Nation, Ideas, Identities: Essays in Honour of Ramsay Cook

In October 1997 more than a hundred people met at the University of Ottawa to pay tribute to one of Canada's pre-eminent historians on his retirement from York University. At that gathering twenty-one of Ramsay Cook's former doctoral students, among them several of the country's most distinguished contemporary historians, delivered papers, of which fifteen are collected in Nation, Ideas, Identities. Grouped in five broad areas reflecting Cook's own scholarly interests over the course of his career-ideas, culture, nationalism, women's history, and Native issues-these essays range widely in subject: from the role of the seal hunt in Newfoundland culture to the concept of academic freedom, from the perils of nationalism to the struggle for gender equality in Aboriginal communities, the changing function of the art exhibition, and Quebec neo-nationalists' abandonment of francophones elsewhere in Canada.