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Louis Riel, prophet of the new world and founder of the Canadian province of Manitoba, has challenged Canadian politics, history and religion since the early years of Confederation. In Canada’s most important and controversial state trial, Riel was found guilty of “high treason,” sentenced to hang and executed on November 16, 1885.

In this bestseller, thirty-six Canadian war brides recount their early lives, their involvement in wartime duties, the magical/funny moments when they met their Canadian husbands-to-be and their journeys from Britain to Canada. The stories convey courage and humour: qualities that carried the war brides through the difficult war years and that contribute to lively reading today. Includes fifty photos.

Captain Richards' journal is an account of three survey seasons on Vancouver Island aboard two British Navy ships, the HMS Plumper and the HMS Hecate. Between 1860 and 1862 Richards and his dedicated crew surveyed and charted the entire coastline of Vancouver Island, creating baseline information for the nautical charts we use today.This monumental task, faithfully and often humorously recorded, also includes a lively description of California on the eve of the American Civil War as Richards sits in dry dock following the near wreck of the Hecate.

Alan Twigg has here recovered the amazing story of how George and Ingeborg while travelling in northern India in 1961 encountered many of the Tibetan refugees who had fled over the mountain passes. Appalled by the condition of the children, huddled together with inadequate bedding, surviving on a diet of thin soup and momos, steamed dumplings of mixed wheat and corn flour, they expressed their desire to help. "You must absolutely come and see uncle," said a young girl. This was Khando Yapshi, the Dalai Lama's niece.

Jim McDowell’s new biography of the little-known Spanish explorer José María Narváez, reveals his significant discoveries during the European exploration of what is now Canada’s Pacific Northwest Coast. Narváez was the first European to investigate a Russian fur-trading outpost in the Gulf of Alaska in 1788. The following year he became the first Spaniard to reconnoitre Juan de Fuca Strait.

This profoundly honest Holocaust memoir describes the transformation of everyday anti-Semitism into the Holocaust nightmare. Central to the story are the years Mielnicki spent in the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buna, Mittelbau-Dora and Belsen. Mielnicki's account is a harrowing yet powerfully redeeming human drama. Includes over 30 black and white photos and maps.

At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics an unknown Vancouver runner named Percy Williams shocked the sports world by capturing the 100- and 200-metre gold medals. Some said the feat was a fluke. It wasn't. In 1929 Percy silenced naysayers by sweeping the US indoor track circuit, then he went on to set a world record in the 100 metres that would stand until the arrival of Jesse Owens.

Father August Brabant (1845–1912) was the first Roman Catholic missionary to live and work among indigenous peoples on the west coast of Vancouver Island during the colonial period. He endured long periods of isolation, built a number of log churches and undertook extraordinarily difficult trips along the west coast in dugout canoes. His thirty-three-year-long effort to transform Nuu-chah-nulth culture gives us a provocative case study of the dynamics that shaped, and continue to define, the settler-colonial relationship between indigenous peoples and the state in Canada.

Still sassy, Doris Gregory takes the reader back over seventy years to the time when she broke with tradition, first by publicly challenging the University of British Columbia’s discrimination against women, and then by joining the Canadian Women’s Army Corps. Her memoir allows us to travel with her across the Atlantic at the height of the U-boat infestation and to take refuge in underground shelters while bombs fall on London.

In this unusual Holocaust memoir, Rhodea Shandler gives a woman's view of life under the Nazis in Holland. She begins by describing her early life in a closely knit Jewish family in northern Holland. There was anti-Semitism, she explains, but it was of a low level, and the Jews with their strong ties to community managed to live relatively normal lives. Then everything began to change with Hitler's rise to power in 1933. Through it all, she tells of life ongoing and how she became a nursing student in Amsterdam.