History Post-confederation (1867-)
The Queen v Louis Riel
- Publisher
- University of Toronto Press
- Initial publish date
- Dec 1974
- Category
- Post-Confederation (1867-), Historical, Constitutional
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781487578275
- Publish Date
- Dec 1974
- List Price
- $56.00
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780802062321
- Publish Date
- Dec 1974
- List Price
- $56.00
Add it to your shelf
Where to buy it
Description
The transcript of Louis Riel’s trial has never been readily accessible to the general reader interested in the 1885 Rebellion and related events. This work will promote knowledge of the facts, and illustrate a social phenomenon of nineteenth-century Canada.
In that age litigation was a prime public spectacle and the trial of Louis Riel in 1885 was followed intently across the country. The crowded, stuffy courtroom in Regina was the stage for the most dramatic and perhaps the most important state trial in Canadian history.
Riel had decided never to return to the dreary, hopeless life of an exile. Guided by his own private vision of reality, he tried to carry his revolutionary struggle from the field into a new arena, because he was not a man of action but a man of words. He went to his enemies to demand the great public trail which he had never received – a trial that was the deliberately chosen climax of his political life and an opportunity to vindicate himself. Much of the drama of the courtroom was created by his struggles with his own lawyers to be able to present his own case. In the background were the almost insoluble dilemmas created by a conflict of cultures.
In his introduction, Desmond Morton has sought to banish many of the myths which surround both Riel and the trial, doing justice to Macdonald and the government as well as to the prisoner of Regina. In the process, he has restated the issues of the trail in the terms understood by his contemporaries.
About the authors
Michael Bliss was a Canadian historian and a University Professor Emeritus in the Department of History and the History of Medicine Program at the University of Toronto. He was the author of numerous award-winning books in business and political history as well as the history of medicine, including popular biographies of Sir Frederick Banting, Sir William Osler, and Harvey Cushing. He was an Officer of the Order of Canada, an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and the first historian to be inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.
DESMOND MORTON is professor of history at the University of Toronto and principal of Erindale College. He is the author of ministers and Generals: Politics and the Canadian militia, 1868-1904, A Peculiar Kind of Politics: Canada’s Overseas Ministry in the First World War, A Campaign (with J.L. Granatstein), and numerous other books.
Other titles by
The Discovery of Insulin
Special Centenary Edition
Right Honourable Men
The Descent of Canadian Politics from MacDonald to Chrétien
Writing History
A Professor’s Life
The Making of Modern Medicine
Turning Points in the Treatment of Disease
Harvey Cushing
A Life in Surgery
Right Honourable Men Updated Reissue
The Discovery of Insulin
The Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
William Osler
A Life in Medicine
Conscience and History
A Memoir
Banting
A Biography
Other titles by
A Short History of Canada
Seventh Edition
The Mystery of Frankenberg's Canadian Airman
Fight or Pay
Soldiers' Families in the Great War
A Military History of Canada
What Next?
and other recent cartoons by Aislin
The Mystery of Frankenberg's Canadian Airman
Revised and Expanded Edition
Canada and the Two World Wars
Canada
A Millennium Portrait
Working People
An Illustrated History of the Canadian Labour Movement
Working People, Fifth Edition
An Illustrated History of the Canadian Labour Movement