Jeffrey D. Brison. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada: American Philanthrophy and the Arts and Letters in Canada. Ithaca: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 281. $75.00

Historical studies of the intellectual and cultural interaction of Canadians and Americans are rare, and new work based on primary research is welcome. Jeffrey D. Brison examines the significant role played by the U.S.-based Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations in Canada from the 1920s to the 1950s which, over four decades, provided some $20 million for universities, academic fellowships, humanities and social science research, the fine arts, and book publishing, all of which would have foundered in the absence of such patronage. With the establishment of the state-funded Canada Council in 1957, Canadian scholars and artists, at long last, were able to draw substantially from their own country's financial resources and cultural agencies.

Brison contends that while the process was not always direct and overt, American “philanthropoids” collaborated with Canada's “cultural elite” to map the country's cultural landscape. They did...