In her book, He Did Not Conquer: Benjamin Franklin’s Failure to Annex Canada, Madelaine Drohan, tells the story of American designs on Canada during the colonial period focusing on Benjamin Franklin who not only hatched one plan after another to join Canada to the American colonies and later to the United States, but even was dispatched by the Continental Congress in early 1776 at age seventy through the wilderness to Montreal to try to rescue a faltering occupation by American forces and persuade the Canadians to become the fourteenth colony.  In this lecture, Drohan will tell this dramatic story and reflect on why it is not better known today, on either side of the border, while suggesting that “a better understanding of what happened 250 years ago would help Canada shape relations with its powerful – and increasingly unstable – neighbour.”  Joining Madelaine Drohan will be historian Greg Koabel who will offer his insight into several other occasions over the past 250 years when American expansionism threatened Canada’s sovereignty, and how Canadians responded at the time.

BIOGRAPHIES
Madelaine Drohan spent most of her journalistic career as a foreign correspondent, reporting on Europe for the Toronto-based Globe and Mail and then on Canada for the London-based Economist.  She is senior fellow at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa, and is on the advisory council of the Canadian Institute for Historical Education.  Madelaine Drohan lives in Ottawa.

Greg Koabel holds a PhD from Nottingham Trent University in the field of early modern English history, and has taught European history and European politics at the University of Regina. He is the writer and host of The Nations of Canada Podcast, and also the author of The Making of Canada: An Epic History in Twenty Extraordinary Lives, (Sutherland House Books, 2025).  Greg Koabel Greg lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Copies of both Madelaine’s and Greg’s books will be available for sale and signing.  This event is co-sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Historical Education, www.CIHE.ca.