Why Vancouver? Yes, it's my hometown, but I've lived in other places for about 20 years of my life, and I'm anything but a thoughtless booster. Vancouver is a beautiful city, but it's a conflicted one between dreamers of its potential greatness, people wanting a laid-back West Coast lifestyle, and those for whom it's the end of the poverty road with the mildest climate in Canada. Thinking about it, painting it, and writing about it—it's an itch I have to scratch.
Announced as an "urban encyclopedia," the late Chuck Davis's almost 900-page work covers history, culture, recreation, buildings, and events through the pens of myriad writers. Davis had a reputation for interesting anecdotes and for tying dates to places and events that make history fun and memorable, and he encouraged the writers (including myself) to do the same.
If you want to know about your
neighbourhood's past, the background on Hollywood North, or the
shipping industry, this book has all sorts of rabbit holes to explore.
A unique work of visual storytelling using maps created by the author that trace the evolution of this place defined by a major river, a natural harbour, and a backdrop of snowcapped mountains, decade by decade from Indigenous times through the 1980s.
Each map has detailed notes focusing on changes and developments and a two-page spread of the key players of each period.
Absolutely unique in its presentational style, Vancouver: A Visual History is a delightful and important book. This stunning, full-colour historical atlas brings to life Vancouver’s first fourteen decades, beginning with a map of the 1850s depicting the land use, economy and settlement patterns of its first peoples, and ending with a map of the 1980s.
Using a repeating grid format, in which each ten-year period of the city’s history is examined through the application of the same criteria, each decade is introduced by a full-colour map that illustrates land use patterns. A column of text to the left of this…
Tourists and local residents of St. Augustine will enjoy reading about the secret wonders of their ancient city that are right under their noses. Of course, that includes a few stray corpses and ghosts!
A crash course in how the city's evolution has been shaped by its buildings old and new, their architects and developers, and touching on the campaigns to make the city "world class" while others try to hang on to its historic areas. Presented in an engaging tour format with excellent colour photos.
This new edition of the classic urban guidebook brings the city’s architectural story up to date.
Harold Kalman and Robin Ward, long-time chroniclers of Vancouver, offer an authoritative and highly readable book about Vancouver’s most interesting places and explain how, why and by whom the city’s urban environment was created.
Containing more than four hundred entries, ten self-guided tours highlight significant buildings from all eras in the city and its metro region, and feature new projects that transform the skyline more radically than ever before. The tours―organized by neighbourhood and planned variously for walking, cycling, car and transit―reveal Vancouver in…
The first chronological and comprehensive history of the city in about 50 years, this book covers the battles of the 1960s and 1970s to keep freeways out of the city and save Chinatown and nearby areas from urban renewal, saving a little of Vancouver's rich and diverse past as it awaited the onslaught of international development money that came with Expo '86.
A brisk chronicle of Vancouver, BC, from early days to its emergence as a global metropolis, refracted through the events, characters and communities that have shaped the city.
In Becoming Vancouver award-winning historian Daniel Francis follows the evolution of the city from early habitation by the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, to the area’s settlement as a mill town, to the flourishing speakeasies and brothels during the 1920s, to the years of poverty and protest during the 1930s followed by the long wartime and postwar boom, to the city’s current status as real-estate investment choice of the global super-rich.…
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Historic photos and maps weave a rich tale of the settlement of the
southwest corner of British Columbia, complementing Bruce MacDonald's
work with an extraordinary range of images, including of the
oft-overlooked suburbs and farming communities on Vancouver's doorstep.
Compared with MacDonald's maps, many of the images here are art—birds-eye views by artists from an era before people could fly and others that dream of a great, huge city when, in reality, it was a
collection of little cabins.
Map researcher and collector Derek Hayes here presents the sixth in a series of critically acclaimed, award-winning historical atlases. Gathered together in a single volume for the first time, here are the maps that shaped Vancouver and the surrounding Lower Fraser Valley. More than 370 original maps chart the region’s development beginning with the years of discovery and exploration. They depict its days as a fledgling colonial outpost, its appearance on the world scene after the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway, through to its emergence as a postwar Pacific metropolis. These maps evoke such historic events and developments as…
"Surviving" as an adjective and as a verb. What's survived in Vancouver? Where are the neighbourhoods where people are retaining old buildings, who believe they make for a complete, mature city and are part of a green strategy? (This was the subject of my earlier Vanishing Vancouver books from 1990 and 2012.) And how do you survive in Vancouver? The text follows the debates about densification, land speculation, luxury housing, and the displacement of tenants. It reviews 90 years of homeless people arriving and trying to survive amidst some of the most expensive housing in the world.
My artwork from the past 25 years illustrates Vancouver's neighbourhoods and public spaces. It's an art book with a lot of text, trying to wrap up my thoughts about this beautiful city.
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
From the author of Washington’s Spies, the thrilling story of two rival secret agents — one Confederate, the other Union — sent to Britain during the Civil War.
The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was ordered to acquire a clandestine fleet intended to break Lincoln’s blockade, sink Northern…
