Yankee Go Home?: Canadians and Anti-Americanism - Hardcover

J.L. Granatstein is a distinguished Canadian historian and the author of over 40 books, including Victory 1945, Empire to Umpire: Canadian Foreign Policy to the 1990s and The Generals, which won the J.W. Dafoe Prize and the UBC Medal for Canadian Biography. The royal Society of Canada awarded him the J.B. Tyrell Historical Gold Medal (1992) for "outstanding work in the history of Canada." In 1996, the Conference of Defence Associations Institute named him winner of the Vimy Award for "achievement and effort in the field of Canadian defence and security." He comments regularly on historical questions and public affairs in the media. A Distinguished Research Professor of History Emertius at York University, he has received honorary degrees from Memorial University and University of Calgary and is a member of the Royal Military College of Canada Board of Governors.

Of the varieties of anti-Americanism in the world, the Canadian strain has the oldest lineage, and according to this noted Canadian historian, it is finished as a factor in Canadian politics. With the failure to stop the 1988 FTA (the precursor to NAFTA), anti-Americanism seems dead, but for the two preceding centuries it had a boisterous run and affected many elections. Usually, the Tories played the anti^-Uncle Sam card, and Granatstein renders their campaigns of 1891 and 1911 in strong hues, as the Conservatives depicted "reciprocity" (low tariffs negotiated by the Liberals) as a sellout of Canadian independence. Fifty years later, the Tories were still at it, as Prime Minister Diefenbaker loudly beat the Yankees-out drum, yet lost the 1963 election. However, political antipathy to the southern colossus continued through the '60s and '70s, as Granatstein underscores its manifestations in disparate intellectual and economic areas. This lively presentation, ending with the waning of protectionism in the '80s, surely fills a subject gap in many American libraries. Gilbert Taylor