Includes bibliographical references (p. [216]-231) and index.
Contents:
The sixteenth-century world and Jacques Cartier -- Forgetting and remembering -- The invention of a hero --Cartiermania -- Common sense -- The many meanings of Jacques Cartier -- Decline and dispersal -- Failure and forgetting.
Summary:
"Historians have long engaged in passionate debate about collective memory and the building of national identities. Alan Gordon focuses on one national hero - Jacques Cartier - to explore how notions about the past have been created, passed on through the generations, and used to present particular ideas about the world in English- and French-speaking Canada. He reveals that the cult of celebrity surrounding Cartier by the mid-nineteenth century reflected a particular understanding of history, one which accompanied the arrival of modernity in North America. This new sensibility shaped the political and cultural currents of nation building in Canada. Cartier was a point of contact between English and French Canadian nationalism, but the nature of that contact had profound limitations."--Book jacket.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.