Read Local BC 2016

Shortlisted for two 2016 BC Book Prizes
Finalist for the 2016 Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing

A compelling history of the earliest explorers to Vancouver Island, brought to life with illustrations and maps.

In 1842, when explorer James Douglas encountered the rugged natural paradise that would become Vancouver Island, he described it as “a perfect Eden." This book gathers the early recorded histories and personal accounts left by Chinese seafarers, Spanish and British naval …

Pack your bags! A reassuring handbook geared toward women between the ages of 40 and 65 who are eager but apprehensive to take a solo adventure.

Chicago, St. Louis, London, Vienna ... bestselling author Jayne Seagrave has traveled there, and she's done it solo. Now she wants her readers to know that not only can they do it too, they should.

Seagrave shares her tips as a mature woman travelling solo in general including booking transportation and accommodation, packing, buying medical insurance, an …

For decades, the Chinese Rescue Home was a feature of the landscape of Victoria, British Columbia. Originally a refuge for Chinese prostitutes and slave girls rescued from captivity, it became a residence and school where the Methodist Women’s Missionary Society attempted to reform Chinese and Japanese girls and women. They did so, in part, by teaching them domestic skills meant to ease their integration into Western society. This book offers the first in-depth history and analysis of this ico …

The ranchers who resettled BC’s interior in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depended on grassland for their cattle, but in this they faced some unlikely competition from grasshoppers and wild horses. With the help of the government, settlers resolved to rid the range of both.

Resettling the Range explores the ecology and history of the grassland and the people who lived there by looking closely at these eradication efforts. In the claims of “range improvement” and “rati …

Stories of Indigenous children forced to attend residential schools have haunted Canadians in recent years. Yet most Indigenous children in Canada attended “Indian day schools,” and later public schools, near their home communities. Although church and government officials often kept detailed administrative records, we know little about the actual experiences of the students themselves.

In What We Learned, two generations of Tsimshian students – a group of elders born in the 1930s and 1940 …

While some of the historical events we recount have been largely forgotten by the public and largely unexamined by scholars, they reflect an understanding of larger power dynamics that goes beyond the practice of sustained-yield and multiple-use forestry to touch upon important themes in the province's social and cultural history—themes still relevant today.

?from the Introduction

In The Sustainability Dilemma, historians Robert Griffin and Richard A. Rajala delve into two of the more controver …