Happyland: a history of the "Dirty Thirties" in Saskatchewan, 1914-1937
Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2011 vii+326 pp.
Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2011 vii+326 pp.
Synopsis: In his award-winning first book Happyland, Curtis R. McManus recalibrates the nature of Western Canadian settlement history. McManus places the devastating and historic droughts of the 1930s in their proper context by arguing that they were far from being an exceptional, one-time occurrence as is commonly believed. The drylands of the prairie West had been plagued by drought for decades prior to the settlement of the region in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a consequence, crop failure, bankruptcy, and starvation formed the foundation of agricultural life in the drylands for years before finally culminating in the largest land abandonment crisis in Canadian history.
