Celebrating Canada: Commemorations, Anniversaries, and National Symbols

"Celebrating Canada, Volume 2 makes a significant contribution to the history of Canadian political identity. Moving beyond a study of the federal state, this collection shows how local communities make their own meaning out of the July 1 celebrations."

Jeff A. Webb, Department of History, Memorial University

"This second volume of Celebrating Canada exposes the varieties, commonalities, and contradictions of the Canadian experience; the multiple and multilayered meanings of belonging; identity -shaping, identity -shifting, and identity -resisting; nationalisms and the uses to which they can be put; the small voices alongside the powerful; the absences, exclusions, and the margins as well as the grand national story; the modern and the anti-modern; top-down and bottom-up mobilization and something in between; and the constant and fluid re-imagining and re-imaging of what it means to be Canadian."

Norman Hillmer, Chancellor’s Professor of History and International Affairs, Carleton University

"Presenting emerging scholarship about Canadian commemorative efforts, especially those surrounding anniversaries or the qualities of ‘Canadian-ness,’ Celebrating Canada, Volume 2 is both implicitly and explicitly aware of how cultures of varying scopes and sizes construct commemorative and celebratory events from anniversaries of battles or migrations to continual interpretation."

Len Kuffert, Department of History, University of Manitoba