We’ve digitized thousands of issues containing more than 100,000 stories from Canada's greatest writers and journalists. Everything from 1905 to 2008 is free to read.

“History moved down this river,” Pierre Berton wrote. “Before these tugboats churned downstream the romantic sternwheelers plied these waters. Before the sternwheelers came the flat-bottomed York boats, gross with furs. And before the York boats were the explorers’ canoes.” That’s vintage Berton, transforming the way Canada saw the north—and the world saw Canada—in a 1954 Maclean’s story titled “The mysterious north.”

Berton is just one of a celebrated cast of contributors whose complete writings for Maclean’s are now available in our fully digitized archive.

Readers can access every issue of Maclean’s ever published. That’s more than 100,000 stories from about 3,400 issues going back to 1905. And every story published before 2009 is free for every reader.

The archive collection is a trove of Canadiana: there are the historic covers, including some by Group of Seven members A.J. Casson, Arthur Lismer and J.E.H. MacDonald, and a celebrated cast of contributors, including Margaret Atwood, Farley Mowat, Joseph Boyden, Mordecai Richler, and even Lucy Maud Montgomery. It’s a Canadian who’s who of journalists who graced our pages, including Ralph Allen, Peter C. Newman, Christina McCall, Barbara Moon, Peter Gzowski, Trent Frayne, and June Callwood, to name just a few.

This is the first archive of its kind in Canada. It chronicles our coverage of every major issue in the past century: war, political upheaval, massive social change.

The Maclean’s Historical Digitization Project, made possible with support from the Ontario Media Development Corporation, came to life thanks to work by Bondi, a digital publishing company that created a searchable database of all our past issues. You can explore it by year, author, or subject. The archive is easy to navigate, whether you want to explore our extensive coverage of the Great War (a phrase that first appeared in Maclean’s), or you’re looking for a specific story, such as Margaret Atwood’s 1974 profile of Margaret Laurence.

READ FROM THE ARCHIVES: