As a country with enormous economic, military, and cultural power, the United States can seem an overwhelming neighbour - one that demands consideration by politicians, thinkers, and cultural figures. Prejudice and Pride examines and compares how English and French Canadian intellectuals viewed American society from 1891 to 1945.

Based on over five hundred texts drawn largely from the era's periodical literature, the study reveals that English and French Canadian intellectuals shared common preoccupations with the United States, though the English tended to emphasize political issues and the French cultural issues. Damien-Claude Belanger's in-depth analysis of anti-American sentiment during this era divides Canadian thinkers less along language lines and more according to their political stance as right-wing, left-wing, or centrist. Significantly, the era's discourse regarding American life and the Canadian-American relationship was less an expression of nationalism or a reaction to US policy than it was about the expression of wider attitudes concerning modernity.

Professeur agrégé d’histoire du Canada à l’Université d’Ottawa et cofondateur de Mens : revue d’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle. Diplômé de l’Université de Montréal et de McGill, ses recherches portent sur la vie intellectuelle du Canada français et sur les relations canado-américaines. Récipiendaire d’un Prix d’excellence en éducation de l’Université d’Ottawa.

Damien-Claude Belanger's profile page

• Short-listed, Ottawa Book Award

'Prejudice & Pride is a noteworthy addition to Canadian historiography. Bélanger has done an important service by pointing to the centrality of modernity as an intellectual conception and organizing principle of Canadian intellectual debates concerning United States. This book will appeal to a broad scholarly audience.'

H-Canada, August 12, 2011

‘Bélanger offers a refreshingly different lens to the history of Canadian nationalism… He skillfully examines one of the most critical components of Canadian social and political thought, and his book will undoubtedly be indispensable, both for the study of Canadian-American relations and Canadian intellectual history.’

American Studies Journal; vol 52:02:2013

‘The book should be a required reading not only for students of the intellectual dimensions of imperialism and continentalism, but for all well-schooled readers with an interest inlate nineteenth and early twentieth-century Canadian history.’

Canadian Historical review; vol93:02:2012