"Calgary was a Boomtown of 50,000 people in 1912, the year the Lougheed building and the adjacent Grand Theatre were built. The fanfare and anticipation surrounding their opening marked the beginning of a golden era in the city's history. The Lougheed quickly became Calgary's premier corporate address, and the state-of-the-art Grand Theatre the hub of a thriving cultural community." "From the viewpoint of these two prominent heritage buildings, author Donald Smith introduces the reader to the personalities and events that helped shape Calgary in the twentieth century. Complemented by over 140 historical images, Calgary's Grand Story is a tribute to the Lougheed and the Grand, and celebrates their unrivalled position in the city's political, economic, and cultural history."--BOOK JACKET.

In this authoritative work, Seiler and Seiler argues that the establishment and development of moviegoing and movie exhibition in Prairie Canada is best understood in the context of changing late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century social, economic, and technological developments. From the first entrepreneurs who attempted to lure customers in to movie exhibition halls, to the digital revolution and its impact on moviegoing, Reel Time highlights the pivotal role of amusement venues in shaping the leisure activities of working- and middle-class people across North America.

In June of 1962, the Canadian Pacific Railway announced a proposal to redevelop part of its reserved land in the heart of downtown Calgary. In an effort to bolster its waning revenues and to redefine its urban presence, the CPR proposed a multimillion dollar development project that included retail, office, and convention facilities, along with a major transportation centre. With visions of enhanced tax revenues, increased land values, and new investment opportunities, Calgary’s political and business leaders greeted the proposal with excitement. Over the following year, the scope of the project expanded, growing to a scale never before seen in Canada. The plan took official form through an agreement between the City of Calgary and the railway company to develop a much larger area of land and to reroute or remove the railway tracks from the downtown area—a grand design for reshaping Calgary’s urban core. In 1964, amid bickering and a failed negotiating process, the project came to an abrupt end. What caused this promising partnership between the nation’s leading corporation and the burgeoning city of Calgary to collapse? What, in economic terms, was perceived to be a win-win situation for both parties fell prey to a conflict between corporate rigidity and an unorganized, ill-informed, and over-enthusiastic civic administration and city council. Drawing on the private records of Rod Sykes, the CPR’s onsite negotiator and later Calgary’s mayor, Foran unravels the fascinating story of how politics ultimately undermined promise.

Why have democratic governments failed to take serious steps to reduce carbon emissions despite dire warnings and compelling evidence of the profound and growing threat posed by global warming? Most of the writing on global warming is by scientists, academics, environmentalists, and journalists. Kevin Taft, a former leader of the opposition in Alberta, brings a fresh perspective through the insight he gained as an elected politician who had an insider's eyewitness view of the role of the oil industry. His answer, in brief: The oil industry has captured key democratic institutions in both Alberta and Ottawa. Taft begins his book with a perceptive observer's account of a recent court casein Ottawa which laid bare the tactics and techniques of the industry, its insiders and lobbyists. He casts dramatic new light on exactly how corporate lobbyists, politicians, bureaucrats, universities, and other organizations are working together to pursue the oil industry's agenda. He offers a brisk tour of the recent work of scholars who have developed the concepts of the deep state and institutional capture to understand how one rich industry can override the public interest. Taft views global warming and weakened democracy as two symptoms of the same problem — the loss of democratic institutions to corporate influence and control. He sees citizen engagement and direct action by the public as the only response that can unravel big oil's deep state.

Since its inception as an institutionalized discipline in the United States during the 1980s, performance studies has focused on the interdisciplinary analysis of a broad spectrum of cultural behaviours including theatre, dance, folklore, popular entertainments, performance art, protests, cultural rituals, and the performance of self in everyday life. Performance Studies in Canada brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the national emergence of performance studies as a field in Canada. To date, no systematic attempts has been made to consider how this methodology is being taught, applied, and rethought in Canadian contexts, and Canadian performance studies scholarship remains largely unacknowledged within international discussions about the discipline. This collection fills this gap by identifying multiple origins of performance studies scholarship in the country and highlighting significant works of performance theory and history that are rooted in Canadian culture. Essays illustrate how specific institutional conditions and cultural investments – Indigenous, francophone, multicultural, and more – produce alternative articulations of “performance” and reveal national identity as a performative construct. A state-of-the-art work on the state of the field, Performance Studies in Canada foregrounds national and global performance knowledge to invigorate the discipline around the world.

Alberta Formed Alberta Transformed is a two-volume set spanning a remarkable 12,000 years of history and showcasing the work of 34 of Alberta's most respected scholars. Volume 1 sets the stage from human beginnings in Alberta to the eve of Alberta's inauguration as a province in 1905, while Volume 2 takes readers through the twentieth century and up to the 2005 centennial.

Jaques recounts the tumultuous history of the Alberta farm organization, Unifarm. This book documents Alberta farmers' quest to increase control over the forces that have had such an impact on their lives and describes how it led them to form organizations which have afforded them measures of stability and security throughout the past century.

In Metis Pioneers, Doris Jeanne MacKinnon compares the survival strategies of two Metis women born during the fur trade—one from the French-speaking free trade tradition and one from the English-speaking Hudson’s Bay Company tradition—who settled in southern Alberta as the Canadian West transitioned to a sedentary agricultural and industrial economy. MacKinnon provides rare insight into their lives, demonstrating the contributions Metis women made to the building of the Prairie West. This is a compelling tale of two women’s acts of quiet resistance in the final days of the British Empire.

Born in 1861 to a Methodist family, William Henry Jackson grew up in Ontario before moving to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, where he sympathized with the Métis and became personal secretary to Louis Riel. After the Métis defeat a Regina court committed the young English Canadian idealist to the lunatic asylum at Lower Fort Garry. He eventually escaped to the United States, joined the labour union movement, and renounced his race. Self-identifying as Métis, he changed his name to the French-sounding “Honoré Jaxon” and devoted the remainder of his life to fighting for the working class and the Indigenous peoples of North America. In Honoré Jaxon, Donald B. Smith draws on extensive archival research and interviews with family members to present a definitive biography of this complex political man. The book follows Jaxon into the 1940s, where his life mission became the establishment of a library for the First Nations in Saskatchewan, collecting as many books, newspapers, and pamphlets relating to the Métis people as possible. In 1951, at age ninety, he was evicted from his apartment and his library discarded to the New York City dump. In poor health and broken in spirit, he died one month later. Heavily illustrated, Honoré Jaxon recounts the complicated story of a young English Canadian who imagined a society in which English and French, Indigenous and Métis would be equals.

The petroleum industry is unique: it is an industry without which modern civilization would collapse. Despite the advances in alternative energy, petroleum’s role is still central. Petroleum still drives economics, geopolitics, and sometimes war. The history of petroleum is, to some measure, the history of the modern world. This book represents a concise but complete one-volume reference on the history of the petroleum industry from pre-modern times to the present day, covering all aspects of business, technology, and geopolitics. The book also presents an analysis of the future of petroleum, and a highly useful set of statistical graphs. Anyone interested in the history, status, and outlook for petroleum will find this book a uniquely valuable first place to look. This new second edition incorporates all the revolutionary changes in the petroleum landscape since the first edition was published, including the boom in extraction of oil and gas from shale formations using techniques such as fracking and horizontal drilling. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Petroleum Industry contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on companies, people, events, technologies, countries, provinces, cities, and regions related to the history of the world’s petroleum industry. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the petroleum industry.