Cape Breton Railways: An Illustrated History
Herb MacDonald

Cape Breton's rail lines are perhaps best known for their substantial roles in the coal and steel industries — and their decline as those industries faded away. Yet, despite their prominent connections to coal and steel, railways played many other important roles in the life of the Island. Over a century-and-a-half, as some areas of Cape Breton evolved from a rural and agricultural society into an urban and industrial one, railways played a central role in supporting the changes that took place. This book looks at those railways in the context of what was happening on and beyond the Island. Cape Breton's railways were shaped by factors such physical geography, availability of both capital and customers, and the distribution of population and industries. In response to those factors, railway builders and operators often had to make difficult choices and try to deal with factors they could not control.

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Bluebacks and Silver Brights: A Lifetime in the BC Fisheries
Norman Safarik & Allan Safarik

More than a history of the Vancouver fishing industry, this collection of adventures set on the Pacific Ocean also serves as a compelling memoir. With dozens of salty tales of hardworking and hard-living fishermen and fish-industry workers, this is the story of West Coast fishing from the Strait of Georgia, down to Steinbeck's Cannery Row, and even a look into New York's old-time, mob-controlled fish markets. With wisdom and insight, the tales also serve as an ecological warning, recalling the lost bounty of Canada's natural resources of a century ago and their possible extinction today at the hands of government mismanagement and overfishing.

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Necessaries and Sufficiencies: Planter Society in Londonderry, Onslow and Truro Townships, 1761–1780
Carol Campbell & James F. Smith

2011 marks the 250th anniversary of the coming of New England and Irish Planters to Nova Scotia. Necessaries and Sufficiencies is a social political, cultural and material microhistory of 18th-century daily life in the district of Cobequid, now part of Colchester County. Eight vignettes from a cross-section of immigrants detail migration and settlement and the evolution of New England and Irish cultural mores in this wilderness setting. Occupations of both men and women, family and religious life, educational and social institutions, health care, commercial links and more. A separate section chronicles Cobequid's reaction to the American Revolutionary War.

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Texada Tapestry: A History
Heather Harbord

Texada is the largest island in the Strait of Georgia, a long strip of richly mineralized granite and limestone dividing the upper gulf. Although today Texada is better known as the home of the illegal agricultural product called Texada Gold, it was once the focus of a real gold rush that lured no less a figure than cookie tycoon William Christie. Later, Texada was the site of British Columbia's first major political scandal when squabbles over a rich iron ore claim forced the resignation of Premier Amor de Cosmos in February 1874. Population ebbed and flowed with mineral prices and Texada has been in and out of the news: its association with illegal intoxicants, the bitter Blubber Bay strike of 1938 where the Pacific Lime Company faced off against the International Woodworkers' Association labour union in a bloody riot and the feisty struggle against the Greater Vancouver Regional District when it wanted to dump metropolitan garbage in the abandoned pit of the once-famous Texada Mine. Author Heather Harbord has dedicated years to research, including over a hundred interviews of locals and old-timers to create a captivating book full of unforgettable characters, humorous anecdotes and well-researched fact, accompanied by many previously unpublished photographs. Once again, she has created a valuable volume on the history of the BC coast.

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Happyland: A History of the Dirty Thirties in Saskatchewan, 1914-1937
Curtis R. McManus

In Happyland, Curtis McManus contends that the agricultural crisis commonly known as the "Dirty Thirties" actually began much earlier and was connected only peripherally to the Great Depression itself. McManus has mined the rarely consulted records of Rural Municipalities in Saskatchewan, as well as government documents, ministerial correspondence, local community histories, newspapers, and publications of relevant government departments, to tell this story that has not yet been told - a story of a quarter-century of stubborn persistence, but also of absurdity, despair, social dislocation, moral corrosion, and inconsistent and often inept government policy. Thanks to McManus's rare and welcome blend of sound scholarship and living, breathing prose, it is a gripping and evocative story as well.

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