Canada Transformed: The Speeches of Sir John A. Macdonald is a bicentennial project by a Kingston-centered group of Macdonald admirers, and I momentarily quailed at having to plough through 450 pages of Victorian oratory. No fear. Most of the speeches here are not formal platform orations but drawn from the House of Commons Debates. Full of lively exchanges between Macdonald and his opposition critics, they should inform anyone with an interest in workaday 19th century politics.Once I understood I needed a new password -- the damn thing wasn't just mindlessly rejecting me -- I found the new interface for the online edition of the CHR pretty welcoming. You could mostly find things on the old one if you knew what you were looking for, but the new one makes an issue more browseable.
Dundurn Press is offering Macdonald at 200 with Ged Martin's recent short biography as a "two book bundle." Canada Transformed is from McClelland & Stewart
