Alan Taylor

In 1983, at Red Bay, Labrador, archeologists for Parks Canada recovered a well-preserved boat that sank in 1565. About twenty-six feet long and six and a half wide, the graceful craft of oak and pine could move by oars or sails. The builders were Basques, from the Bay of Biscay along the north shore of the kingdom called…

In Canadian Spy Story, David A. Wilson thoroughly and insightfully examines Canada’s struggle against the Fenians, nineteenth-century radicals also known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood. They recruited fellow Catholics who had fled to the United States and Canada to escape British misrule over Ireland. Cultivating a powerful sense of grievance, they called attention to the nearly one million killed by the Great Famine of the late…