Join us on Thursday, January 18 for an evening with award-winning author Stephen R. Bown as he discusses his latest book Dominion: The Railway and the Rise of Canada, which tells the gripping and eye-opening account of the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway and how it enabled the nation of Canada.

With over 3,000 kilometers of track, much of it driven through wildly inhospitable terrain, the CPR would be the longest railway in the world and the most difficult to build. Its construction was the defining event of its era and a catalyst for powerful global forces.

In recent years Canadian history has been given a rude awakening from the comforts of its myths. In Dominion, Stephen Bown again widens our view of the past to include the adventures and hardships of explorers and surveyors, the resistance of Indigenous peoples, and the terrific and horrific work of many thousands of labourers. His vivid portrayal of the powerful forces that were molding the world in the late 19th century provides a revelatory new picture of modern Canada’s creation as an independent state.