Interpreting Canada's Past: A Pre-Confederation Reader ed. by Michel Ducharme, Damien-Claude Bélanger, and J.M. Bumsted, and: Interpreting Canada's Past: A Post-Confederation Reader ed. by Michel Ducharme, Damien-Claude Bélanger, and J.M. Bumsted (review)

It was the enthusiasm of Hay of New Brunswick that gave the movement its real start. An educator and botanist, George Upham Hay published Volume 1 of Canadian History Readings in 1900; it was a collection of articles by twenty-six authors, all of which had appeared from 1898 to 1900 as supplements in his Educational Review. Wanting to widen students' understanding of the Canadian past beyond the chronological narratives available in the history textbooks of the time, and to include some primary as well as secondary sources, Hay's motives sound familiar even today.

Hay wrote that his goal was to introduce students to individual aspects of Canadian history without needing to create a narrative that one might fit past events into. He also criticized the habit of introducing literary elements in the historical account of Canada in order to make it attractive to the reader. To Hay, the narrative textbooks of his day had failed students, as well as history, "in consisting too often of a dreary mass of facts, dates and events with no more coherence than beads upon a string" (Canadian History Readings, Vol. 1, Barnes and Co., 1900).

Hay's edited collection set the template for readings in Canadian history for the next years. In the intervening decades, formats changed, full-colour cover artwork appeared, and soon, readers were divided into primary and secondary sources; some even acquired visual sources. However, the die had been cast, and to this day, the accepted wisdom dictates that narrative textbooks for introductory courses need to be supplemented by separate readers, organized chronologically on either side of the central event of Confederation.

Until 1967, Hay's Canadian History Readings was the only general Canadian history reader available. At that time, the one-hundredth anniversary of Confederation encouraged a widespread upsurge in national feeling and interest in Canada's history, prompting Ramsay Cook, Craig Brown, and Carl Berger, all young professors at University of Toronto at the time, to collaborate on an edited collection of readings in Canadian history. According to Carl Berger, the series was Ramsay Cook's idea, and it was a way of recognizing the University of Toronto Press's ongoing support for the Canadian Historical Review. Cook approached Francess Halpenny at utp, pointing out that this was an opportunity for the press to publish out-of-print scholarly articles before a private publisher might do so. Canadian Historical Readings, an eight-book series, appeared from 1967 to 1969. Organized by themes and each with an editorial introduction, the articles were chosen mainly from the pages of the Canadian Historical Review and covered subjects from the 1850s to the Great War.

Over a decade passed before readers in Canadian history came into their own. Francis and Smith's two-volume Readings in Canadian History appeared in 1982, followed in 1986 by the first edition of J.M. Bumsted's Interpreting Canada's Past in two volumes, called Before Confederation and After Confederation. By the time the second edition of Bumsted's reader was published (1993), the subtitles of the two volumes had changed to Pre-Confederation and Post-Confederation. For the third edition in 2005, chapters were divided into primary and secondary sources; an introductory overview preceded each chapter; and questions were provided, as well as a short bibliography. The fourth edition (2015) added some visual sources and a website with instructions on how to use the readers in conjunction with Bumsted's narrative histories.

This brings me to the fifth and most recent...