The Wilson Institute for Canadian History announces its short-list for the annual Wilson Institute Book Prize

The Wilson Institute for Canadian History announces its short-list for the annual Wilson Institute Book Prize, given to the book which best exemplifies the quest to place Canadian history in a transnational perspective.

Our three nominees this year:

Catherine Larochelle, School of Racism: A Canadian History, 1830-1915 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2023). “Guided by postcolonial, antiracist, and feminist theories and methodologies, Larochelle examines late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century classroom materials used in Quebec’s public and private schools. Many of these materials made their way into curricula across the country and contained textual and visual representations that constructed Indigenous, Black, Arab, and Asian peoples as ‘the Other’ while reinforcing the collective identity of Quebec, and Canada more broadly, as white.”

Daniel Macfarlane, Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023). “The central conceit of this book is that understanding the history of Canada-US relations requires comprehending the importance of environment and energy,” writes Macfarlane. His study encompasses many aspects of the continental energy relationship, “from electricity to uranium to fossil fuels,” and reveals how “Canada became vital to American strategic interests and, along with the United States, a major international energy power and petro-state.”

Thomas Peace, The Slow Rush of Colonization: Spaces of Power in the Maritime Peninsula, 1680-1790 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2023). “Historian Thomas Peace demonstrates that despite imperial changes of power and settler colonial incursions on their Lands, local Mi’kmaw, Wabanaki, Peskotomukhati, Wolastoqiyik, and Wendat nations continued to experience the contested [Maritime] Peninsula as a cohesive whole, rather than one defined by subsequent colonial borders.”

 
Wilson Fellows and Associates are invited to weigh in, and we will reveal the winners, on our blog, in late May 2024. In order to have your opinion counted, we need to hear from you by mid-May 2024. 

 We do hope you will take part, and are happy to provide PDFs of the book or books you may need to make up your own mind. Just write to us at the Wilson Institute -- wilsonch@mcmaster.ca  -- and we shall make it happen. 

 
Thanks so much!

 Ian McKay
Director, Wilson Institute for Canadian History