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The Dawn of Canada’s Century: Hidden Histories ed. by Gordon Darroch (review)

demonstrates how the formation of identities is most clearly expressed in the visual language of representation, whether on a large scale, like Montreal’s Diamond Jubilee parade in 1897, or on a more localised scale, like the portrait of an individual family. The issue of collective identities has interested and divided historians for a long time, and it is a significant challenge to describe their development and diffusion. For this reason, Stanworth is most persuasive in her later chapters, where she looks at portraiture and its role in fashioning identity at the individual level. While the scope of this book is ambitious – too few studies bridge the ‘Confederation chasm’ as Stanworth has done here – the range of sources means that each chapter is effectively a separate and self-contained study. Indeed, Stanworth notes that each chapter’s case study ‘could equally be a book in itself ’ (p. 7). Unfortunately, the development of a common argument is often lost as a result. Indeed, it is difficult to identify common threads that connect the disparate chapters. Certain important themes emerge in some chapters and disappear altogether in others. The concept of citizenship, for example, is integral to the first chapter’s examination of an educational museum, but fades in subsequent chapters. It would be helpful and enlightening to see this theme and others like it woven more cohesively throughout the whole study. Despite this limitation, Visibly Canadian provides an innovative approach to the use and analysis of sources, and challenges readers to consider seriously the role of visual culture – so often overlooked or placed in subordination to written sources – in constructing our understanding of the past. A unique aspect of the book is the author’s inclusion of methodological notes at the end of each chapter, in which she describes in frank terms the experiences and challenges faced in conducting the archival research on which the chapter is based. As Stanworth explains, these postscripts remind readers of the contingent and often unpredictable nature of archival research. Readers will hear echoes of their own research challenges here, and will certainly find much to contemplate. Peter Price, University of Cambridge