Canada-US relations

Energy and environmental diplomacy factors were a major, though often unrecognized, part of Canada-United States relations prior to the Cold War. Hydroelectricity was the most important of these factors, particularly power exported from the Canadian side of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin. The history of Canada- U.S. hydroelectricity relations, exports, and regulations offered here covers the key steps, institutions, and actors in the evolution of hydroelectricity geopolitics and governance regimes during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Most of the earliest large Canadian hydropower projects were built on or planned for border waters, which, after the creation of the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty, required formal coordination with the United States. Over the following half-century, prospective power projects on border waters continued to dominate the diplomatic dialogue. Federal governments or agencies established broad export restrictions, altering them occasionally, but often subnational governments, special interests, and specific power projects played as large a role in shaping the power trade. The result was a constantly shifting political and regulatory context, albeit one that generally trended toward cooperation and reduced barriers to electricity integration.

Volume in the BAAS American Studies Paperbacks series published by Edinburgh University Press, 20 February 2017 (and distributed by OUP in the USA from 1 March 2017).

Reviews:

"A concise and lucid survey of US foreign policy. Adam Burns convincingly argues that empire has been a central feature of the American experience since the nation's founding."
- Dr Fabian Hilfrich, University of Edinburgh

"The fact that the book includes the less familiar histories of Vermont, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Marianas, and Trust Territories of the Pacific, as well as the better-known histories of westward expansion and the Spanish-American War, makes this a useful and informative volume."
- Professor Bartholomew H. Sparrow, University of Texas at Austin (Tulsa Law Review)

"Burns’s opus, all inclusive and incisive, explores angles that have never been discussed before like Canada and Liberia. In this sense, it assists the reader, even the novice of American history, in appreciating the scope, parameters and nuances of American imperialist politics diachronically, from the early years of the new State until the dawn of the twenty-first century."
- Dr Theodora D. Patrona , Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (European Journal of American Studies)

Abstract:

The United States has been described by many of its foreign and domestic critics as an “empire”. Providing a wide-ranging analysis of the United States as a territorial, imperial power from its foundation to the present day, this book explores the United States’ acquisition or long-term occupation of territories through a chronological perspective. It begins by exploring early continental expansion, such as the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803, and traces US imperialism through to the controversial ongoing presence of US forces at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The book provides fresh insights into the history of US territorial expansion and imperialism, bringing together more well-known instances (such as the purchase of Alaska) with those less-frequently discussed (such as the acquisition of the Guano Islands after 1856). The volume also considers key historical debates, controversies and turning points, providing a historiographically-grounded re-evaluation of US expansion from 1783 to the present day.

U.S. Army enlistment records do not merely document military service; they can shed light on otherwise obscure aspects of American immigration history. This is especially true in regard to the Canadian-born men who joined the forces of the Republic during the Mexican War (1846-1848). Newly retrieved data indicates that approximately 1,500 individuals from British North America enlisted—a fairly widespread survival strategy at a time when people from the Canadas and the Atlantic colonies were increasingly seeking opportunities abroad. Enlistment records tell us something of the economic backgrounds of prospective soldiers and the ways in which the creation of a national market in the United States drew British subjects south of the border. Thus they provide a valuable glimpse into an oft-overlooked aspect of Canadian and North American history prior to 1849.

The construction of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line in the mid-1950s represents the most dramatic example of military modernization in the Canadian Arctic. To ensure that a range of federal government stakeholders were informed about and engaged in this megaproject, the DEW Line Co-ordinating Committee was established in February 1955 and ran until 1963. The meeting minutes and the regular progress reports provided to the committee offer valuable insights into the logistical and administrative machinery behind the “great assault” on the Canadian Arctic and its transformative effects on the human population in the region.

This chapter focuses on the Blackfoot Confederacy, which spanned much of the present-day Montana-Alberta borderlands through the late 19th century. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Niitsitapi faced the rapid colonization of their lands in the form of Anglo settlement, transcontinental railways, the U.S.-Canada Boundary Commission, the military, agents of the state, and the legacy of broken treaties. The hardening of the border that accompanied these developments did not, however, terminate the cross border movement of Blackfoot bands. Families visited each other across the line, band members registered on tribal rolls in the U.S. and Canada, and Indian agents fulminated against Blackfoot manipulation of fluid yet contradictory notions of status, blood, and citizenship.

Looking at the Blackfoot Confederacy contributes to scholarship investigating Indigenous peoples’ negotiation of international boundaries bisecting aboriginal homelands. This growing body of work has emphasized the social and cultural dimensions of these histories, but there remains room to explore the legal implications of overlapping state, territorial and national jurisdictions; and the confusion resulting from Canadian and American treaties made with Native people throughout the borderlands. A critical legal perspective is especially important for Native peoples straddling the international boundaries and confronting reservation borders. As observed by Dudziak and Volpp, “Law is an important technology in the drawing of dividing lines between American identities and the boundaries (or lack of boundaries) around American global power. Borders are constructed in law, not only through formal legal controls on entry and exit but also through the construction of rights of citizenship and noncitizenship, and the regulation or legitimation of American power in other parts of the world.” Because these boundaries are constructs of law, they are crucial sights of deconstruction.

Borrowing from such insights, this chapter will focus on Blackfoot bands and families that negotiated the legal contradictions and jurisdictional complexities of life as transnational actors in the U.S – Canada borderlands. Between 1855, with the signing of the Blackfoot Treaty in the U.S., the signing of Treaty 7 in Canada in 1877, and the onset of World War One, Blackfoot bands confronted numerous international, national, territorial, provincial, and tribal legal regimes. At the borderlands of two imperial nation-states, Blackfoot bands encountered “legal voids” between competing notions of Indigenous sovereignty, wardship, and national citizenship. These voids and contradictions stem largely from the colonial nature of “Indian Law” as a combination of erasure and extermination on the one hand, and racial assimilation and transformation on the other. 4 South of the “Medicine Line,” Blackfoot people saw their status deteriorate as courts redefined them as wards of the state that lacked legal personhood and the protections of the Constitution. North of the line, Canada promoted assimilation and tried to extinguish Native land title. These related Indian policies signaled the settler-colonial mindset of Canadian and U.S. officials, but implementation at the edge of the U.S. and Canadian Dominion exposed fractures legal through which Niitsitapi survived a changing world.

THIS IS YOUR CUE: TIME TO TAKE ACTION
Call upon the community or general public, parents and youths, mental health professionals, physicians and nurses, educators, Facebook and other internet social media, religious groups, athletes, celebrities, secular and SBNR, school administrators, news media, Hollywood, academia, scientists, employers and employees, business owners and managers, private individuals and public officials, to join their talents, opportunities, and influence to support student mental health and end school shootings. Sharing this article is one way you can help https://www.academia.edu/35809557

Uncertainty about the future strategic environment is a rational impetus for cooperation. Despite a joint reiteration, by the US and Canada, of cooperation’s importance in managing and responding to future threats, interrogations about NORAD’s potential for future contributions in the North American defense landscape are relevant as it marks six decades of operation in 2018. Is NORAD, in its present configuration, sufficient for managing future threats to North America as well as strategic defense? Should NORAD be adapted to meet expected defense challenges? Or, alternatively, should it be replaced with a different structure; and at what risks? This chapter examines those questions through a discussion the importance of cooperation for uncertainty management, the challenges to cooperation as well as the role and limits of NORAD. It continues with a presentation of the possibilities for adapting the command arrangement relative to replacement employing arguments drawn from rational institutionalism. Finally, an exploration of the centrality of NORAD for North American defense cooperation and strategic defense is provided based on a comparison of the risks of adaptation versus replacement. Should the partners decide to participate in strategic defense, a pragmatic adaptation of the NORAD command arrangement is recommended through a use of the institutional provisions denoting flexibility. The chances for a successful mandate adaptation of the existing command are increased if stakeholders manage information transparently and effectively to minimize the risks of politicization.

This is my MA thesis in its entirety.

Climate change represents a challenging problem in public policy. This project examines various
policy solutions to rising emissions, and suggests one that might be best suited to Canada, a highly integrated,
highly-developed economy which relies on natural resources, including fossil fuels, for its balance of payments, governmental revenues, and a small portion of its GDP. It adopts a public policy framework from Simpson, Rivers and Jaccard (2008) to analyze policy solutions using the following
criteria: political acceptability, economic efficiency, administrative feasibility and effectiveness at
reducing emissions. Additionally, it offers substantial discussion relating to the potential constraints
and opportunities to climate change policy presented by NAFTA, compliance with which is key to the
viability of any emissions regime. It advocates an upstream cap-and-trade system, integrated within the NAFTA area and regulated by an empowered Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), as well as complementary policies to lower emissions in inelastic sectors.

Eric Wittkower founded McGill University’s transcultural psychiatry unit in 1955. One year later, he started the first international newsletter in this academic field, which became (and remains) the main journal today: Transcultural Psychiatry. However, at the beginning of his career Wittkower gave no signs that he would be interested in social sciences and psychiatry; he originally trained as a specialist in internal medicine in Berlin. This paper describes the historical context of the post-war period, when Wittkower founded a research unit at McGill University with an American anthropologist, Jacob Fried. Using archival material from McGill, I focus on the history of scientific networks and the circulation of knowledge, particularly on the exchanges between the French- and English-speaking academic cultures in North America and Europe. Because the history of transcultural psychiatry is a transnational history par excellence, but also a literature of exile, this leads necessarily to the important question of the reception of this academic field abroad.

Canada and the United States share one of the most complex, interdependent, and asymmetrical relationships in the Western world. This article explores to what extent anti-Americanism constitutes an aspect of Canadian national identity. This article argues that there are strong, even at times legitimate, reasons why forms of low-grade, relatively benign, anti-Americanism continue to resonate in Canadian public life. This article focuses on the presidency of George W. Bush as the recent high water mark of anti-Americanism, and is divided into three parts. The first critically engages with definitions of anti-Americanism, employing a typology used by Katzenstein and Keohane (2007). The second part presents an overview of some empirical and interpretive research on Canadian anti-Americanism. Recent manifestations of the phenomenon have been closely tied to anti-Bush sentiments and a fear of ‘deeper integration’ with the US. The third part interrogates whether anti-Americanism is in part fuelled by American attitudes and actions, and concludes that these have played an important role.

Net emigration from eastern Canada leading to a relatively slow growth of population is a prominent feature of the late nineteenth century economy. A disaggregate view confirms that net emigration from each of the eastern Canadian provinces during the 1870s and 1890s was higher than that of adjacent American states. Emigration was faster from areas of lower income, slower employment growth and more widespread literacy. Illiteracy and the Montreal labour market slowed emigration from Quebec but in other respects there is no evidence that emigration was unusually slow from Quebec or from francophone areas.

Unpublished paper presented at the 1999 meeting of the Social Science History Association.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4649.9681

This issue of Reconstruction offers little in the way of fixing problems, but plenty in the way of critiquing attempts to automate war, media, opinion, democracy, culture and life to produce predictable outcomes -- all attempts to dominate the world. Postmodernism trumpeted the death of "grand narratives," but now we are quickly finding out that they have come back as ghosts, this time hard to see, harder to believe in, difficult to capture, and, perhaps, impossible to kill. Yet, we are called to do the impossible, to pick up our pens and pencils or pots and pans and make the world a better place.

This bilingual article explores the possibilities of post-bilingual “Canadian” memory and identity through the literary and cultural history of Canada’s largest extraterritorial diasporic community: the French-Canadians of New England. In examining textual sources through which New England French-Canadians have imagined their affinities and differences in relation to other ethnic groups and nationalities, from the mid-19th century up to the present day (e.g., Tremblay, Beaugrand, Kerouac, Plante, Proulx), an alternative model for the 21st century emerges: a politics of alterity in which an increasingly fragile “microethnic” memory continues to be rearticulated across linguistic and national borders to serve as a parallel narrative to metropolitan discourses of identity, exceptionalism and survivance.

The aim of the paper is to stress the importance of transnational law in the applicability of various rules of international law to cross-border transactions, in order to disclose a coherent language of law. The paper will analyse and comment the Tribunal’s considerations with regard to the U.S. Claimant’s suffering of “economic harm to its investment through interference with its operations, lost contracts and opportunities in Canada”.

Environment and History is an interdisciplinary journal which aims to bring scholars in the humanities and natural sciences closer together, with the deliberate intention of constructing long and well-founded perspectives on present day environmental problems. ABSTRACT Between 1965 and 1975, the United States and Canada investigated whether they should preserve and enhance the American Falls, one of the two main cataracts at Niagara Falls, by physically reengineering it. This campaign had its roots in local concerns, but tapped into wider sentiments and emotions about the famous waterfall, and came to involve multiple levels of government and the International Joint Commission. Engineers looked at whether it was feasible to remove all the rock at the base of the American Falls -the talus -which led to the dewatering of the waterfall in 1969. Using a range of techniques, including public consultations, the transborder experts concluded that it was feasible to give the waterfall a facelift, and presented a range of engineered options. However, the International Joint Commission ultimately recommended that it would be best to refrain from an interventionist approach and mostly leave the American Falls alone. Employing envirotech and emotional history approaches, this paper argues that over the course of a decade the meaning of 'preservation' in the context of Niagara Falls significantly shifted because of several factors: the emerging environmental movement, the cost of removing the talus and other alterations, evidence that the public wouldn't sufficiently appreciate these changes, and worries about tourism impacts.

This overview presents one of the episodes of the Yakima war (1855-1856). During this Indian war, the American side was struggling not only with their own Indians but also with indigenous people from the British Canada. Minor  presence of the English side in this conflict was at that time represented by two steam ships from the Hudson’s Bay Company - 'Beaver'  and 'Otter'.
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Should New Brunswick and Nova Scotia consider emission trading systems linked with Quebec, California and Ontario under the auspices of the Western Climate Initiative (WCI)? The Government of New Brunswick is currently considering various climate mitigation options to comply with the federal carbon pricing benchmark outlined in the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change. In late 2016, Nova Scotia announced it would establish its own cap-and-trade system though not linked with any other jurisdiction. In this paper, we consider the prospect of climate finance flowing into NB & NS in order to reduce emissions in these two Maritime provinces through the establishment of cap-and-trade systems that are linked to the WCI. Emissions trading under the WCI could see Quebec and Ontario firms buy emission allowances from their counterparts in NB & NS.

The Canadian government has a policy of searching laptop computers at airports and other border crossings. It is considered an outrageous policy by those who have been subjected to this gross invasion of privacy, and it has drawn some press attention. The Canadian courts have yet to rule on the constitutionality of this policy. The present article reports on one person's experience (the author's) and makes a conservative estimate of the cost of this policy to the Canadian people, both monetary and nonmonetary. The conclusion is that the cost of searching laptop computers is high while the benefits of doing so are low or nonexistent.

This analysis examines the disharmony in American–Canadian relations in the period from 2001 to 2005. Canada and the United States co-operated in the early days after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, managing their mutual border and fighting the war in Afghanistan. Yet they soon came into conflict over American plans to invade Iraq and create a ballistic missile defence (BMD) system for North America. President George W. Bush and Paul Cellucci, his ambassador in Ottawa, were insensitive to Canadian concerns. Canadian leaders sent mixed messages to Washington, hinting that they would support a war in Iraq and participate in the BMD system, but ultimately deciding against each. The article examines the limitations of the tolerant ally interpretation of the Canadian–American relationship and illuminates the role of leadership in the rupture that took place between the two countries.

This article analyzes the rescaling of transboundary water governance and explores challenges and opportunities for the twenty-first century. The analysis is grounded in the example of the Canada–United States transboundary water governance regime, and asks two questions: What are the lessons learned since Canada and the United States first signed the Boundary Waters Treaty 100 years ago? And what is the potential of rescaling to influence the tension between the ‘sovereign rights’ of a nation and transboundary water governance protocols based on ‘good neighbourliness’?

Numerous scholars argue that the rules, mechanisms, and bodies established under NAFTA's Chapter 11 for the settlement of foreign direct investment disputes have undermined the policy-making capabilities of governments in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada for promoting public welfare in their countries. This article argues that Chapter 11 has instead contributed to reaffirming governments' power to enact and uphold social-oriented domestic laws. It demonstrates that Chapter 11's dispute settlement mechanisms were created and operate according to the interests of the national governments in facilitating and increasing the flows of trade and investment capital between their countries without compromising their sovereignty and policy-making powers.

Policymakers are, as a rule, more concerned with people crossing into their jurisdiction than with those who leave. Historians easily fall into the same pattern in their respective areas of study, but scholars focused on the history of Quebec have ample reason to study the hundreds of thousands of French Canadians who left the province (or Lower Canada) in the century after the 1830s. These emigrants did not merely alter the political, demographic, and cultural character of Quebec; their large-scale settlement across northern New York and New England suggests, in some ways, Quebec itself expanded and lived under a different name beyond its actual boundaries. By studying this diaspora, scholars stand to enrich an histoire nationale and articulate a more nuanced understanding of borders.

Under a 1950 U.S.-Canada treaty the majority of the Niagara River is diverted to massive hydroelectric complexes. To hide the aesthetic impact of turning Niagara Falls into an energy waterscape, and retain tourism , the waterfall was physically reshaped and shrunk, and remedial works were built to control water flows and hydropower diversions. To achieve this, hydraulic engineers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and On-tario Hydro relied on hydraulic models of Niagara Falls. Using an envirotech approach, I show how these physical hydraulic models were an integral part of the disguised design approach to remaking Niagara Falls, and I use this Niagara case study to critically explore the evolution of hydraulic modeling in early Cold War North America. The river and waterfall were transformed into a hybrid envirotechnical system, a submerged infrastructure that relied not only on steel and concrete, but also water, ice, and weeds.

Drawing on the fragmentary chain of letters between George Woodcock and Herbert Read, this article uses these materials as a point of departure to consider the development of Woodcock’s cultural politics. Focusing on the memories he explored in his autobiographical writing, his histories of anarchism and Canada, and his project to live off the land, it examines the ways in which Woodcock looked to anarchism’s past to theorise afresh its future.

The Eagle, The Beaver and Border Politics: Can Canada Remain Sovereign in A World Dominated by the US & China
Author: Fareed Khan
Date: October 7, 2013
http://theviewfromhere-fareedkhan.blogspot.ca/2013/10/the-eagle-beaver-and-border-politics_7.html

James Laxer, Canada-US Relations, Canadian Sovereignty, 9/11, Continentalism, Integrationists, National Security In Canada, September 11th, Terrorism In North America, The Border, US-Canada Border, Canada-US Trade, Canada-US Economy, Protecting Canada From the US, US Hegemony, Canada-US Border, US-Canada Relations

In the wake of the racial violence in the mid-2010s across the United States, several journalists, pointing to historic and contemporary discrimination against minorities in Canada, cautioned Canadians against being "smug about race." Highlighting the plight of indigenous peoples, one contributor to the country's leading newsmagazine went even further, declaring, "Canada's race problem? It's even worse than America's." Canadians have long been both keen observers of racial discrimination in the United States and prone to drawing self-congratulatory comparisons. To wit, the Canadian singersongwriter Neil Young's songs "Southern Man" (1970) and "Alabama" (1972) were sharply critical of southern bigotry, while in "American Woman" (1970), The Guess Who told their eponymous American target: "I don't need your ghetto scenes." As one member of the band recalled of the song's genesis, "We'd never seen ghettoes in Winnipeg before and suddenly we're in Savannah, Georgia, witnessing real poverty." Yet 1960s Canada did have its own "ghetto scenes," though many Canadians seemed willfully ignorant of this fact. As the Métis activist Howard Adams complained in 1969, white Canadians were "self-righteous, arrogant, and free from any social conscience with regard to racism." Two years later, J. Ashton Brathwaite, a Barbadian living in Canada, noted: "Contrary to widespread belief, Canadian society is polluted with the virus of racism-subtle racism." Canada, he added, should stand for "Cold Anti Niggers And Definitely American." 1 As this range of comments indicates, the United States looms large in Canadian understandings of racism, with many Canadians emphasizing a continental divide on race. Constance Backhouse has called this outlook an "ideology of racelessness," and this Canadian view has been intertwined with a national myth "that there is less racism here than Asa McKercher is an assistant professor of history at the Royal Military College of Canada. For their helpful comments and criticisms on early versions of this paper, my thanks to the anonymous reviewers, to the members of the Cambridge Faculty of History's American History Workshop, especially

Canada's actions during the Cuban missile crisis open a revealing window onto the Canada—USA relationship and the sub-state influences therein. By refusing a US request to raise the alert status of Canadian forces, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker precipitated one of the worst crises in the modern Canada-USA relationship; by secretly defying this refusal, the Canadian military leadership ensured that Canadian forces provided greater military support to the US than any other ally did. In this article, I argue that a significant divergence in the extent to which the Canadian Prime Minister and military leadership trusted their US counterparts represents a critical part of any explanation of this bifurcated response. In so doing, I rely on a new conceptualization of trust and how it influences decision-making in international politics. By applying this model, I develop an explanation for Canada's contradictory behavior that is superior to existing explanations of Canadians’ decision-making during this crisis.

Les actions du Canada durant la crise des missiles de Cuba ouvrent une fenètre revelatrice sur les relations entre le Canada et les Etats-Unis et les influences infra-Statiques s'exercant sur ces relations. En refusant une demande des Etats-Unis d'elever l'etat d'alerte des forces canadiennes, le Premier ministre John Diefenbaker a precipite l'une des pires crises dans les relations canado- americaines; en bravant secrètement ce refus, le commandement de l'armee canadienne a fait en sorte que les forces canadiennes fournissent aux Etats-Unis un plus soutien militaire plus fort que tout autre allie. Dans cet article, je soutiens qu'une divergence significative sur le plan du degre de confiance accordee par le Premier ministre canadien et le commandement militaire du pays a leurs homologues americains represente une partie cruciale de toute explication de cette réponse bifurquee. Pour ce faire, je me base sur une nouvelle conceptualisation de la confiance et la maniere dont elle influe sur la prise de decisions dans le milieu politique international. En appliquant ce modele, j'elabore une explication du comportement contradictoire du Canada qui est superieur aux explications existantes des decisions prises par les Canadiens durant cette crise.

Sat down for an interview with Brendan McShane of Canada's History magazine, right before the 2020 Presidential election, to discuss the situation and provide some historical context to the relationship between Canadian and American leaders.

Nationalistic blinders and misunderstandings have regularly exaggerated differences between the two countries (or whatever we might call the northern half of the continent before the twentieth century). As I suggest below, Canadians in particular remain prisoners of these easy ruts. Time has not helped us become any more enlightened in our discussions of the United States.

Full text: http://activehistory.ca/2020/11/teaching-canada-u-s-relations-in-2020/

"In recent decades, Quebec scholars have paid special attention to the américanité of French Canadians—the extent to which they have been culturally, economically, and politically American, whether they be on Canadian soil or in the United States. This conceptual lens has proven its worth not merely in studies of recent Quebec history. When projected over nearly two and a half centuries of North American history, it reveals a fascination with (and ambivalent response to) American political ideals. In time, the lure of republicanism would yield to cultural and economic concerns, but, in the 1830s, reformers and radicals in Lower Canada could envision a day when they too would break free from colonial bondage and more fully realize democratic ideals. [...]"

This article looks at the bilateral U.S.-Canada remaking of the St. Lawrence River and Niagara River/Falls during the twentieth century for hydropower and navigation. Utilizing a range of archival records from various governments and organizations, and an envirotech approach, I focus on the role of estimation for controlling water and ice formation on these iconic waterways. The engineers employed an iterative 'cut and try' approach which relied upon considerable place based knowledge of the local Niagara and St. Lawrence environments, which was then used to generate synoptic models that served as the basis for remaking those very environments. But the gap between local and abstract expertise often resulted in uncertainty. To deal with cases where they had only approximate knowledge, engineers and bureaucrats used the qualifying phrase 'as nearly as may be'. Not only did this allow them to proceed in the face of uncertainty, but it required experts to incorporate flexibility into their plans.

When American Methodist preachers first arrived in Upper Canada they brought more than a contagious religious faith. They also brought saddlebags stuffed with books published by the New York Methodist Book Concern – North America’s first denominational publisher – to sell along their preaching circuits. Pulpit, Press, and Politics traces the expansion of this remarkable transnational market from its earliest days to the mid-nineteenth century during a period of intense religious struggle in Upper Canada marked by fiery revivals, political betrayals, and bitter church schisms.

The Methodist Book Concern occupied a central place in all this conflict as it powerfully shaped and subverted the religious and political identities of Canadian Methodists, bankrolled the bulk of Methodist preaching and missionary activities, enabled and constrained evangelistic efforts among the colony’s Native groups, and clouded Methodist dealings with the British Wesleyans and other religious competitors north of the border. Even more importantly, as Methodists went on to assume a preeminent place in the province’s religious, cultural, and educational life, their ongoing reliance on the Methodist Book Concern played a crucial part in opening the way for what would later become the lasting acceptance and widespread use of American books and periodicals across the province as a whole.

A physician by training, Prosper Bender (1844-1917) achieved prominence through his written work on French Canadians. In the 1870s, he joined the flourishing literary scene of Quebec City, a period that culminated with his Literary Sheaves (1881) and Old and New Canada (1882). Then, for more than a quarter-century, Bender lived in Boston, where he practiced homeopathic medicine and again played the part of an intercultural broker. Doubts concerning his native land's future led him to promote the American annexation of Canada; he also wrote for American readers articles on French-Canadian culture. More than a century later, Bender's body of work reflects the challenges facing post-Confederation Canada and the struggle for mutual understanding between French Canadians and their English-speaking neighbours.