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  • Canada: An Illustrated History
  • Andrew Holman
Canada: An Illustrated History. Derek Hayes. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2008. Pp. 288, $34.95 paper

Canada: An Illustrated History is a handsome, oversized coffee-table book that provides an attractive visual rendering and an able, if traditional, narrative of Canada’s varied past. This book follows the model that geographer and book designer Derek Hayes has employed successfully in his previous illustrated works on other historical subjects, including California, British Columbia, and the Arctic. As with all books in this genre, the visual takes centre stage. Four hundred and forty images are used to tell the story of Canada; no page is left unadorned. Hayes researched the book in archives and museums across Canada, and among the images in his collection are maps and document facsimiles, photographs and portraits in oil, watercolour paintings and museum recreations. The book includes images that will be familiar to even casual consumers of Canadian history (such as the Charlottetown Conference group photograph and Lawren Harris’s painting North Shore, Lake Superior) and others that are entirely new, including the author’s own photographs. Put together, the book’s images provide an important corrective to the idea sometimes expressed that Canada’s history is dull or grey, especially when compared to that of its southern neighbour. The stories Hayes’s volume depicts in illustrated form show a country’s history that is bold, complicated, and disconnected. Of course, there is narrative, too. Canada is divided into twelve chapters organized according to rather conventional periodization and a traditional topical focus. The book covers Canada’s temporal terrain fairly evenly and describes historical characters and events in an accessible, informal voice. The author punctuates his narrative [End Page 537] effectively with occasional sidebar feature pages on topics of special interest: newspaper publishing and postal history, the discovery of oil in southwestern Ontario and the Underground Railroad, crime and punishment and the construction of the Trans-Canada Highway, to name a few.

This volume will no doubt contribute to the recent revival of popular interest in Canadian history among Canadians, a trend that historians of the country should applaud. As such, it would be churlish to focus extensively on what this book does not cover or on its occasional textual error or obscuring of fact. Still, it must be said that it is a notably partial treatment. Perhaps because of its intended audience, its synthetic nature, or its emphasis on the visual, majestic themes, big events, and grand actors are privileged in this treatment. We see explorers, warriors, inventors, and statesmen front and centre; on the other hand, women and workers are underrepresented. First Nations people make appearances at the beginning of the story and, occasionally – in military contexts – in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (for example, Hayes has the Ottawa laying a ‘savage siege’ to Fort Detroit in 1763). They are largely absent from the twentieth century. The volume is not footnoted (as one might expect of a popular history) and the author does not provide a bibliography (and that is surprising). Instead, a brief and simple ‘For Further Reading’ page appears at the end of the book.

Canada prompts discussion beyond the old challenge that all historians face on what to include and exclude in their studies. Visual images are particularly powerful tools of interpretation and, if presented uncritically, have the potential to distort history even as they invite interest in it. Unfortunately, the images in Canada are presented uncritically. Primary-source photographs, document facsimiles, and maps are reproduced without distinction alongside modern-day photographs of historical places and museum recreations, invented tradition in church stained-glass windows, and ‘historical’ renderings by modern artists. Hayes uses, for example, a photograph of Louis Riel arguing his case in a Regina courtroom in the same way that he employs the art of C.W. Jefferys and George Agnew Reid. Each is illustrative of the past, to be sure, but only the Riel photograph is a documentary ‘fact’ that deserves to be presented as such. The difference between these pictorial ‘events’ is profound but concealed in Hayes’s presentation. Though each of his images is presented with a useful, descriptive cutline...

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