Alan Taylor

Until recently, Sir John A. Macdonald was among the most honoured Canadians, celebrated as the key founder and long-term prime minister of the confederated, transcontinental nation. Textbooks and biographies sang his praises. His statues studded public places across the dominion, while schools, airports, streets, and highways bore his name. But much changed during the past two decades as Macdonald came to be redefined as the alleged father of Canadian…

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…