Emma Battell Lowman and Adam Barker defend Denys Delâge and Jean-Philippe Warren’s Le Piège de la liberté: Les peuples autochtones dans l’engrenage des régimes coloniaux

I don’t know about you, but it’s not often I read a book cover to cover these days. Though I’m always reading, that kind of sustained engagement tends to elude me – whether because of the time pressures of academic work or because mental health challenges can make reading at length uncomfortable and difficult. So, I’m grateful to Andrea for organizing of CHA Reads 2019for helping me prioritize such a pleasurable task as reading a good book I might otherwise not have picked up. And make no mistake, it’s absolutely worth picking up Denys Delâge & Jean-Philippe Warren’s 2017 Le Piège de la Liberté: Les peuples autochtones dans l’engrenage des régimes coloniaux.

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Jessica DeWitt defends Joshua MacFayden’s Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil that Covered a Continent

The nearly iridescent blue of the flax flower jumps off the cover of Joshua Macfadyen’s Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil That Covered a Continent immediately challenging the reader’s perception of this under-appreciated fibre crop. At the same time as one’s eye is drawn to the beauty of the flax flower, one is also pulled into the scene above that juxtaposes the steady stream of labour that flax required with the technological advances of modernity that would change the crop’s use and demand through time. The unexpected vibrancy of the cover serves as an effective representation of flax’s [somewhat unexpected] connection to early household paint. Flax Americana is a book that seeks not to simplify the history of flax, but rather to unveil the complexity of this singular commodity and to trace its colourful trajectory from rural to industrial crop.

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Heather Green defends Shirley Tillotson’s Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy. 

I must (shamefully) admit that when I first cracked open Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy, I did not have high expectations for a gripping read. I mentally prepared myself for dry recounts of numbers, a chronology of changing legislation, or a tally of taxation debates among privileged white men. As an environmental and Indigenous historian, I thought I would be out of my element. To my surprise, however, I found myself entrapped in an entertaining and readable narrative that incorporates the history of federal income tax into the wider history of Canada’s struggle to define itself as a nation.

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Mary-Ann Shantz defends Jean-François Lozier’s Flesh Reborn: The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Settlements through the Seventeenth Century

As Andrea noted in her Introductory post for CHA Reads 2019, I am not a specialist in the field of the book I have chosen to champion as the best book in Canadian history this year, Jean-Francois Lozier’s Flesh Reborn: The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Settlements through the Seventeenth Century. But I jumped at the opportunity to read, review, and champion this study because, in my experience teaching North American and Canadian history survey courses over the past decade, the history of northern North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and of colonial contact with the French, has become one of my favourite areas to teach. It is an area that engages, surprises, and challenges students; in particular, I have enjoyed sharing with students the work of scholars such as Kathryn Magee Labelle and Allan Greer, which dismantles misconceptions about Indigenous history (among settler students in particular), highlights Indigenous agency, and complicates and nuances students’ understanding of the nature of colonialism and its evolution over time. Jean-Francois Lozier’s book also furthers these objectives. At the same time, it represents a new and welcome intervention into scholarship through its re-framing of Algonquian, Wendat, and Iroquois decision-making, warfare, diplomacy, and community with a geographical focus on the St. Lawrence valley.

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Dan Horner defends Valérie Lapointe-Gagnon’s Panser le Canada: Une histoire intellectuelle de la commission Laurendeau-Dunton.

Valérie Lapointe-Gagon’s Panser le Canada is a lively and exhaustively researched history of the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission, known to many as the Royal Commission on Biculturalism and Bilingualism.

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Welcome to our third annual CHA Reads! We’re back again this year, with five readers to review and reflect on the five books shortlisted for the Canadian Historical Association’s (CHA) Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize in 2019.

Over the course of this week, five scholars will argue why their book should win the coveted award.

Based on the format of CBC’s Canada Reads, five different scholars have agreed to champion these five books. They are:

• Dan Horner (Ryerson University)
• Mary-Ann Shantz (MacEwan University)
• Heather Green (St. Mary’s University)
• Jessica DeWitt (NiCHE)
• Emma Battell Lowman (University of Hertfordshire)

And Andrea will be acting as moderator.

Each scholar selected a book that was outside their particular field of expertise, so that the books could be judged on their merits alone. Because we are Canadians and academics, we have decided that this will be a friendly discussion, rather than a competition. To that end, each scholar has written a short piece explaining the merits of their chosen book and why they think it should win the top prize in Canadian history.

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