Description
Ronald F Williamson teaches anthropology at the University of Toronto. Contributions in this new edition include a new foreword by Grand Chief Pierre Picard of the Wendat Nation.
Telling Toronto's story from the final retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet to today's metropolis, a team of historians brings together beautiful illustrations and fresh perspectives in this short history.
Grand Chief Pierre Picard discusses the history of Indigenous peoples in the Toronto area up until first contact with colonizers and the transformation of the land and people in early colonial times. Carolyn King, the former elected Chief of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, and and Ronald F. Williamson, an archeologist who has spent most of his career studying the archaeology of Ontario’s Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people, have co-authored the expansive history of the Indigenous peoples in the area, dating back to the earliest hunters from 11,000 B.C.
Peter Carruthers introduces Toronto as a middle ground: geographically a meeting point between Canada's vast natural resource wilderness, and the sprawling continental Midwest. Since prehistory the city’s site has been a place of meditation and exchange between different cultures and peoples. Robert MacDonald takes us back 12,500 years with an exploration of the geological and ecological history of the area's ancient landscape. Ronald F. Williamson presents the archaeological record of the lives of the Indigenous peoples who made seasonal camps and villages along the river valleys and lakeshore. Carl Benn describes the colonial transformation of York during the 1700s, and its growth into the most important urban, institutional, cultural and commercial centre in Upper Canada during the early 19th century. Christopher Andreae presents the city’s age of industry, a century of technological and industrial growth that laid the foundations for today’s city. Roger Hall brings Toronto into the twenty-first century, analyzing the forces that transformed Toronto into a vigorous, multicultural metropolitan centre that continues to re-invent itself.
Updated with new research, particularly honouring and reflecting Indigenous perspectives, this new edition provides an engaging multi-layered history of Toronto.