Book excerpt: This book is a combination of five public lectures offered to the university and community during the academic year 1973–1974, given by the History Department of Wilfrid Laurier University. These were given by leading scholars in their individual fields and are published here. The essays are on such topics as family life in New France, the origins of British fiscal policy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, images of the negro in Victorian popular culture, Joseph Chamberlain and the “New Imperialism” in West Africa’s Gold Coast, and the controversial prime minister of Canada, Mackenzia King. They are all important in their own sense as contributions to the historian’s ongoing search for the visible past.