History professor Alan Gordon is a finalist for an award from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences’s Aid to Scholarly Publications Program (ASPP). Gordon’s book, The Hero and the Historians: Historiography and the Uses of Jacques Cartier, is one of five books to make the short list for the Canada Prize for best ASPP-subventioned English-language book in the social sciences.
The jury is expected to select the winning book in the coming weeks. Gordon’s book focuses on one national hero — Jacques Cartier — to explore how notions about the past have been created and passed on from generation to generation in English- and French-speaking Canada and used to present particular ideas about the world. It was published by UBC Press last year.