This book offers innovative thoughts on present and future approaches to the study of the Canadian past. Moving beyond the political vs. social history debates that have dominated the field since the 1970s, these essays suggest novel questions and approaches while delving into recently overlooked subjects. The authors place a particular emphasis on international, transnational, and comparative approaches to the past. Essays cover such topics as the Atlantic World, oral history, postcolonialism, public history, historical periodization, Canada's place in the British Empire, and French-English relations. The art of history as a discipline and practice is also discussed. A must read for Canadian historians, Contesting Clio's Craft will also appeal to international scholars interested in these issues and curious about the contribution that Canadian history has made to the broader history of the Americas. Contributors include Michael Dawson (St.Thomas University), Michel Ducharme (University of British Columbia), Christopher Dummitt (Trent University), Magda Fahrni (Universit? du Qu?bec ? Montr?al) Catherine Gidney (St.Thomas University), Steven High (Concordia University), Adele Perry (University of Manitoba), Katie Pickles (University of Canterbury), and Andrew Smith (Laurentian University).

"There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation," Pierre Elliott Trudeau told reporters. He was making the case for the most controversial of his proposed reforms to the Criminal Code, those concerning homosexuality, birth control, and abortion. In No Place for the State, contributors offer complex and often contrasting perspectives as they assess how the 1969 Omnibus Bill helped shape sexual and moral politics in Canada. Fifty years later, the origins and legacies of the bill are equivocal and the state still seems interested in sexual regulation. This incisive study explains why that matters.

When Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King died in 1950, the public knew little about his eccentric private life. In his final will King ordered the destruction of his private diaries, seemingly securing his privacy for good. Yet twenty-five years after King's death, the public was bombarded with stories about "Weird Willie," the prime minister who communed with ghosts and cavorted with prostitutes. Unbuttoned traces the transformation of the public's knowledge and opinion of King's character, offering a compelling look at the changing way Canadians saw themselves and measured the importance of their leaders' personal lives. Christopher Dummitt relates the strange posthumous tale of King's diary and details the specific decisions of King's literary executors. Along the way we learn about a thief in the public archives, stolen copies of King's diaries being sold on the black market, and an RCMP hunt for a missing diary linked to the search for Russian spies at the highest levels of the Canadian government. Analyzing writing and reporting about King, Dummitt concludes that the increasingly irreverent views of King can be explained by a fundamental historical transformation that occurred in the era in which King's diaries were released, when the rights revolution, Freud, 1960s activism, and investigative journalism were making self-revelation a cultural preoccupation. Presenting extensive archival research in a captivating narrative, Unbuttoned traces the rise of a political culture that privileged the individual as the ultimate source of truth, and made Canadians rethink what they wanted to know about politicians.