Robert Bothwell - Böcker

Canada's history, eminent historian Robert Bothwell argues, is more than simply regional or national. In some respects, Canada makes most sense when viewed from the outside in, and in "The Penguin History of Canada" we are invited to do just that. The world has always seen Canada as a terrain for experiment and a land of opportunity. At first Canada's survival and, later, its prosperity depended on links with the world outside - the technologies that drove steamships and trains across oceans and continents; the armies that battled for North America; the furs, wheat, and gold that bought Canada a place in the world's trading system.An uneasy and difficult country, most of Canada's space is uninhabited, and much uninhabitable. It is a country with a huge North but with most of its population in the South, hugging the American border. Canada has nevertheless defied the odds: it remains, in the twenty-first century, a haven of peace and a beacon of prosperity. Erudite yet accessible and marked by narrative flair, "The Penguin History of Canada" paints an expansive portrait of a dynamic and complex country.

Canada: land of hockey, terrible weather, unfailing politeness-and little else, as far as many Americans are aware. For Canadians, the United States is seen as a land of unparalleled opportunity and unparalleled failure, a country of heights and abysses. The straitlaced country in the north could hardly have much to tell about its powerhouse of a neighbor to the south, eh?Not so, according to historian Robert Bothwell. In this witty and accessible book, Bothwell argues that the shared history of the United States and Canada reveals more about each country than most would suspect. Your Country, My Country takes readers back to the seventeenth century, when a shared British colonial heritage set the two lands on paths that would remain intertwined to the present day. Tracing Canadian-American relations, shared values, and differences through the centuries, Bothwell suggests that Americans are neither unique nor exceptional, in terms of both their good characteristics and their bad ones. He brings this contention down to the present day by examining Canadian and American differences over such questions as universal health care in domestic policy and the Iraq war in foreign policy. What happens in Canada often reflects what has happened in the United States, but by the same token, what happens in Canada signals what could happen in its American neighbor. From whatever direction, this innovative volume contends, Canada's story illuminates America's-and vice-versa.

The book might almost be entitled Canadians in the Attic. Canada is the United States' forgotten twin, the country that resembles the United States more than any other, and that shares a history with America that goes back to the seventeenth century, and that includes the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the anti-slavery movement, to name only a few. Canada is in a way a measure of, a barometer of, American exceptionalism. What happens in Canada is often a reflection of what has happened in the United States, but by the same token, what happens in Canada is often a sign of what could happen in its American neighbor. While the two countries have distinct political systems, and particular histories, ideologically they are closer together than standard Canadian histories suggest. (Canadians are left out of standard American histories.) Arguably, Canada is the part of North America where the New Deal came to fruition in the 1960s, when it was frustrated in the United States. But no American political idea fails to penetrate Canada, and in the 2000s many Canadians, including the current Canadian government, seek to imitate or replicate the hard-right turn in American politics. From whatever direction, the Canadian experience illuminates American experience-- and vice-versa.

Relations between Canada and Quebec have never been easy. Beginning with the Conquest and working through the many political permutations before Confederation and since, there has always been conflict between the two governments and, in particular, between two points of view. The rebellions of 1837-8, conscription, the Quiet Revolution, language laws, the FLQ crisis and endless constitutional wrangles such as Meech Lake are just a sampling of the issues that have divided the nation. The cast of characters has been fascinating, too: Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney, Robert Bourassa, and Rene Levesque have all played centre stage. In the wake of a razor-thin majority for federalist forces in the referendum of 1995, the issue of separation continues to be complicated by the division of the huge national debt, the possibility of further territorial partition within a separate Quebec, the rights of First Nations people, and the spectre of separatist movements in Eastern Europe in recent years. Through interviews with a wide variety of politicians, journalists, and academics, Robert Bothwell skilfully weaves together a coherent account of the relationship between Canada and Quebec. We hear from Jean Chretien, Sharon Carstairs and Ovide Mercredi; Lise Bissonnette and Graham Fraser; Michael Bliss and Ramsay Cook; and many more. The text is an absorbing collage of personal accounts and considered opinions, one that acquaints us with the many different facets of this complicated yet crucial question: how did Canada and Quebec get to this impasse, and where do we go from here?

Pierre Trudeau and most of his contemporaries at home and abroad are now dead. This book offers reflections on Canadian foreign, trade, and defence policies from interviews conducted more than three decades ago with key policy makers, diplomats, and military officers in the Trudeau government and of that era.The interviews are informative and revealingly frank. There is much on the enormous difficulties in dealing with the United States, Europe, NATO, the Soviet Union, and Communist China in an era dominated by the Cold War. There are also personal insights into Trudeau himself – a man of great "esprit," who initially seemed destined to change Canadian policy in a dramatic fashion. Over time, however, this was not to be, and his government policies reverted towards the norm. A unique resource, Trudeau's World adds immeasurably to our understanding of the Trudeau era. It also has much to tell us about Canada and the world from 1968 to 1984.

From the preface:"A visitor seeing Canada for the first time since 1939 might well conclude that Canada, even more than nations devastated by war, has become another country. On the surface so much remains the same: the Liberals prevail in Ottawa; the provinces quarrel with Ottawa and among themselves; and we worry about Americans in our future. But most of the pieces have been rearranged, and the effect of the picture is quite different...This is a book about our own times, and as such it expresses definite views. No reader will agree with everything we say. We have not tried to end debate; we have tried to clarify and broaden. We trust that our readers will be encouraged to seek for themselves a better understanding of where Canadians have been and what they have become."

Through war, depression, and social upheaval, the first half of the twentieth century was a period of unprecedented turbulence in Canada. In this lively and contentious survey, Robert Bothwell, lan Drummond, and John English explore the political and economic forces that shaped this era of change.As in their earlier work, the highly acclaimed Canada since 1945, the authors focus on the political context of events. Beginning at the turn of the century, they consider the status of Canada in the empire and the world, the burgeoning growth of its economy, and the development of social and labour problems, up to the eruption of 1914. They discuss the political currents running through Canada during two wars, the interwar economic boom and depression, and the plans for post-war reconstruction, and assess the impact of these and other events on Canada's political, economic, social, and cultural institutions.

On 16 May 1930, Gilbert LaBine discovered pitchblende near the shores of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. This is the story of Eldorado and the mine whose discovery marked the beginning of Canada's uranium industry. Robert Bothwell tells how Gilbert and Charlie LaBine, veteran Canadian prospectors, promoted and developed Eldorado Gold Mins Limited to produce radium. Thought to be the miracle cure for cancer, the rare mineral had a market price at the time of $75,000 per gram. Riches seemed a certainty and the company established a radium refinery at Port Hope, Ontario, in 1933.But manipulation of the market, the physical challenge of taking men and supplies into Port Radium, NWT, and the difficulties in extracting radium from ore at Port Hope prevented them from realizing that imagined wealth. Along the way, the LaBine brothers had become entangled with international radium interests in Belgium, and at a crucial moment the Belgian cut the price to $25,000 per gram. The LaBine enterprise was on the verge of bankruptcy. But the Port Radium mine's pitchblende also contained uranium. In the wartime race to split the uranium atom, scientists from North America and Europe discovered its immense engery potential. The uranium that had been Eldorado's waste became its survival. In 1942, the U.S. Army contracted to buy all the uranium the company could mine and refine. The political and economic significance of the U.S. contract attracted the attention of the Canadian government in the person of C.D. Howe. Eldorado became a crown corporation in 1942, the secret sale of the company to the federal government making millionaires of the LaBine brothes.Only after the war did Eldorado make a profit, when the Cold War accelerated and a whole industry grew up in Canada around uranium production. Uranium became Canada's largest and most profitable mineral export. 'While the going was good, it was very good indeed,' says the author, but in 1959 the Americans and later the British decided not to renew their Canadian contracts. The bottom dropped out of the uranium markets, just as it had dropped out of the radium market 20 years earlier.Eldorado negotiated with Canada's allies to stretchout deliveries under the expiring contracts, mainting the Canadian industry until markets for the peaceful use of uranium in the generation of electricity could be developed. However, the cost of waiting was high: in the early 1960s, mines were closed and miners were out of work.Robert Bothwell, one of Canada's foremost historians, has told the Eldorado story with colour and drama. He has captured the excitement of frontier resource development in the 1930s and the intrigue of international politics in the 1940s and 1950s. Eldorado covers the company's history until 1960, when the crown corporation turned to the generation of electricity as the market for its products and services.