Margaret Conrad

Margaret Conrad's history of Canada begins with a challenge to its readers. What is Canada? What makes up this diverse, complex and often contested nation-state? What was its founding moment? And who are its people? Drawing on her many years of experience as a scholar, writer and teacher of Canadian history, Conrad offers astute answers to these difficult questions. Beginning in Canada's deep past with the arrival of its Aboriginal peoples, she traces its history through the conquest by Europeans, the American Revolutionary War and the industrialization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its prosperous present. Despite its successes and its popularity as a destination for immigrants from across the world, Canada remains a curiously reluctant player on the international stage. This intelligent, concise and lucid book explains just why that is.

A Concise History of Canada

Shelby Doherty

Likes:
- A great overview of the history of Canada overall, from its beginning days all the way up to 2011. Covers political, social, economic, and military details among others.
- I personally most enjoyed the sections that detailed the social history throughout the times.
- I learned a lot from this book. While it does not necessarily provide a deep dive into all of the topics it is a great starting point and gives you plenty of interesting topics to look into further.
- Despite my criticism of the subsections within the chapters seen below, I do think that these subsections did a good job of showing the overall sentiment of the times rather than having to focus on each nitty-gritty detail in chronological order.

Dislikes:
-Sometimes it was hard for me to place what time period the events were taking place. The chapters separate out specific times periods but they are often quite large time periods and often have several prime ministers governing within these times. The chapters are then broken down into subsections looking at specific parts of society (i.e. the environment, the economy, specific political events, etc.). While I think that how these subgroups are broken down makes sense, I do think that it made keeping track of when these things happened a bit more difficult than if it was broken up by which prime minister was in office or if a more chronological approach were taken.
- Similarly, there are a lot of people who are introduced in this book (as to be expected given it is covering history). Some of these people were only mentioned fleetingly, and I had difficultly remembering who was who during the short period that they were discussed during the book.
- I personally would have enjoyed more maps, especially in the early days and when the dominion was beginning to form. I personally really enjoyed the maps in the first chapter showing the span of territory and presence of the different aboriginal languages and thought that similar maps would have been helpful in later chapters when the landmass and border of Canada began changing.

Areas to Dive Deeper into in the Future:
- Dionne quintuplets from 1934
- WW2 history in Asia
- Alberta's tar sands
- Bhopal
- Acadians
- Quebec and francophone Canada
- Newfoundland and Labrador's specific history
- Nunavut's specific history
- The metis and the Red River settlement / rebellion

A Concise History of Canada

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