Most of the below, except for Stories from Canada’s Economic History, are licensed via a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to share, copy or remix these, as long as you credit the source. While Stories is not licensed via a Creative Commons license, it is entirely free, and you may copy, share and distribute the file as you wish.
Most of the texts below are annotated sourcebooks that draw from contemporary, public domain sources, predominantly newspapers. All are provided as PDFs, and feature interactive tables of contents.
TOOLS, MAPS AND TEXTBOOKS
- A Tiny Toolkit: (Last updated Sep. 1, 2022) A set of tools to help undergraduate students and the general public make sense of large collections of historical data. Sections include “Epistemology: Thinking about Knowing,” “Prices, Quantities, Choice and Value,” “How much is enough?” and “Writing”. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
- Stories from Canada’s Economic History: Suitable for use as a textbook. Chapters include Newfoundland, Fur, The Treaties and After, Chinese Immigration, Gold, Railways, The American ‘Invasion’, Wheat and Farming, The Status of Prairie Women 1912 – 1916, Housework, Women and Paid Work, and Money and Banking.
- Educator’s Care Package (8 MB .zip file): Contains sample lecture notes, assignments and research projects making use of the sourcebooks. All files are in Word, Powerpoint and Excel format, for easier use in the creation of your own teaching materials. Selected from materials used in my Economic History course (ECON 321).
- Free Photo Album (122 MB .zip file): Free to use, remix and share. Intended for educators, this virtual album contains scans of over 100 antique photographs from my own collection (and Canada’s history).
- Map of British Columbia c. 1885: Free to use, remix and share.
- Map of Newfoundland (1884): Free to use, remix and share.
- Map of the Prairie Provinces (c. 1880): Free to use, remix and share. This is a very special map, because it shows locations of Indigenous settlements, cart trails, trading posts, forts, boundaries of the “true forest” and “true prairie” biomes, and the originally-intended, more northerly route of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
SLAVERY
- Crossings, Coercion and Consequences: Slavery and its repercussions in Canada.
INDIGENOUS HISTORY
- Banned Practice: The Potlatch and British Columbia, 1803 – 1953.
- A Chinook Glossary: A Chinook jargon to English glossary. Useful when reading “Banned Practice”.
- Caughnawaga (Kahnawá:ke): Settler accounts to 1900.
- Our Betrayed Wards: My edition, with new appendices, of a work self-published by R. N. Wilson, a former Indian agent, in 1921. Wilson wished to draw attention to the way in which the federal government’s ‘Greater Production’ measures during World War I had affected the Blood Reserve.
- Permission: A Blood Reserve sourcebook drawn from settler records.
- This Spurious Philanthropy: Indian Policy, food and Canada’s North-West as discussed in the Senate of Canada in 1886.
- To Christianize and Civilize: Settler motives and Residential Schools.
CHINESE AND JAPANESE IMMIGRATION
- A Servant when he Reigneth: Chinese servants in British Columbia, 1867 – 1924.
- Japanese Immigration to British Columbia and the Vancouver Riot of 1907.
- Windsor’s Chinese Laundries: A history of Windsor, Ontario’s, Chinese community from 1894 to 1959, through the lens of Chinese laundries.
GENDER
- “Masquerades” and Male Attire: Canada, women and “masculine” clothing, 1851 – 1923. Includes a 20+ page appendix with women’s and men’s clothing from the 1908 Simpson’s catalogue.
- Married Women Workers and the early Great Depression: Saskatoon, 1929 – 1931.
- Next Step Stories: Trade Training of Canadian Girls. My edition of a previously uncollected series of articles, published in 1913, by Marjory MacMurchy (Lady Willison). Also includes other works by MacMurchy, such as “The Case of the Working Girl,” (1912) “The New House Keeping Problem of the Paid Domestic Worker” (1912 – 1913) and portions of “The Canadian Girl at Work” (1920).
- Only a Working Girl: Canadian women and paid work, 1890 – 1921.
- Woman’s Sphere of Action: Canadian women, housework and the household, 1858 – 1921.
- Waiting Table: Canada’s waitresses, 1867 – 1968. During most of the time period covered, “waitress” was considered its own job, distinct from that of a waiter.
DRUGS AND MEDICINE
- Dynevor Indian Hospital: “The only Indian hospital in the Northwest”. Dynevor Indian Hospital, 1896 – 1957.
- Fine Habits: Opium & morphine users in British Columbia to 1914.
- Makes Friends and Retains Them: “Medicinal” opiates in Canada, 1780 – 1913.
- Manipulative Surgery: Doctor Locke and Williamsburg. The story of a small-town doctor who became an international sensation.
- Smallpox, Students & Vaccines: Opposition to smallpox vaccination in 1908.
- The First Few Weeks: Victoria’s experience with Spanish Flu, September 25 – October 21, 1918.
- This Lucrative Trade: Opium smuggling and factories in British Columbia, 1863 – 1908.
THE FUR TRADE
- A Selkirk Settlement Sourcebook: I was frustrated by the lack of compelling, readable material on the economic history of the Selkirk settlement that was suitable for undergraduate courses, so I compiled this collection. It covers the century from 1811 to 1911.
- Castor Resartus: The beaver hat in history. Includes over 10 pages of illustrations.
- Stories of Indian Days: My edition of the previously uncollected reminiscences of Reginald Beatty, a former fur trader for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Title by the author. Extensively annotated and intended for high school use.
MONEY, GOLD AND BANKING
- Bank(ing) Notes: The story of two Canadian bank failures (the Central Bank and the Farmers Bank), plus a few interesting discussions of early Canadian banking policy.
- The Assay Office and the proposed mint at New Westminster: A chapter in the history of the Fraser River Mines. My edition of a 1926 book by R. L. Reid. I’ve included full transcriptions of many of the primary sources used by Reid, plus additional readings to provide context to the modern reader.
- The Dominion Bank: Fifty years of banking service, 1871 – 1921. I use a short historical sketch (by O. D. Skelton) of a “monotonously successful” bank as a preface and invitation to a trip through Canada’s early banking history. Includes chapters on free banking in the 1850s, the failure of the Bank of Upper Canada, Accommodation Paper, the Manitoba Boom of the 1880s, the American “Invasion” of 1902 – 1913, warehouse receipts and more.
- The Fraser and the Klondike: The story of two gold rushes, presented in a way that facilitates analysis from the perspective of Narrative Economics. Includes accounts of the Fraser Canyon war of 1858. Emphasis is placed on the Indigenous role in gold discoveries. Chapters include Donald Fraser on the Fraser River Gold Rush, More Tales of the Fraser River Gold Rush, Tappan Adney on the Klondike Gold Rush, and More Tales of the Klondike Gold Rush.
WHEAT
- From Corn Laws to Wheat Board: Topics in Canadian wheat marketing, 1821 – 1950.
NEWFOUNDLAND
- Newfoundland in International Context: Chapters include The End of the Beothuk World, Conflict with the French, Conflict with the United States, Conflict with Canada, The Crash of 1894, and more.
INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION
- Fixing the Price of Sugar: Canada, 1887 – 1920. Canada has an interesting history of sugar cartels. This offers a quick look at some of them. Prepared for use in a course on Competition Policy.
If you find these at all useful, drop me a line! (E-mail not reproduced here for spam-related reasons, but it’s quick to find with a web search.)