Daniel Francis


Photo by Patrick Francis

Daniel Francis was born in Vancouver in 1947. He earned his BA from the University of British Columbia, then moved to Ottawa, where he worked as a news­pa­per jour­nal­ist and obtained an MA in Canadian Studies from Carleton University in 1975. Since then he has worked as a free­lance his­tor­i­cal writer and researcher.

From 1984 to 1987 he was the edi­to­r­ial direc­tor of Horizon Canada, a bilin­gual illus­trated his­tory of Canada pub­lished from Montreal in weekly mag­a­zine for­mat. In 1987 he moved with his fam­ily back to the Vancouver area.

Francis has writ­ten two dozen pub­lished books, most of them about Canadian his­tory. Titles include: The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992), National Dreams: Myth, Memory and Canadian History (Arsenal Pulp, 1997), Red Light Neon: A History of Vancouver’s Sex Trade (Subway Books, 2006) and A Road for Canada: The Illustrated Story of the Trans-Canada Highway (Stanton Atkins and Dosil, 2006). His book L.D.: Mayor Louis Taylor and the Rise of Vancouver (Arsenal Pulp, 2004) won the City of Vancouver Book Award. He also served as edi­to­r­ial direc­tor of the mam­moth Encyclopedia of British Columbia, hailed on its appear­ance in 2000 as one of the most impor­tant books about the province ever pub­lished. He has also writ­ten sev­eral books for young read­ers, includ­ing Far West: The Story of British Columbia (Harbour, 2006), which stayed on the BC Bestseller list for many weeks.

His lat­est book is Operation Orca: Springer, Luna and the Struggle to Save West Coast Killer Whales (Harbour, 2007).

Daniel Francis has been a mem­ber of the Geist edi­to­r­ial board since the mag­a­zine was founded in 1990. Read his blog at www.knowbc.blogspot.com


Daniel Francis recently spoke to Joseph Planta from thecommentary.ca about his book, Red Light Neon: A History of Vancouver’s Sex Trade (Subway, 2007). Listen here.

Daniel Francis on Geist.com

Canada's Funnyman: The Flip Side

A misog­y­nist, a racist and an aca­d­e­mic walk into a bar…

Politics Times Two

True Patriot Love feels like it began life as a seri­ous project that was sub­verted by the author’s need to estab­lish his bona fides as a car­ing Canadian.

Writing the Nation

Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.

The Landscape Men

 The Group of Seven “vision” is an inadequate way to describe an urban, multiracial, industrial society like Canada, and pretty much always was.

The Big Bad Wolfe

When General James Wolfe scampered up the steep path that carried him onto the Plains of Abraham and into the pages of the history books, what was he thinking?

At the Margins

In Chicago, where he settled, William Henry Jackson, British settler, transformed himself into Honoré Jaxon, Métis freedom fighter. He identified so closely with the Métis struggle for justice that he became one of them. He had no trouble convincing others that he was a Native and probably had no trouble convincing himself either.

Identity Crises

Several years ago Ian McKay, a Queen’s University history professor, published a book called The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McGill-Queen’s University Press) in which he argued that the image many of us have of Nova Scotia as a tartan-wearing, bagpipe-squealing mini-Scotland is pretty much a fabrication.

Dates with Destiny

Not long ago I was having dinner at a small cottage beside a lake in central British Columbia hundreds of kilometres north of Vancouver. Among the guests seated around the table was Elio, a neighbour from down the shore. As we talked he mentioned that he had grown up before the Second World War in the Adriatic port city of Rijeka, where his father had worked in a factory making torpedoes. “Most of the torpedoes used by the Axis during the war were made there,” he informed me.

Re-hanging the National Wallpaper

When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970s, I used to enjoy passing lazy afternoons at the National Gallery looking at the pictures. I remember how surprised I was when I first encountered the Group of Seven collection. These paintings were completely familiar—I’d seen them in schoolbooks and on calendars, posters, t-shirts, everywhere—yet at the same time they were completely unexpected.

Daniel Francis Interview

Daniel Francis recently spoke to Joseph Planta from THECOMMENTARY.ca about his book, Red Light Neon: A History of Vancouver’s Sex Trade (Subway, 2007). Listen here.

The Last Supper

In 1971 I went to work as a reporter at the Ottawa Journal. The newspaper depended for much of its copy on a roster of freelancers who would get their assignments by phone and drop by the office to deliver their articles. One of these contributors was D’Arcy Marsh.

Afghanistan

One thing Canadians have learned from our armed incursion into Afghanistan is that we do not have a vocabulary for discussing war or warlike events.

African Gulag

In 1952, Princess Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip visited Kenya, then a British colony, and stayed for a night at Treetops, a tiny, rustic structure in the branches of a fig tree, where guests could watch the wild animals that came to drink at an adjacent waterhole. During the night, Elizabeth’s father, King George vi, died, so when she clambered down out of the tree in the morning she was the Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (and, of course, Canada).

 

Buffalo Bill’s Defunct

In the sun-streaked barroom of the Irma Hotel on the main street of Cody, Wyoming, late one afternoon in June, I made a big mistake. “What’s on tap?” I asked.