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HUMANITIES 165 restrictions placed on women and First Nation peoples; colonial practices; and racism. As well, Johnson thought that the new Dominion was an opportunity to establish a blended European and native culture. StrongBoag 's essay presents us with a well-researched picture of a Canadian who was both a self-constructed presence bringing together issues concerning race, hybridity, gender, aesthet~cs, colonialism, and nation, and a person whose hopes for the formation in Canada of a liberal nonracist nation traced the arc of nineteenth-century Canadian history from promise to resignation. (DONNA BENNETT) David Priestley, editor. MemonJ and Hope: Strands ofCanadian Baptist History , Wilfrid Laurier University Press 1996. viii, 216. $24.95 For many years now, Canadian Baptist historiography has been propelled along a series of conferences sponsored by Acadia and McMaster universities . Publications of the papers have emerged in various forms from 1978 to 1998. Memory and Hope is a decade old, the results of a conference held at North American Baptist College in Edmonton, Alberta in 1990. Priestley, the editor, was the convenor and teaches church history at the German Baptist heritage school. There are fourteen papers ranging from general topics to specific new research in Baptist studies. Among the contributors dealing with Canadian Baptist history in general are Jarold K. Zeman and Harry Renfree, whose venerable remarks can mostly be found in earlier published forms. Six of the essays are distillations of doctoral dissertations and the rest are new excursi. As the next survey versions of Canadian Baptist history are compiled, this book will be an important resource. Among the more useful of the contributions are Paul R. Wilson's study of the Old School Baptists, Brian Scott's paper on social Christianity, and David Priestley's own work on the German Baptistimmigrant community. Wilson defines a hitherto lost group of Baptists (he doesn't connect them very well with those of similar nomenclature in the United States), and Scott recalls the relationship between Walter Rauschenbusch and D.R. Sharpe recovered two decades ago byJoseph Ban. Priestly and his Edmonton colleague Ernest Pasiciel nicely fill in a wide gap in data about an ethnic community under the influence of religious and cultural assimilation. It must have been hard to find a generic enough title for this anthology, which exhibits great diversity of subject matter. As has been the case with previous conference publications, some of the papers appear to have been published pro forma. The essay on Samuel Steams Day adds little to what was already available, the materia] on Aberhart and Shields could have yielded more, and the Southern Baptist treatment, while supplying some interesting chronology, comes off as an apologetic. More careful editing 166 LETTERS IN CANADA 1998 and/or rigorous treatment of the context of English and North American Baptist history could have strengthened the paper on the LordIs Supper. The writer falsely assumes a later Baptist theological dependency upon John Smyth (fl1606) which cannot be substantiated in any source. In terms of raWI freshI scholarshipI Walter Ellis's piece on Baptist development in Western Canada provides a good reference tool. Wilfrid Laurier University Press has done a commendable job with the technical aspects of the book. Tables are a bit small in type size; there is a helpful index. The cover is attractively designed and of high-quality material and the price is reasonable. Among the other earlier conference publicationsI this volume belongs in Canadian religious collections. (WILLIAM H. BRACKNEY) Douglas R. Frayne. Ur III Period (2112-2004 Be) Volume 3/2 ofThe Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia Early Periods. University of Toronto Press 1997. xliv, 490. $200.00 With the publication of each volume from the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia Project the study of the ancient Near East takes a major step forward. The volume under review was edited by D.R. Frayne, who has already produced two massive studies of the Sargonic and Old Babylonian periods respectively (RIME 2 and 4). This volume fills the historical gap between the two and provides the first truly comprehensive collection of historical inscriptions relating to the Dr III period that comprises nearly all of the twenty-first century Be. During this century we witnessed...

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