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Reviews Limited Identities Without Pain: Some Recent Books on Prairie Regional, Class and Ethnic History THE PRAIRIE WEST: HISTORICAL READINGS. Ed. R. Douglas Francis and Howard Palmer. Edmonton: Pica Pica Press (textbook div. of University of Alberta Press), 1985. $27.95 PEOPLES OF ALBERTA: PORTRAITS IN CULTURAL DIVERSITY. Ed. Howard Palmer and Tamara Palmer. Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1985. $18.95 RANCHERS' LEGACY: ALBERTA ESSAYS BY LEWIS G. THOMAS. Ed. Patrick A. Dunae. Western Canada Reprint Series. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1986. $14.95 BUILDING BEYOND THE HOMESTEAD : RURAL HISTORY ON THE PRAIRIES. Ed. David C. Jones and Ian MacPherson. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1985. $15.95 CHARLES NOBLE: GUARDIAN OF THE SOD..,. Grant MacEwan. Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1983. $13.95 FREDERICK HAULTAIN: FRONTIER STATESMAN OF THE CANADIAN NORTHWEST. Grant MacEwan. Saskatoon : Western Producer Prairie Books, 1985. $12.95 The modern pattern of prairie historical writing emerged in its scholarly form some fifty years ago, beginning with eight volumes on "Canadian Frontiers of Settlement" and ten on "Social Credit in Alberta: Its Background and Development." The two series produced comprehensive studies of agriculture, including land policy, ethnic and community settlement, and economic prob: lems in the thirties, as well as works on Journal of Canadian Studies political parties, farm and labour protest, religious life, and the wheat economy in the 1940s and 1950s. This historiographical foundation is remarkable because it established an interdisciplinary base, a "cooperative" or "collective" approach and a strong sense of both regionalism and relations with other regions which have been sustained ever since. Written by outsiders as much as by residents ("Frontiers" was edited by an Ontarian, W.A. Mackintosh; "Social Credit" by an Albertan, S.D. Clark), these works forced the integration of prairie history into "national" history. This foundation was sensibly built on in the opulent 1960s and 1970s. New interdisciplinary institutions and programmes elaborated on the pattern of the "Frontiers" and "Social Credit" series. Canadian historians became more leery of centralist and political biases which prairie historians had always been on guard against. Extremely skilled scholars - W.L. Morton, G.F.G. Stanley, Lewis G. Thomas and L.H. Thomas - and successful popular historians - notably James H. Gray, J.G. MacGregor and Grant MacEwan - sustained scholarly activity, student interest and popular enthusiasm far beyond that which any strategic grant programme or polemic could ever have achieved.1 The long-term momentum and a twenty-year outpouring of prairie history have led recently to the confidence to summarize and synthesize the region's history. The works are impressive: Daniel Francis's Battlefor the West: Fur Traders and the Birth ofWestern Canada (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1982); J. Arthur Lower's Western Canada: An Outline History (Vancouver: Douglas & Mcintyre , 1983); John Conway's The West: The History of a Region in Confederation (Toronto: Lorimer, 1983); John Richards and Larry Pratt's masterful Prairie Capitalism: Power and Class in the New West (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979); and Gerald Friesen's definitive The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). 219 Vol. 23, Nos. 1 & 2 (Printemps/Ete 1988 Spring/Summer) These works share a conviction that a distinctive, even a unique society economically , politically, culturally has been created in the prairies. The works presuppose, therefore, that there is a primary territorial identification equal to or greater in importance than other identities based on class, ethnic or other factors. The effect is sometimes to sustain the notion of prairie exceptionalism that Doug Owram found emerging in prairie writing as early as the 1880s.2 Ignoring that historical lesson, current historians seem seldom to consider whether this notion of exceptionalism has become more of a dogma than a hypothesis about the past or present experience of peoples in the prairies. In the writing of the older generation of historians, the notion of the prairies as a region was based more on comparisons of and relations between the prairies and other parts of Canada, the Empire, and the United States than on a conviction of exceptionalism alone. Similarly, their adoption of the geographers' perspective on region meant a subtle appreciation of distinctions between areas and peoples within the three prairie provinces that is somewhat...

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