Nations, Ideas, Identities

A Rare Bird on the Earth: Essays in Honour of Ramsay Cook grew out of an Ottawa conference in the fall of 1997, which was organized by two of his former PhD students, Michael Behiels and Marcel Martel. The essayists are all former PhD students of Professor Cook's, and their work reflects the range of Cook's scholarly interest as well as the transformation of the historical profession in Canada following the growth of graduate history programmes in the late 1960s. This collection is both a tribute to Ramsay Cook and a testimony to the maturation of Canadian historiography. Among the topics which cover culture, ideas, nationalism, native voices, and women, readers will learn about the biases underlying Canadian art exhibitions, the role of sealing in the formulation of Newfoundlanders' identity, why Harold Innis was concerned with the uses and abuses of power, how contemporary Quebecois nationalists abandoned the Francophone minority communities after World War II, the struggle for Indian votes in Saskatchewan elections in the 1960s and 1970s, and the radicalization of female workers in Quebec's cotton industry at the turn of the century.