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Next weekend (Sept. 30-Oct. 2) is Culture Days, a national celebration of arts and culture. 

As part of the festivities I will be presenting an illustrated talk about the history of North Vancouver, the subject of my latest book. It happens at the Community History Centre in Lynn Valley at 2 p.m. Saturday (Oct.1) afternoon.

Why not take in Karen Dearlove's walking tour of Old Shaketown first? That departs the History Centre at...

When I was a kid one of the only books about British Columbia on the family bookshelves was British Columbia: A History by Margaret Ormsby. I still own it, inherited from my parents and inscribed by the author. From its publication in 1958 (that's the cover of the paperback edition above), Ormsby's book was the definitive one-volume history of...

Interesting that this week a group of Vancouver sex trade activists will be unveiling some kind of memorial to one of the most acrimonious episodes in the city's history: the West End "sex wars" of the late 1970s, early 1980s.

The story is told in my book, Red Light Neon. Briefly, once the police wrongheadedly cracked down on prostitution taking place in the relative safety of downtown clubs in 1975, hundreds of sex...

Nice spread about my new book in the Vancouver Sun this weekend.

You can read it online here.

(Credit for the photo belongs to Bee Chalmers.)

Mel Hurtig, who died last week at the age of 84, was my publisher for a few years during the 1980s. I had been working as a fur-trade historian and thought that the time was right for a popular history of the trade incorporating some of the new ideas which were transforming the academic approach to the subject, chiefly a re-assessment of the role played by the First Nations. Mel was encouraging and Battle for the West appeared under the Hurtig imprint in 1982. Next he suggested that...