Margaret Conrad's history of Canada begins with a challenge to its readers. What is Canada? What makes up this diverse, complex and often contested nation-state? What was its founding moment? And who are its people? Drawing on her many years of experience as a scholar, writer and teacher of Canadian history, Conrad offers astute answers to these difficult questions. Beginning in Canada's deep past with the arrival of its Aboriginal peoples, she traces its history through the conquest by Europeans, the American Revolutionary War and the industrialization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its prosperous present. Despite its successes and its popularity as a destination for immigrants from across the world, Canada remains a curiously reluctant player on the international stage. This intelligent, concise and lucid book explains just why that is.

"This impressive history of Canada tells a rich and surprisingly new story in a relatively brief space. It is constructed on an awareness of the past half-century of historical writing and is especially convincing in its approach to Aboriginal communities, French-speaking households, and Atlantic Canada. I recommend it wholeheartedly." -Gerald Friesen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Manitoba

"Conrad's book has energy and narrative drive and never seems didactic or heavy-handed. It has what Stephen Pyne calls the hallmark of all good non-fiction: "voice and vision." Instead of the literary conceits or clunky structural devices others may have relied on, Conrad trusts her own voice and the history of Canada itself to tell an inclusive yet coherent national story." -Jeffrey L. McNairn, Queen's University

"Margaret Conrad’s elegant, erudite and sophisticated study of Canada’s history is both dramatic in scale and detailed in exposition. Throughout, Conrad traces a clear narrative trajectory that juxtaposes Canada’s internal social, political and cultural dynamics and its external influences, especially those emanating from the nation on the other side of Niagara Falls, to emphasize both the challenges and triumphs that the nation has faced in constructing and sustaining a distinctive, coherent and inclusive identity in the face of internal dissent, global unrest and economic uncertainty." -Susan-Mary Grant, Professor of American History, Newcastle University

"Recommended." -Choice