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Coming Soon: The Unquiet North

A definitive six-volume series exploring Canada’s tumultuous 20th-century history.

This series traces the evolution of Canada not as a settled nation-state, but as a contested space—of empire, identity, and ideology. From colonial Dominion to reluctant middle power, The Unquiet North explores the deep fractures and enduring tensions that shaped Canadian life at home and abroad over the course of a turbulent century.

• Volume I: Dominion: Canada Before the Storm, 1896–1914 May 10, 2025 Release
• Volume II: Fault Lines: Canada’s War Within a War, 1914–1919
• Volume III: The Unfinished Country: Canada Between the Wars, 1919–1939
• Volume IV: The Necessary War: Canada’s Fight at Home and Abroad, 1939–1945
• Volume V: The Long Watch: Canada in the Cold War, 1945–1991
• Volume VI: Fault Lines Renewed: Canada in the Global Reckoning, 1991–2001

Series Synopsis: The Unquiet North: A History of Canada in the 20th Century is a definitive six-volume history by historian and writer Robert Cruise, tracing Canada’s emergence from colony to conflicted nation-state through the seismic political, social, and cultural transformations of the modern era.

Far from a peaceful ascent into stability and global respectability, Cruise presents a more truthful portrait of a country forged in friction. Across wars and recessions, insurrections and referendums, migration waves and constitutional crises, Canada has repeatedly redrawn the boundaries of who belongs—and who decides. What emerges is not a myth of unity, but a long, often uneasy negotiation between ideals and realities, peoples and power.

Each volume blends academic depth with journalistic clarity, weaving archival research, political analysis, and narrative storytelling into an expansive portrait of a country too often defined by silence. From the prairies to Parliament, from conscription riots to peacekeeping missions, from residential schools to global trade deals, Cruise uncovers the hidden architecture of a nation built on contradiction and contested memory.

Spanning the years from 1896 to 2001, the series examines Canada at home and abroad—as imperial subject, warrior nation, welfare state, Cold War watchman, and globalized democracy-in-progress. It is a sweeping, unflinching, and timely reappraisal of the country’s most pivotal century.

The Unquiet North asks: What does it mean to be Canadian in a land never fully at peace with itself?