Foreword

Every Canadian knows the Stanley Cup.For citizens of a country reared on frozen ponds, frigid mornings at the local arena, and Saturday nights clustered around the television, hockey is practically a national religion.Every boy and girl who grows up playing the game dreams at one stage or another of hoisting its most cherished prize.So, while the Stanley Cup is widely recognized as one of the most iconic trophies in all of sportand arguably the hardest to win -it is also a potent symbol of Canadian identity.How did a professional sports trophy become so entwined with what it means to be Canadian?In Canada's Holy Grail, Jordan B. Goldstein explores what exactly Lord Stanley of Preston was up to when he donated the Dominion Challenge Cup in 1892, and how it is that the origins of the Stanley Cup lay in ideas of sporting excellence, liberal politics, and Canadian nation-building at the end of the nineteenth century.As a scholar of sports history and philosophy, as well as a solid two-way defenceman and a die-hard Montréal Canadiens fan (a minor fault that this long-suffering Toronto Maple Leafs supporter can happily overlook), Goldstein is especially well-suited to the task.Through his extensive archival research in Canada and the United Kingdom, including Lord Stanley's personal archive, we gain a new and intimate perspective on the thinking of Canada's sixth governor general -what Stanley found when he arrived in the Dominion of Canada in 1888, the political philosophy that shaped his activities in Ottawa, and how he sought to encourage the growth of a shared national identity through the distinctly Canadian sport of ice hockey.Canada's Holy Grail dovetails with and contributes to an increasingly fruitful vein of historical scholarship that situates Canada and Canadian nation-building in broader global and imperial contexts.As an integral part of the British empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Canadians were enmeshed in networks of people, goods, and ideas that spanned Foreword the "British world" -as well as a wider "Anglo-world" that included the United States -and which indelibly marked the development of their country.For both good and ill, today's Canada is a product of that imperial past -and as Goldstein deftly shows, the Stanley Cup itself is no exception.The fact that an English aristocrat serving as imperial viceroy in a distant, overseas colony is responsible for one of the great and enduring symbols of modern Canada powerfully illustrates that, as

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