Books

Published in 2018 to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Highlands Historical Society of Edmonton, the James Bond Steele Diaries follow the daily life of the one room schoolteacher who taught the children of settlers in early Edmonton, including what is now the Highlands neighbourhood.

"For the first time the full story of Alberta's greatest premier and how he was destroyed by one of Canada's hottest scandals..."

Now you can rediscover the career of this great Canadian and for the first time read the complete story. Put the sensational scandal in context with a new and revealing interpretation.

Author: Franklin Foster

This book is a collection of short stories and snapshots from the historic Highlands neighbourhood in northeast Edmonton. It is a look into the history of an Edmonton neighbourhood through the eyes of the people who lived there.

Author: Carol Snyder

June was a trying month for Lukas, a month of endless waiting. Once school was done for the year, Lukas would join his cousin KC on "The Farm," where his father and his Uncle Ben had grown up, and where a summer full of adventure beckoned.

But then KC told Lukas about something new. A ghost train had been sighted, running on the branch line not far from The Farm. And not just any ghost train. This was the Ghost Train, a train with ties to Lukas' very own family, a train long absent but now mysteriously reappearing when the moon was full.

Author: Stuart Adams

The terrifying Wîhtikow Rex takes centre stage in this exciting second book in the Lukas Encounters. The mysterious creature, a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton that Lukas and his cousin KC accidentally bring to life, is described in Cree mythology as a ravening monster that grows as it consumes its victims.

Author: Stuart Adams

The journal of Father Léon Doucet presents a rare account of the changes that occurred in what is today Saskatchewan and Alberta in the last half of the nineteenth century. These changes included the spread of devastating disease epidemics, the decline of bison populations, the end of the fur trade economy, the establishment of Canadian sovereignty, the signing of treaties, the creation of First Nations reserves, and the transformation of the landscape into an agricultural west. A keen observer, Doucet recorded significant ethnographic, geographic, genealogical, faunal, floral, and meteorological details and events.

This book is a fibre artist's dream! It makes it easy to dye your own fabric and yarn with plants you will find in your own back yard.

Author: Carol Snyder

In 1899, the Counterfeit Circulation Company Limited is formed to forge Canadian $2.00 notes in Boston, Massachusetts and transport them to Nova Scotia for distribution. In Halifax, Laura Davis begins her litany to her daughters to never marry an Englishman, as a result of her husband Lewis' complicity in the counterfeiting scheme and his affair with another woman. Drawn into the illegal enterprise by his financial and marital difficulties, Lewis William Davis finds himself as the principal of the Boston group formed to print the 1897 Canadian banknotes. Using the daily notes of United States Secret Service agent Owen Owen, which were uncovered by the popular television show Ancestors in the Attic, as well as newspaper accounts of that time period, "Never Marry an Englishman" tells the story of Lewis William Davis' attempt to become richer from his counterfeiting skills and of agent Owen Owen's attempt to capture him.

Author: Rob Milson

"Old Strathcona: Edmonton's Southside Roots" by Monto is an extensively researched chronological history of southside Edmonton, once the separate city of Strathcona, from its start as a scattering of Metis/Indian pioneer cabins in the 1870s to a bustling commercial/industrial/residential section of the City of Edmonton prior to the downturn of the 1930s. Bound together with "Metis Strathcona" by Lawrence, a ground-breaking essay on the roots of Strathcona, which delineates the Metis identity of many of its earliest pioneers and the Metis pioneers' connection with the area's Papaschase First Nations, which was subsequently thoroughly dispossessed.

Author: Tom Monto

Fort George and Buckingham House and the early fur trade on the North Saskatchewan River, 1792 to 1800.

Through meticulous research and careful historiographical analysis, historians Douglas Babcock and Michael Payne paint a vivid portrait of a foundational period of social and economic interaction in Alberta s early fur trade history. While the British Crown claimed ownership and control through a charter granted to the Hudson s Bay Company over a vast territory known as Rupert s Land, in reality it was the Indigenous nations of the continent who held uncontested sovereign dominion over their ancestral lands. It wasn t until 1869 that these territories were absorbed into Canada after which treaties were fashioned, and western provinces established.

Author: Douglas R. Babcock with Michael Payne

After the terrible poison gas attack in the Ypres Salient in April 1915, Canadian medical officer John McCrae made a plea to his nation in his poem, "In Flanders Fields", to hold the torch from fallen hands and take up Our Quarrel with the Foe.

Inspired by McCrae's words, author Ian Edwards, a historian with The Loyal Edmonton Regiment Military Museum, dives into the early story of the Edmonton area Canadian Militia and its preparation to stop the aggression of the Central Powers of Europe. He follows the new Edmonton units, cavalry and infantry, as they came together as comrades within their own unique battalions or regiments of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Edwards reveals their difficulties and successes with recruiting volunteers, mastering command and control, and adapting to new tactical skills, weapons, uniforms, and equipment. Most Edmonton region units were only to be broken up in England, parcelled out as replacements for the fallen Albertans. While other units supplied timber or laid rail lines to permit Allied Powers advances, medics from Edmonton collected and dressed the wounded soldiers of the infantry at the front line.

The Canadian Corps suffered atrocious losses at Ypres, the Somme, Vimy, Passchendaele, and the highly successful but costly Final 100 Days Offensive in 1918. The Alberta units, with high proportions of Northern and Central Albertans, had triumphs and failures. The gallantry of individual soldiers and unit battle honours paints the picture of their heroism while taking up the quarrel in the First World War.

Author: Ian Edwards

Rice Sheppard, Harry Ainlay, Margaret Crang... three Edmontonians who stood up and fought for the working people of their city through the dark days of the World Wars, the fragile prosperity of the 1920s, the grinding poverty of the Dirty Thirties and Cold War repression.

Rice Sheppard, Harry Ainlay and Margaret Crang did not win all their battles but they made a difference in the history of the city, the province and the country.

Author: Tom Monto

Survival in Paradise: A Century of Coal Mining in the Bow Valley is both a story of how coal was mined in the region for nearly 100 years and a story of its four coal-mining towns.

Engineers and miners will be interested in the specifics of how coal was mined in the Rocky Mountains. General readers and those with a passion for history will appreciate how this book explores the development of each community and why three died and Canmore survived.

Author: Walter J. Riva

In an approach that allows the writers of letters, reports, proposals and policy to speak for themselves, this book covers the critical decade of the 1930s in which the first definitive provincial Métis policy in Canada was produced. The review includes:

• Alberta Métis-provincial (intergovernmental) policy relationships.
• The first years of the Métis Association of Alberta.
• The initial development of the Alberta Métis Settlements.
• Roles of Alberta Métis leaders (Dion, Brady, Norris, Tomkins), politicians and bureaucrats in provincial Métis policy development.

Author: Denis Wall

This book is an assortment of stories about the glass milk bottle era and the home delivery of milk.It was inspired by the author's research of Western Canadian dairies and milk bottles from his own collection.

Author: Bob Snyder

Drawing on historic newspaper accounts, books and PR organization newsletters, and on recent secondary references, historian Tom Monto has pulled together an overview of the use of proportional representation in Canada.

This chronological history describes the drive for PR starting in the 1880s and its eventual success when by 1923, Single Transferable Voting had been adopted by 19 cities and two provincial governments.

This book presents an overview of STV's use in 17 provincial elections and 150 city elections in Canada. And how despite its effectiveness, it was successively discontinued, with the last Canadian STV government election happening in Calgary in 1971.

With increasing sentiment in favour of electoral reform, this affordable book is bound to provide speaking points and inspiration for today's debates on the subject.

Self-published by Tom Monto, of Edmonton. Monto, a published author, is creator of the electoral reform blogsite Montopedia.

Drawing on historic newspaper accounts, books and PR organization newsletters, and on recent secondary references, historian Tom Monto has pulled together an overview of the use of proportional representation in Canada.

This chronological history describes the drive for PR starting in the 1880s and its eventual success when by 1923, Single Transferable Voting had been adopted by 19 cities and two provincial governments.

This book presents an overview of STV's use in 17 provincial elections and 150 city elections in Canada. And how despite its effectiveness, it was successively discontinued, with the last Canadian STV government election happening in Calgary in 1971.

With increasing sentiment in favour of electoral reform, this affordable book is bound to provide speaking points and inspiration for today's debates on the subject.

Self-published by Tom Monto, of Edmonton. Monto, a published author, is creator of the electoral reform blogsite Montopedia.