Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors.
Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker.

Download links will be available after you disable the ad blocker and reload the page.

The Makers of Canada: Index and Dictionary of Canadian History



Download options:

  • 1.28 MB
  • 4.13 MB
  • 1.77 MB

Description:

Excerpt


INTRODUCTION

This Supplement is designed to supply a double need: it furnishes an analytical index to the entire series of twenty volumes; and it affords a great deal of additional information, bearing on the subject-matter of these volumes, but which from its very nature it was impossible to incorporate in the text. This additional information includes biographical sketches of the characters mentioned in each volume; similar sketches of prominent Canadians who for one reason or another do not appear in any of the twenty volumes; and brief descriptions of wars, battles, treaties, and political and other events having a vital bearing on the history of Canada. References have been added, wherever necessary, to the principal sources which the student may consult for further information. The whole has been thrown into one alphabetical arrangement, and it constitutes, to a large extent, a dictionary of Canadian history.

To satisfy further the desire of those who, after reading the foregoing volumes, find it profitable to investigate more fully certain lines of inquiry suggested by the narratives, it has been thought advisable to add a list of manuscript sources from which new material may be gleaned. The collection of documents most convenient for this purpose is to be found in the Dominion Archives. It is not possible in the present work to do more than indicate the principal documents, as there are fifteen thousand volumes of manuscript in the Archives bearing on Canadian history. The sources indicated here are drawn principally from the series designated A, B, C, F, Q, M. The letter refers to the series, and the number to the volume. The Calendars published by the Archives in the Annual Reports should also be consulted by the student. For convenience of reference, it has been deemed preferable to group the manuscript sources under general headings, and print the list as a separate section in the volume.

In the preparation of the bibliographical references, the object has been to include only those works that have a direct and vital bearing on the subject. A complete bibliography in each case would obviously be neither possible nor desirable. Nor, except in special cases, has any attempt been made to include articles or papers in periodicals or in the publications of learned societies. It will be sufficient to make a general reference here to some of the more important sources of information on the many topics covered in this volume. First among these sources probably should rank the publications of the Royal Society of Canada. The Society has published in a separate volume a very full General Index to its Proceedings and Transactions, 1882-1906, compiled by Dr. Benjamin Sulte. For volumes subsequent to 1906, the individual indexes should be consulted. A key to the Annual Reports of the Geological Survey of Canada is found in two General Indexes, one covering the years 1863-1884, and the other the years 1885-1906. The latter, compiled by F. J. Nicolas, is very complete. Wurtële's Index to the Transactions and other Publications of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, 1829-1891, furnishes a guide to the material issued by this oldest of Canadian learned societies. Unfortunately, no general index is available for the publications of the Canadian Institute, which cover a very wide and important field; nor for those of the Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba, the Ontario Historical Society, the Nova Scotia Historical Society, and various other Canadian institutions of a similar character. Much important material, bearing on, or supplementary to, the topics treated in the several volumes of the Makers of Canada will be found in the foregoing publications. The reader may also find it profitable in many cases to consult the publications of the American Historical Association, and the State Historical Societies of New York, Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. A great deal of important material is also to be found in Canadian and other periodicals. Of the more significant of these, the Revue Canadienne marked the completion of its fifty-third volume in 1907 by publishing in separate form a comprehensive Index to the entire series up to that year. In consulting other Canadian magazines, reference must in most cases be made to the individual indexes in each volume. The series of the Canadian Monthly and the New Dominion Monthly are, however, fully covered by Poole's Index; the Canadian Magazine, to a large extent, by Wilson's Guide to Periodical Literature, as well as by a General Index published by the magazine in 1907. A key to the publications of several Canadian historical societies and periodicals, since the year 1906, is furnished by the Magazine Subject-Index (Boston). The three admirable American guides mentioned above, that is, Poole's Index, Wilson's Guide, and the Magazine Subject-Index, with their annual or cumulative supplements, provide also a key to the great body of literature in the principal American and English periodicals, bearing on Canadian topics.

Among other important guides to Canadian subjects, historical, political, biographical, social, literary, and scientific, should be mentioned the Review of Historical Publications Relating to Canada, edited by Wrong and Langton; Larned's Literature of American History, which includes a section on Canada; the various encyclopædias; the annual bibliographies of Canadian scientific work published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada; Gagnon's Essai de Bibliographie Canadienne; Morgan's Bibliotheca Canadensis; James's Bibliography of Canadian Verse; Horning and Burpee's Bibliography of Canadian Fiction; Tanguay's Dictionnaire Généalogique des Familles Canadiennes; and the very full bibliographies of material published in or about the province of Quebec, by Dr....