| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

H. V. Nelles. The Art of Nation-Building: Pageantry and Spectacle at Quebec's Tercentenary. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. 1999. Pp. ix, 397. $45.00.

In 1908, the governments of Canada, Quebec, and Quebec City collaborated as senior organizers of a grand celebration marking the 300th anniversary of Quebec's founding by France. The event involved the participation of French and English-speaking citizens, Ojibway, Mohawk, Iroquois, and Onandaga Indians, militia regiments, regular soldiers, and mounted police. It was acted out in the presence of ships of the Royal, French, U.S., and Canadian navies, huge crowds of spectators, and dignitaries from several parts of the world. Most noteworthy of all, it unfolded in an extraordinary series of balls, dinners, receptions, parades, and—the pièce de résistance—an elaborately staged historical pageant recapitulating significant moments in the history of New France and Quebec. 1

Standing at the heart of this powerfully orchestrated public spectacle was a concern that the drama and artifice so prominent in it represent the Quebec, Canadian, and imperial pasts in ways that would mobilize support for Canada and the British Empire in the present. "The Tercentenary," writes H. V. Nelles, "seemed to have been built on the dual propositions that history would make a nation and that history could best be understood as performance" (p. 11). Attaching great importance to this idea, Nelles scripts his book as an extended examination of the tercentenary's meaning and implications. . . .

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