years, Indian boarding schools in Canada and the US produced newspapers read by white settlers, government officials, and Indigenous parents. These newspapers were used as a settler colonial tool, yet within these tightly controlled narratives there also existed sites of resistance. This book traces colonial narratives of language, time, and place from the nineteenth-century to the present day, post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

“Speaking in the Past Tense participates in an expanding critical dialogue on the writing of historical fiction, providing a series of reflections on the process from the perspective of those souls intrepid enough to step onto what is, practically by definition, contested territory.” — Herb Wyile, from the Introduction The extermination of the Beothuk ... the exploration of the Arctic ... the experiences of soldiers in the trenches during World War I ... the foibles of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister ... the Ojibway sniper who is credited with 378 wartime kills—these are just some of the people and events discussed in these candid and wide-ranging interviews with eleven authors whose novels are based on events in Canadian history. These sometimes startling conversations take the reader behind the scenes of the novels and into the minds of their authors. Through them we explore the writers’ motives for writing, the challenges they faced in gathering information and presenting it in fictional form, the sometimes hostile reaction they faced after publication, and, perhaps most interestingly, the stories that didn’t make it into their novels. Speaking in the Past Tense provides fascinating insights into the construction of national historical narratives and myths, both those familiar to us and those that are still being written.

Part of the CBC Massey Lectures Series In History’s People internationally acclaimed historian Margaret MacMillan gives her own personal selection of figures of the past, women and men, some famous and some little-known, who stand out for her. Some have changed the course of history and even directed the currents of their times. Others are memorable for being risk-takers, adventurers, or observers. She looks at the concept of leadership through Bismarck and the unification of Germany; William Lyon MacKenzie King and the preservation of the Canadian Federation; Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the bringing of a unified United States into the Second World War. She also notes how leaders can make huge and often destructive mistakes, as in the cases of Hitler, Stalin, and Thatcher. Richard Nixon and Samuel de Champlain are examples of daring risk-takers who stubbornly went their own ways, often in defiance of their own societies. Then there are the dreamers, explorers, and adventurers, individuals like Fanny Parkes and Elizabeth Simcoe who manage to defy or ignore the constraints of their own societies. Finally, there are the observers, such as Babur, the first Mughal emperor of India, and Victor Klemperer, a Holocaust survivor, who kept the notes and diaries that bring the past to life. History’s People is about the important and complex relationship between biography and history, individuals and their times.

At first glance, the relationships among tourists, tourism maps, and the spaces of tourism seem straightforward enough: tourists use maps to find their way to and through the sites of history, culture, nature, or recreation represented there. Less apparent is how tourism maps and those using them construct such spaces and identities. As the essays in Mapping Tourism clearly demonstrate, the extraordinary interaction of work with leisure and the everyday with the exotic makes tourism maps ideal sites for exploring the contested construction of place and identity. Construction sites in the "New Berlin, " Alabama's civil rights trail, Quebec City, a California ghost town, and Bangkok's sex trade are among the spaces the essays examined. Taken together, these essays allow us to see tourist space as it truly is: contested, ever changing, and replete with issues of power.

Discusses baseball's history and the game's relationship to American society from the 1850s until the present day.