First of two volumes. Principally covers the war itself - preparations, battles, individual experiences, some historical assessments, but is extremely cursory on the geopolitics and has nothing to say about what the British Government is thinking, and very little on Washington. War may be politic...
A suprisingly good read. I picked up this book for the chapter on Lady Jane Franklin (after having just finished the fictional account of her husband's lost voyage in The Terror A Novel by Dan Simmons). While I enjoyed getting the actual facts of John Franklin's tribulations searching for her h...
In many ways, Niagara Falls is a tourist trap.And yet.There is something primal about the falls. If you go to the Grand Canyon or Monument Valley, you see the beauty of nature. If you go up the Hudson River Valley, you learn why there was a Hudson River School and you realize that the East Coas...
As the five stars indicate, I thought "Klondike" was amazing. Author and journalist Pierre Berton has written an truly enjoyable book about a one-of-a-kind event in Canadian/U.S. history. He spent a good portion of his life living in the area, thinking about the narrative, researching, interviewi...
In the four years between 1881 and 1885, Canada was forged into one nation by the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The Last Spike reconstructs the incredible story of how some 2,000 miles of steel crossed the continent in just five years — exactly half the time stipulated in the contract...
Over 1.5 million Canadians were on relief, one in five was a public dependant, and 70,000 young men travelled like hoboes. Ordinary citizens were rioting in the streets, but their demonstrations met with indifference, and dissidents were jailed. Canada emerged from the Great Depression a differen...
One chill Easter dawn in 1917, a blizzard blowing in their faces, the four divisions of the Canadian Corps in France went over the top of a muddy scarp knows as Vimy Ridge. Within hours, they held in their grasp what had eluded both British and French armies in over two years of fighting: they ha...
PETERSBURG, RUSSIA, JANUARY 6, 1814The Russian Christmas. It is bitterly cold; the Fahrenheit thermometer shows twenty-five below. A skin of ice glitters on the colossal bronze statue of Peter the Great; a crust of snow sheaths the cornice of the church of St. Catherine; a frieze of icicles droop...
Not only was he Prime Minister, but he had also chosen to assume the burden of the Ministry of Public Works, the most sensitive of cabinet posts in that era of railway contracts. In the spring of 1877, the ex-stonemason revealed a little of his feelings when he exploded in the House that “it is i...
Jules Verne died; Greta Garbo was born. Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, Freud his “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex.” Russia crushed a revolution; Norway and Sweden parted company. Ty Cobb began his baseball career and Isadora Duncan opened her dancing school. The Rot...
this morning, because nobody is going anywhere. The sun is already high in a cloudless sky when the first risers tumble from their sleeping bags. The view from the bank where we prepare breakfast is breathtaking. Spread out before us in a huge semi-circle is the river; beyond it runs a continuous...
Tomorrow willbe memorable in the annalsof the United States. – Brigadier-General Alexander Smyth,November 29, 1812. BUFFALO, NEW YORK, November 17, 1812. Brigadier-General Alexander Smyth is putting the finishing touches to a proclamation, which, like Hull’s, will return to haunt him. “Soldiers!”...
Smith 2Radio politics 3Harry Stevens’s moment in history 4The year of the locust 5Pep, ginger, and Mitch 6The Pang of a Wolf 7Slave camps 1The seditious A.E. Smith The usual New Year’s fanfare heralding the end of hard times (“LOW POINT OF DEPRESSION REACHED IN FEBRUARY LAST YEAR, SAYS OTTAWA EXP...