Richard M. Reid – författare

Before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he added a paragraph authorizing the army to recruit black soldiers. Nearly 200,000 men answered the call. Several thousand of them came from Canada.What compelled these men to leave the relative comfort of their homes to face death on the battlefield, loss of income, and legal sanctions for participating in a foreign war? Drawing on newspapers, autobiographies, and military and census records, Richard Reid pieces together a portrait of a group of men who served the Union in disparate ways – as soldiers, sailors, or doctors – but who all believed that liberty, justice, and equality were worth fighting for.By bringing the courage and contributions of these men to light, African Canadians in Union Blue opens a window on the changing nature of the Civil War and the ties that held black communities together even as the borders around them shifted or were torn asunder.

This book is the first detailed study of the Ottawa Valley in the early 19th century. The author provides an extensive introduction and numerous documents to trace the growth of this sometimes turbulent region, and its emergence as a society distinct from what later became Ontario.

Famous for a Time celebrates Canadian athletes and sporting history.The cultural impact of sport on a nation is not slight. Famous for a Time explores a number of important, if not well remembered Canadian athletes and the sports they played to help explain the nation’s complicated history, sporting and otherwise. It is an exploration that reveals the socio-cultural trends that have shaped Canada since Confederation.Through the prism of some exceptional athletes, the prevailing attitudes of many Canadians toward issues such as class, race, memory, manliness, femininity, and national identity are laid bare. Here, from the sidelines, we find how these attitudes have changed — or not, as the case may be — over time.From team sports such as lacrosse, baseball, and cricket, to Canada's cycling craze, track and field, and boxing, each chapter offers insight to an important aspect of the nation’s narrative. The winners and losers of Canada’s games simply mirror the larger questions that have faced Canadian society across three centuries.

More than 5,000 North Carolina slaves escaped from their white owners to serve in the Union army during the Civil War. In Freedom for Themselves Richard Reid explores the stories of black soldiers from four regiments raised in North Carolina. Constructing a multidimensional portrait of the soldiers and their families, he provides a new understanding of the spectrum of black experience during and after the war.Reid examines the processes by which black men enlisted and were trained, the history of each regiment, the lives of the soldiers' families during the war, and the postwar experiences of the veterans and their families living in an ex-Confederate state. By considering four regiments from a single state, Reid presents a cross section of a wide range of experiences and assesses what experiences proved largely universal among black troops. The full freedom they fought for and dreamed of having when the war ended did not materialize in their lifetimes, but Reid shows that many of them found in the army a kind of equality that was denied them in civilian life. The postwar benefits afforded to white veterans seldom crossed the color line. The accolades African American soldiers received, Reid demonstrates, came not from a new southern society, but from within their own communities, where black soldiers were seen and recognized as heroes.