Books
Forthcoming · Sutherland House · Winter 2027
Blood & Loyalty: The Long, Violent Battle for Canadian Democracy
Canada’s self-government may have arrived peacefully in 1867, but it began decades earlier on blood-soaked streets, in the aftermath of the rebellions of 1837–38. Those failed insurgencies produced a new generation of reformers – Robert Baldwin, Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Joseph Howe among them – who built democracy through assertive, independent-minded loyalty, embracing and reshaping British political institutions. Their struggle culminated in 1849, when mobs burned the Parliament buildings in Montreal.
Blood & Loyalty shows that Canada’s political story is one of loyalty and reform, compromise and assertiveness – and a reminder of how hard-won, and how fragile, self-government can be.
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McGill-Queen’s University Press · 2017
Unbuttoned: A History of Mackenzie King’s Secret Life
King ordered his diaries destroyed. Within a generation of his death in 1950 they had made him a national curiosity. How the private life of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister became public, and what that says about the cultural shifts that made self-revelation central to how Canadians judge their leaders.
- Finalist, Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for the Best Book on Canadian Politics 2017
- Finalist, Canada Prize for the best academic book 2018
- Finalist, J W Dafoe book prize 2018
UBC Press · 2020 · Edited with Christabelle Sethna
No Place for the State: The Origins and Legacies of the 1969 Omnibus Bill
A collection examining the Trudeau government’s 1969 Omnibus Bill and its effects on sexual and moral politics in Canada, from varied and sometimes conflicting perspectives.
University of London Press · 2009 · Edited with Michael Dawson
Contesting Clio’s Craft: New Directions and Debates in Canadian History
Essays on new directions and debates in the writing of Canadian history.
UBC Press · 2007
The Manly Modern: Masculinity in Postwar Canada
How ideas of modernity in postwar Canada were shaped by gender, told through car culture, mountaineering and war veterans.
