Daniel Francis

Reading the National Narrative

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June 29, 2024

Harbour Publishing, for whom I have produced several books over the years, including the Encyclopedia of British Columbia (above), is feted in today's Vancouver Sun.

Harbour turns fifty this year and its founders', Howie and Mary White, deserve all the accolades they are...

April 10, 2024

This past weekend the Vancouver Historical Society held its annual luncheon to commemorate the incorporation of the city in 1886. This year's lunch was at the Vancouver Club in the ballroom of its gorgeous 1914 "clubhouse" downtown on Hastings Street.

Attendees, which included myself, enjoyed a delicious lunch, an instructive talk by society president Michael Kluckner (...

March 28, 2024

Construction began last week on a new Vancouver Art Gallery, much discussed but now apparently coming to fruition.

It is almost 100 years since a group of wealthy business types in the city announced they were offering $100,000 towards the creation of a civic art gallery. The person usually associated with this initiative is...

March 13, 2024

Wayne McCrory has won the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for his fascinating wildlife study, The Wild Horses of the Chilcotin, from Harbour Publishing. The Stuart-Stubbs Prize goes to the year's outstanding scholarly book on British Columbia.

Wild Horses is an artful combination of field work, academic...

February 28, 2024

Two things to draw your attention to.

First, a fine new book by and about the Squamish Nation. Tiná7 Cht Ti Temíxw: We Come From This Land describes the history and future of the Squamish, whose traditional territory includes Howe Sound and the shores of Burrard Inlet. One chapter, for example, tells the story of Senákw, a village site in False Creek with a complicated history of dispossession where the Squamish are now involved in a large, and controversial,...

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