Donald Akenson

In a parish register in Ireland, Akenson discovered a record naming an Eliza McCormack White as John's sister. Employing imaginative reconstruction, he proposes that Eliza McCormack, a transvestite prostitute who was in central Canada at the time John White arrived on the Canadian scene, was actually John's sister. Further, he suggests that John Wh …

The career of Conor Cruise O'Brien reads like the work of several people, not just one. Having served as a diplomat under Sean MacBride, he came to world prominence as special representative to Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the United Nations, in the then-Congo. Squeezed ruthlessly by big-power politics, he resigned and wrote To Katanga an …

To see the Voortrekker monument in Pretoria is to recognize at once that it was built to humble the observer. With walls as thick as parts of the Maginot Line, and ambushments that would do credit to a medieval fortress, this South African national museum would serve equally as well as a defensive outpost. What mentality would create such an imposi …

Montserrat, although part of England's empire, was settled largely by the Irish and provides an opportunity to view the interaction of Irish emigrants with English imperialism in a situation where the Irish were not a small minority among white settlers. Within this context Akenson explores whether Irish imperialism on Montserrat differed from Engl …

In this follow-up to his acclaimed Surpassing Wonder, Akenson recreates the world of Christ, a time rich with ideas, prophets, factions, priests, savants, and god-drunk fanatics. Saint Saul sheds light on Yeshua's birth and his relationship to his family, clarifies Yeshua's views on issues such as divorce and resurrection, and examines his sense of …

The assumption that Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics are fundamentally different is central to modern Irish history. There are hundreds of books and thousands of articles that either presuppose the existence of Irish Catholic-Protestant differences or amplify the theme by illustration and anecdote. Small Differences examines what scholars have …

What Noam Chomsky did for political commentary, and Stephen Hawking did for cosmology, Donald Harman Akenson does for the Bible and its interpreters, and the resulting conclusions are just as astounding. Surpassing Wonder illuminates how the greatest cultural artifacts of our civilization are related to one another and constitute the very core of o …

Hailed as one of the most important books on social sciences of the last fifty years by the Social Sciences Federation of Canada. Akenson argues that, despite the popular conception of the Irish as a city people, those who settled in Ontario were primarily rural and small-town dwellers. Though it is often claimed that the experience of the Irish in …

Ogle Gowan - the Irish upstart who turned Ontario Orange - was a self-seeking, treacherous scoundrel who brought his tattered reputation to the raw frontier of Upper Canada, and built the powerful Protestant machine that shaped Canadian history for more than one hundred years.

Ogle Gowan was a bastard, a bigot and a brawler, yet his silver-tongued o …