Intro Post

[trouble]

I kept meaning to sign up for this community and then forgetting.

Name: trouble
Goal: 50 history books about people of colour, preferably Canadian-history content for this round
Definition of "book": Non-fiction.
A little about my goal and my reading habits: I'm a Canadian historian whose history education did that clever thing where it acted like Canada was a vast empty wasteland when John Cabot arrived and found cod. (Also, it barely touched on things like the Japanese Interment Camps during WWII.) It's really pathetic. While I've done some stuff since then to get over this lacking, I think the only way to really challenge those ideas is to read a lot of history books written by and about people of colour/non-white people living in my country. I like the 50 books challenge, both because it is established (and thus my reviews may tempt more people into reading history!), and because I've read at least that many books about white people history in Canada, and this strikes me as a good counter-balance to that.

Here's the books I have scattered about the house:

Mackey, Frank. Done With Slavery: The Black Fact In Montreal. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010.

Paul, Daniel N. First Nations History: We Were Not The Savages: Collision between European and Native American Civilization. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2006.

Saul, John Ralston. A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2008.

Nelson, Jennifer J. Razing Africville: A Geography of Racism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.

Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.

Arabella, Irving & Harold Troper. None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933 - 1948. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2000. (Originally published in 1980s)

Smardz Forst, Karolyn. I've got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad. Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2007.

Simpson, Leanne & Kiera L. Ladner. This is an Honour Song: Twenty Years since the Blockades - An Anthology of Writing on the "Oka Crisis". Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2010.

Cooper, Afua. The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the burning of Old Montreal. Toronto: Harper Collins, 2006.

Clairmon, Donald H. and Dennis William Magill. Africville: The Life and Death of a Canadian Black Community. Toronto: McLellen & Stewart, 1974.

Reid, John. Nova Scotia: A Pocket History. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2009.


With my schedule that might keep me going for a year. *sigh* Busy busy busy.