About the Book
Canadian History: Pre-Confederation – 2nd Edition was created by John Douglas Belshaw and funded by BCcampus Open Education. This book is the first in a two-part collection by this author; also see Canadian History: Post-Confederation – 2nd Edition.
BCcampus Open Education began in 2012 as the B.C. Open Textbook Project with the goal of making post-secondary education in British Columbia more accessible by reducing students’ costs through the use of open textbooks and other OER. BCcampus supports the post-secondary institutions of British Columbia as they adapt and evolve their teaching and learning practices to enable powerful learning opportunities for the students of B.C. BCcampus Open Education is funded by the British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills & Training, and the Hewlett Foundation.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that, through permissions granted by the copyright holder, allow others to use, distribute, keep, or make changes to them. Our open textbooks are openly licensed using a Creative Commons licence, and are offered in various e-book formats free of charge, or as printed books that are available at cost.
For more information about open education in British Columbia, please visit the BCcampus Open Education website. If you are an instructor who is using this book for a course, please fill out our Adoption of an Open Textbook form.
Starting in March 2020, various edits were made to the textbook. These stop well short of an overhaul. This is not a revised edition so much as a corrected edition. The changes are recorded throughout the book and can be provided on request. Possibly the most significant and wide-reaching change recognizes that the term “Indigenous” has superseded “Aboriginal.” Throughout, as well, Indigenous autonyms have been introduced where needed. As the original project was reaching completion, a parallel project to create short videos by Canadian historians was getting fully underway. A small number of these videos were integrated into the original iteration and now several more have been added. Each comes with a transcript or has been closed captioned. I would like to acknowledge the contributions to this process made by Lisa Chilton and Alan Gordon.
