Ontario: Image, Identity, and Power

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the former editor of the journal, Ontario History. He is the author
of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality and Canadian History to
1967, and the coauthor of The College on

It is not an easy task for Canadians to tell their stories and to see
themselves in print or through the mass media. North America is a huge
English-speaking area where citizens of the United States outnumber
Canadians nearly ten to one. The mammoth American economy specializes in
churning out “entertainment” as its number one export to the world.
Canadian cultural output—in French and English—is meagre in
comparison.

The new six-volume Illustrated History of Canada series from Oxford
University Press will help Canadians understand themselves and see
themselves better, if this volume is any indication. University of
Victoria historian Peter Baskerville has fashioned a strongly written
narrative of Ontario’s history around the ideas of identity and power.
The volume pays particular attention to the importance of Aboriginal
peoples in the province and to their eventual eclipse due to the
pressure of immigration. Women are also front and centre, in an account
that is largely chronological as it weaves political and social
evolution.

An illustrated history should have outstanding illustrations—and this
book does, in both color and black and white. These images convey
elements of Ontario’s past that have been written about before but
seldom actually seen. Many constitute an independent storyline that can
be followed in the long captions accompanying the illustrations; other
are related to developments in the main narrative.

Baskerville provides such an enticing introduction to Ontario from
prehistory to the end of World War II that there is little space left
for the second half of the 20th century: the concluding chapter, on
modern Ontario from 1945 to 2000, is too cursory to be satisfying. But
this weakness does not detract severely from what is otherwise an
inviting introduction to Ontario’s history.