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A member of the same intellectual generation as Harold Innis, Northrop Frye, and George Grant, Donald Creighton (1902–1979) was English Canada’s first great historian. The author of eleven books, including The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence and a two-volume biography of John A. Macdonald, Creighton wrote history as if it “had happened,” he said, “the day before yesterday.” And as a public intellectual, he advised the prime minister of Canada, the premier of Ontario, and – at least on one occasion – the British government. Yet he was, as Donald Wright shows, also profoundly out of step with his times. As the nation was re-imagined along bilingual and later multicultural...
This is a new release of the original 1960 edition.
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First published in 1952 and 1955, John A. Macdonald: The Young Politician, The Old Chieftain remains a classic in Canadian arts and letters. Described as the greatest biography ever written in Canada, it earned Donald Creighton two Governor General's Awards. In 2013, the Toronto Review of Books recommended it to anyone who wished to become a better Canadian. In this book, Creighton examines the public and private lives of Canada’s first prime minister, his victories and defeats as well as his joys and pains. A gifted writer, Creighton takes the reader back in time, to the nineteenth century, the road to Confederation, and the building of the railway. Along the way, he visits Kingston, Quebec, Charlottetown, Ottawa, and London, following his hero from a few rooms above his father’s shop in Kingston to the corridors of power in England, including the magnificent Highclere Castle where much of the British North America Act was written. This edition includes a new introduction by Creighton's biographer, Donald Wright, and by Peter Waite, Creighton's very first doctoral student.
Originally published in 1937 as "The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 1760-1850" and re-issued in its present form in 1956, Donald Creighton's study of the St. Lawrence became an essential text in Canadian history courses. This, his first book, helped establish Creighton as the foremost English Canadian historian of his generation. In it, he examines the trading system that developed along the St. Lawrence River and he argues that the exploitation of key staple products by colonial merchants along the St. Lawrence River system was key to Canada's economic and national development. Creighton tells the story of the St. Lawrence empire largely from the perspective of these Canadian merchants, who, above all others, struggled to win the territorial empire of the St. Lawrence and to establish the Canadian commercial state. Christopher H. Moore, historian and Governor General Award winner, has written a new introduction to this classic text.