Editing Pierre Berton (section)

==Historian==
In 1970, book one of Berton's epic about the building of the CPR, ''The National Dream'' was published, becoming  a great critical and commercial success by 1971.{{sfn|McKillop|2011|p=504}} Book two of the series, ''The Last Spike'', was published in 1971 and was even more successful with the public.{{sfn|McKillop|2011|p=515}} The success of ''The Last Spike'' transformed Berton into a sort of "national institution" as he became the popular story-teller historian that he set out to be.{{sfn|McKillop|2011|p=515}} Such was the popularity of ''The Last Spike'' that in 1972 that stores sold mementoes related to the book, which was most unusual for a history book.{{sfn|McKillop|2011|p=511}} In a review, the American historian Ralph Hidy wrote that Berton's railroad saga was an "essentially sound" history that was relatively free of errors.{{sfn|Hidy|1973|pp=284–285}} Hidy stated that though Berton broke no new ground in his railroad saga, his work was very "lively" and carried "the reader through one cliff-hanging situation after another".{{sfn|Hidy|1973|p=284}}  The sections dealing with the building of the Rocky mountains section of the CPR are generally considered to be the vivid and exciting part of Berton's railroad epic. Berton described how the railroad builders had to quite literally blast and hack their way through the sheer granite of the Rocky mountains, which was an extremely difficult, dangerous and arduous task, given the technology of the time. Hidy wrote that as a work of narrative popular history, Berton succeeded admirably in telling the story of the construction of the CPR over daunting odds, and in impressing the reader as to why the building of the CPR, which was completed five years ahead of schedule, was considered one of the great engineering feats of the 19th century.{{sfn|Hidy|1973|pp=284–285}} However, other historians were more critical. [[Michael Bliss]] felt that Berton's picture of the Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, was too colored by hero-worship as Bliss in a critical review stated that Berton went beyond even Creighton (whose two-volume biography of MacDonald was very sympathetic towards its subject) in portraying MacDonald as the heroic prime minister.{{sfn|McKillop|2011|p=490}}

In common with many other Canadians, Berton found the 1970s to be an unpleasant decade as the recession caused by the Arab oil shock of 1973–74 put an end to the "long summer" of prosperity that had begun in 1945 while the election of the separatist [[Parti Québécois|PQ]] government in Quebec in 1976 led to doubts about whatever Canada would even last as a nation. By 1979, on the threshold of a new decade that seemed to promise only more trouble, Berton came to feel that Canada needed another national epic to give hope in dark and uncertain times.{{sfn|McKillop|2011|p=555}} As the subject of his new national epic, Berton chose the War of 1812 with the first of his books, ''The Invasion of Canada'' dealing with the subject being published in 1980, and the second one, ''Flames Across the Border'' in 1981.{{sfn|McKillop|2011|p=558}} Berton chose to interpret the War of 1812 as not a war between the United States and Great Britain which just happened to be fought in North America, but rather as the beginning of a Canadian national identity.{{sfn|McKillop|2011|p=557}} Though Berton's nationalist interpretation of the War of 1812 was not accepted by most historians it certainly appealed to the Canadian public and his books dealing with the War of 1812 sold very well.{{sfn|McKillop|2011|pp=557–558}}

In his 1984 book ''The Promised Land'', he covered the settlement of the Prairie provinces in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.{{sfn|McKillop|2011|pp=580–581}} Pierre set out to debunk the heroic image of the colonization of the West by focusing on the hardships and suffering of the farmers who could be easily ruined by crop failures.  He focused instead on the tenacity and sheer determination of the settlers and provided a new heroic image of the settlement of the West.{{sfn|McKillop|2011|p=581}} In 1986, he published ''Vimy'', which was one of his more successful books dealing with the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917.{{sfn|McKillop|2011|p=593}} Berton provoked much controversy that his thesis that Vimy may have been a great victory that saw all the four divisions of the Canadian corps fight together for the first time to achieve what had been considered an impossible task, namely to take the heavily fortified Vimy ridge that towered about the Douai plain, but the victory were not worth the sacrifices of thousands of young men who were either killed or wounded.{{sfn|McKillop|2011|p=593}} Berton noted that 1 out of 10 Canadians who stormed up the heights of Vimy Ridge on 9 April 1917 were either killed or wounded, leading him to the conclusion that it would be better if the battle had not been fought at all.{{sfn|McKillop|2011|p=593}}