Ebook: A Picture History of Ontario

Here are the life and times of Ontario, from the first arrival of the Loyalists in Upper Canada to the present day, told in some four hundred pictures with full explanatory captions and an illuminating historical introduction.

All the pictures are contemporaneous with the times they illustrate - there are no "reconstructions" or "artists' conceptions." They portray not only the public events, military and political, but the everyday life of the ordinary people at work and play, showing as no other book has done what it was like to be an Upper Canadian or Ontarian in every decade from the 1790s to the 1970s.

The material assembled by Roger Hall and Gordon Dodds, both expert archivists, is fresh and mostly unfamiliar; little of it has appeared in a book before. It is a fortunate fact for early Ontario history that photography began when the province was still at a formative stage; the first generation of fine professional photographers were at their peak at the time of Confederation. And for the first half of the twentieth century the authors have been able to draw on the magnificent yet little-known James Collection in the City of Toronto Archives.

This is the best possible short history of Ontario, told in first-hand visual images.