This long-awaited history of Canada - the first survey by a single scholar in many years - is the result not only of Professor Bumsted's experience of teaching Canadian history and discussing it with his students over twenty-five years, but also of his assimilation of post-1970s historiography. He has written a highly readable and richly detailed new synthesis for the present time. Professor Bumsted explains in his Preface to Volume I that he has broken with the traditional model of Canadian historical surveys, which concentrated on such 'masculine' subjects as political constitutional, military issues, and the stages of nation-building (though these things are certainly not ignored), in favour of emphasizing the economy and particularly society, the family, and culture - the people themselves: he describes at some length many interesting people who were neither politicians nor administrators. A further departure from the traditional mode of writing Canadian history is that the country is not seen wholly in terms of its bilingual/bicultural development based in Ontario/Quebec. Not only other regions, but many cultural identities also have an important place in the text. Volume I describes the First Peoples before contact with the first European visitors, and discusses exploration; settlement in the St Lawrence valley and the Atlantic regions; the Conquest and its aftermath; the development of British North America and its societies; agricultural and commercial growth; the political changes that brought about the federation of four provinces of British North America in the Dominion of Canada; and the expansion of Canada's domain and its economic growth to 1885.