In the 1870s, approximately 18,000 Mennonites migrated from the southern steppes of Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine) to the North American grasslands. They brought with them an array of cultural and institutional features that indicated they were a "transplanted" people. What is less frequently noted, however, is that they created in their everyday lives a world that ensured their cultural longevity and social cohesiveness in a new land.Their adaptation to the New World required new concepts of social boundary and community, new strategies of land ownership and legacy, new associations, and new ways of interacting with markets. In Hidden Worlds, historian Royden Loewen illuminates some of these adaptations, which have been largely overshadowed by an emphasis on institutional history, or whose sources have only recently been revealed. Through an analysis of diaries, wills, newspaper articles, census and tax records, and other literature, an examination of inheritance practices, household dynamics, and gender relations, and a comparison of several Mennonite communities in the United States and Canada, Loewen uncovers the multi-dimensional and highly resourceful character of the 1870s migrants.

The Canadian Prairie has long been represented as a timeless and unchanging location, defined by settlement and landscape. Now, a new generation of writers and historians challenge that perception and argue, instead, that it is a region with an evolving culture and history. This collection of ten essays explores a more contemporary prairie identity, and reconfigures "the prairie" as a construct that is non-linear and diverse, responding to the impact of geographical, historical, and political currents. These writers explore the connections between document and imagination, between history and culture, and between geography and time.The subjects of the essays range widely: the non-linear structure of Carol Shield's The Stone Diaries; the impact of Aberhart's Social Credit, Marshall McLuhan, and Mesopotamian myth on Robert Kroetsch's prairie postmodernism; the role of document in long prairie poems; the connection between cultural tourism and heritage; the theme of regeneration in Margaret Laurence's Manawaka writing; the influence of imagination on geography in Thomas Wharton's Icefields; and the effects on an alpine climber of pre-WWII ideological concepts of time and individualism.

The founding of the Old Icelandic Commonwealth in 930 A.D. is one of the most significant events in the history of early Western Europe. This pioneering work of historiography provides a comprehensive history of Iceland from 870 A.D. to the end of the Commonwealth in 1262.