Author Description

Product DescriptionHistorian Frank Underhill's collection of essays on Canadian history and politics, written over the course of his career, won the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-fiction in 1960. These informed, often contentious essays shine a probing light into the political tradition in Canada, from thenineteenth-century Family Compact to the government of Louis St. Laurent. Underhill's collection shows at once a remarkable consistency as well as a fascinating evolution over time.Underhill was a leading historian and activist for many decades. He taught history and politics at the University of Saskatchewan from 1914 to 1927, becoming an early founder of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (the forerunner of the NDP), drafting the Regina Manifesto. He was drawn tosocialism as a form of democratic idealism, following the ideal of empowering the people in the face of entrenched interests. In 1927 he began teaching history at the University of Toronto. Underhill became part of the drive for a national culture that would match Canada's economic andconstitutional development, including the growth of such new groups as the Canadian Historical Association, the Canadian Authors' Association, and publications like the Canadian Forum. Aligned with the Confederation poets and the Group of Seven, Underhill was unsentimental, anti-romantic, and keento break with what was seen by many younger intellectuals as the dead hand of tradition. Later he would move to the political centre, but never ceding his role as critic, and ever in search of a politics of ideas and radical energy. No surprise that his outspoken views often brought Underhill intoconflict with various forms of the establishment, even at times from the political left.Underhill's essays are in the tradition of Michel de Montainge, Samuel Johnson, and Edmund Burke, employing a personal voice and relative informality, as well as an open-ended, witty, and free-flowing style, unlike the quasi-scientific