The United States had important ties with Canada's Maritime Provinces that were profoundly shaken by the American Civil War. Drawing extensively on newspaper reports, personal papers, and local histories, Greg Marquis captures the drama of the times, effectively putting the reader into the thick of the action. In Armageddon's Shadow highlights Maritime support for the beleaguered Confederacy and the grave implications this had on race relations in Canada. Marquis details the involvement of maritimers in running blockades and recounts the experiences of some of the thousands of men from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island who served in America's bloodiest conflict. Book jacket.

In 2072 a deadly disease sweeps the world, killing nearly everyone. Governments and civilization disintegrate. Twelve years later, Matt Pringle's scrounger gang meets John Moore, an intelligent orphan boy attracted to the adventurous life he imagines they lead. Matt cannot dissuade him from joining the gang even though death stalks it. A larger rival gang chases them across their empty world. In time John discovers that a Shadow more insidious than disease, starvation and casual violence haunts the world.

Written by leading historians of the mid–nineteenth century United States, this book focuses on the continental dimensions of the U.S. Civil War. It joins a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand the place of America’s mid-nineteenth-century crisis in the broader sweep of world history. However, unlike other studies that have pursued the Civil War’s connections with Europe and the Caribbean, this volume focuses on North America, particularly Mexico, British Canada, and sovereign indigenous states in the West. As the United States went through its Civil War and Reconstruction, Mexico endured its own civil war and then waged a four-year campaign to expel a French-imposed monarch. Meanwhile, Britain’s North American colonies were in complex and contested negotiations that culminated in confederation in 1867. In the West, indigenous nations faced an onslaught of settlers and soldiers seeking to conquer their lands for the United States. Yet despite this synchronicity, mainstream histories of the Civil War mostly ignore its connections to the political upheaval occurring elsewhere in North America. By reading North America into the history of the Civil War, this volume shows how battles over sovereignty in neighboring states became enmeshed with the fratricidal conflict in the United States. Its contributors explore these entangled histories in studies ranging from African Americans fleeing U.S. slavery by emigrating to Mexico to Confederate privateers finding allies in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This continental perspective highlights the uncertainty of the period when the fate of old nations and possibilities for new ones were truly up for grabs.

At the Ocean’s Edge offers a vibrant account of Nova Scotia’s colonial history, situating it in an early and dramatic chapter in the expansion of Europe. Between 1450 and 1850, various processes – sometimes violent, often judicial, rarely conclusive – transferred power first from Indigenous societies to the French and British empires, and then to European settlers and their descendants who claimed the land as their own. This book not only brings Nova Scotia’s struggles into sharp focus but also unpacks the intellectual and social values that took root in the region. By the time that Nova Scotia became a province of the Dominion of Canada in 1867, its multicultural peoples, including Mi’kmaq, Acadian, African, and British, had come to a grudging, unequal, and often contested accommodation among themselves. Written in accessible and spirited prose, the narrative follows larger trends through the experiences of colourful individuals who grappled with expulsion, genocide, and war to establish the institutions, relationships, and values that still shape Nova Scotia’s identity.

Before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he added a paragraph authorizing the army to recruit black soldiers. Nearly 200,000 men answered the call. Several thousand of them came from Canada. What compelled these men to leave the relative comfort of their homes to face death on the battlefield, loss of income, and legal sanctions for participating in a foreign war? Drawing on newspapers, autobiographies, and military and census records, Richard Reid pieces together a portrait of a group of men who served the Union in disparate ways – as soldiers, sailors, or doctors – but who all believed that liberty, justice, and equality were worth fighting for. By bringing the courage and contributions of these men to light, African Canadians in Union Blue opens a window on the changing nature of the Civil War and the ties that held black communities together even as the borders around them shifted or were torn asunder.

This volume of daring actions showcases the countrys rich military experience while capturing the indomitable spirit of the Canadian soldier.