This book is a combination of five public lectures offered to the university and community during the academic year 1973–1974, given by the History Department of Wilfrid Laurier University. These were given by leading scholars in their individual fields and are published here.
The essays are on such topics as family life in New France, the origins of British fiscal policy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, images of the negro in Victorian popular culture, Joseph Chamberlain and the “New Imperialism” in West Africa’s Gold Coast, and the controversial prime minister of Canada, Mackenzia King.
They are all important in their own sense as contributions to the historian’s ongoing search for the visible past.

Dr. Barry Gough, one of Canada's foremost historians, is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Fellow of King's College London and Life Member of the Association of Canadian Studies, and has been awarded a Doctor of Letters for distinguished contributions to Imperial and Commonwealth history. He is well recognized for the authenticity of his research and the engaging nature of his narratives, and is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including Fortune's A River: The Collision of Empires in Northwest America (Harbour, 2007), which won the John Lyman Book Award for best Canadian naval and maritime history and was shortlisted for the Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize. Gough has been writing for almost four decades. He lives in Victoria, BC, with his wife, Marilyn.

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