In The Hanging of Angélique, University of Toronto historian Afua Cooper uses the transcripts of a slave woman’s trial for arson in 18th-century Montreal to uncover something of the history of slavery in Canada. That there was slavery in Canada, Cooper rightly points out, is a fact not widely known. She overreaches in saying that this history has been “silenced,” but slavery, like many aspects of Canadian social history, has not entered our common understanding. The story is not, as the subtitle claims, “untold,” but the book does popularize an important part of Canada’s past. for more click here
