Local author Dennis Rizzo tells the fascinating and diverse history of Orillia, Ontario. First populated by the Huron, Iroquois and Chippewa Nations, Orillia is now a well-loved, year-round recreation destination. Its history is deeply tied to its water. Situated in the narrows where Lake Simcoe flows into Lake Couchiching, Orillia was a gathering place for centuries before Europeans used it to bring furs to market. Sir John Simcoe, first governor of Upper Canada, fostered permanent settlement of the area. A gateway to the Muskoka region, it has been home to lumber, manufacturing, and artistic endeavours. Today, summer cottagers and winter athletes alike enjoy the Sunshine City and its more than twenty annual festivals. Local author Dennis Rizzo tells the fascinating and diverse history of Orillia, Ontario.

After almost 40 years of marriage and boating together, Captain George and Pat Hospodar completed a yearlong Great Loop odyssey aboard their boat, “Reflection”. This trip resulted in their first book, Reflection on America’s Great Loop, a personal, light-hearted, real-life account of the couple’s travels while circumnavigating the waters of the United States and Canada. Their newest book, The Great Loop Experience – from Concept to Completion, is a comprehensive guide written to help others plan, prepare, and successfully execute their own Great Loop adventures. It also addresses the questions that these authors/lecturers are most frequently asked by future “Loopers”. Some of the many topics covered include: selecting and equipping your boat, choosing your route, financial considerations and trip costs, managing your onboard life, vessel security, Customs and border crossings, boating protocol, locking procedures, safely negotiating the waterways, open-water crossings, and great stops along the way. This how-to guide not only informs and educates you, but also hopes to inspire those who want to one day make this wonderful journey! The Great Loop Experience has the information you need so that you can confidently and knowledge- ably cast off your lines for your own exhilarating Great Loop adventure!

An award-winning sociologist, Charles Tilly has been equally influential in explaining politics, history, and how societies change. Tilly’s newest book tackles fundamental questions about the nature of personal, political, and national identities and their linkage to big events—revolutions, social movements, democratization, and other processes of political and social change. Tilly focuses in this book on the role of stories, as means of creating personal identity, but also as explanations, true or false, of political tensions and realities. He uses well-known examples from around the world—the Zapatista rebellion, Hindu-Muslim conflicts, and other examples in which nationalism and other forms of group identity are politically pivotal. Tilly writes with the immediacy of a journalist, but the profound insight of a great theorist.

2017 Orillia Museum of Art & History Award, Historical Publications and/or Research — Winner The history of Orillia, told through the stories of its people, bringing to life the community’s heritage and significance. The Orillia Spirit: Muddling through Canada’s first, and hilarious, experiment with daylight savings time, Mayor “Daylight Bill” Frost had it. Creating his own money and dreaming a drainage ditch would become a tourist attraction, Mayor Ben Johnson had it. Taking his town’s electric company by force, Mayor J.B. Tudhope had it. Inventing early forms of medicare and the first RVs, dreaming of universities and folk festivals, battling for decades over liquor and rinks, ordinary people had it. Something about the place immortalized in Stephen Leacock’s classic Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town has always inspired its people to reach for their dreams. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century leaders coined the phrase “the Orillia Spirit” to describe their drive to make the town a social, moral, and economic leader of Canada. The results have been comic, tragic, and heroic, as shown in this colourful history of Orillia.

Set in the fictional landscape of Mariposa on the shores of Lake Wissanotti in Missinaba County, Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is an affectionate satire of small town life. This series of humourous connected sketches about graft, high finance, religion, love and romance is, on one level, an intimate, comic portrait of town life and local politics. On another level, the narrative is a powerful commentary on the workings of community values and on Canada’s place within the British Empire. The Broadview edition includes a critical introduction, thorough annotation, a list of textual variants, and a range of contextual materials, including Leacock’s stage adaptation of Sunshine Sketches.

The emphasis is on urban society, with new essays on social structure, the family, ethnicity and immigration, and religion. Other sections are devoted to urban growth, the physical environment, and urban government and reform.

In Transcultural Migration in the Novels of Hédi Bouraoui: A New Ulysses, Elizabeth Sabiston analyses the dominant theme of transcultural migration, or immigration, in the experimental fiction of Hédi Bouraoui. His protagonists are seen as Ulysses-figures for the postmodern age, crossing boundaries of language as well as geography

First published in 1988, this book contains entries on famous American Humorists. Humor has been present in American literature, from the beginning, and has developed characteristics that reflect the American character, both regional and national. Although American literature was, in the past, treated as inferior to British literature, there has always been a large popular audience for the genre, which this book shows. The figures with entries in this encyclopedia not only amuse in their writing, but also aim to enlighten- setting out to expose the foibles and foolishness of society and the individuals who compose it. It is the manner in which these authors try to accomplish this end that determines whether they appear in the volume. Indeed, the book will demonstrate that the best humor has at its base, a ready understanding of human nature.

The singer-songwriter, someone who writes and performs their own music, is an ever-present and increasingly complex figure in popular music worlds. The Singer-Songwriter Handbook provides a useful resource for student songwriters, active musicians, fans and scholars alike. This handbook is divided into four main sections: Songwriting (acoustic and digital), Performance, Music Industry and Case Studies. Section I focuses on the 'how to' elements of popular song composition, embracing a range of perspectives and methods, in addition to chapters on the teaching of songwriting to students. Section II deals with the nature of performance: stagecraft, open mic nights, and a number of case studies that engage with performing in a range of contexts. Section III is devoted to aspects of the music industry and the business of music including sales, contract negotiations, copyright, social media and marketing. Section IV provides specific examples of singer-songwriter personae and global open mic scenes. The Singer-Songwriter Handbook is a much-needed single resource for budding singer-songwriters as well as songwriting pedagogues.