The Western Terminus

Why might one read the hist­ory of a city? For many of us, it’s to gain context and an understanding of how a place came to be. After whom are these streets named? Who was welcomed here — or excluded? How did a city’s social policies develop, its neighbourhoods form, its parks and public spaces take shape? Choose a starting point, we ask historians, and trace a line to the present, making the actions and attitudes of those who came before us comprehensible, if not necessarily sympathetic. Tell us who we were, so we can understand who we are and what we might be.

In Becoming Vancouver: A History, Daniel Francis takes on such a project with enthusiasm, telling a story of successes and failures and, perhaps most important, countering the tendency, on the part of individuals and society as a whole, to forget the past. Because Vancouver is young and ever-changing, it has been called “a city without a history,” and that invites some to view it as a hyper-modern...