Themes in Canadian History – serie

The history of the family is a relatively new, yet rapidly developing area of academic study. With this book, Cynthia Comacchio presents the first historical overview of domestic life in Canada.According to Comacchio, the social anxiety resulting from an ongoing perception of the family as being 'in crisis' has had a significant influence on evolving social policy. Comacchio shows how families have both changed and remained the same, through transitions brought about by urbanization, industrialization, and war. Her many stories of individual families highlight both historical trends and the more intimate issues related to race, gender, class, region, and age.This is the only synthesis to date of the historical literature on Canadian families. Designed for students at graduate and undergraduate levels, it not only introduces the key concepts and approaches of a developing field of study, but also summarizes the major issues and trends that affected Canadian families from 1850 to1940.

Canadians and the Natural Environment to the Twenty-First Century provides an ideal foundation for undergraduates and general readers on the history of Canada's complex environmental issues. Through clear, easy-to-understand case studies, Neil Forkey integrates the ongoing interplay of humans and the natural world into national, continental, and global contexts.Forkey's engaging survey addresses significant episodes from across the country over the past four hundred years: the classification of Canada's environments by its earliest inhabitants, the relationship between science and sentiment in the Victorian era, the shift towards conservation and preservation of resources in the early twentieth century, and the rise of environmentalism and issues involving First Nations at the end of the century. Canadians and the Natural Environment to the Twenty-First Century provides an accessible synthesis of the most important recent work in the field, making it a truly state-of-the-art contribution to Canadian environmental history.

The years between 1870 and 1939 were a crucial period in the growth of industrial capitalism in Canada, as well as a time when many women joined the paid workforce. Yet despite the increase in employment, women faced a difficult struggle in gaining fair remuneration for their work and in gaining access to better jobs. Discounted Labour analyses the historical roots of women's persistent inequality in the paid labour force. Ruth A. Frager and Carmela K. Patrias analyse how and why women became confined to low-wage jobs, why their work was deemed less valuable than men's work, why many women lacked training, job experience, and union membership, and under what circumstances women resisted their subordination.Distinctive earning discrepancies and employment patterns have always characterized women's place in the workforce whether they have been in low-status, unskilled jobs, or in higher positions. For this reason, Frager and Patrias focus not only on women wage-earners but on women as salaried workers as well. They also analyze the divisions among women, examining how class and ethnic or racial differences have intersected with those of gender. Discounted Labour is an essential new work for anyone interested in the historical struggle for gender equality in Canada.

Young Canada was often portrayed as a virginal woman or as a healthy frontiersman, and the ideals of purity, industry, and self-discipline were celebrated as essential features of the Canadian identity. To ensure that Canadians lived up to this image, different levels of government passed a variety of laws and created an expanding range of institutions to enforce them. Making Good looks at the changing relationship between law and morality in Canada during a critical phase of nation-building, from Confederation to the onset of the Second World War. The authors argue that though the law played a significant role in giving Canada a moral cast, the law's homogenizing tendencies did not always meet with anticipated success, as values deemed 'good' by the government were constantly repudiated by those on whom they were imposed.Strange and Loo examine both the major institutions which patrolled morality - the Department of Indian Affairs, the Ministry of Justice, and the North West Mounted Police - and the agencies that worked at local levels, such as police forces, schools, correctional facilities, juvenile and family courts, and morality squads. They also look at many fascinating acts of resistance to moral ordinances, showing that not all Canadians shared the same vision of goodness. Certain themes which run throughout the book include the concept of the internal threat to the foundations of national decency, the influence of the United States on Canada's moral order, and the regional discrepancies in the success of moral governance.Through topics as diverse as gambling, marriage and divorce, and sexual deviance, Making Good shows that character-building was critical to the broader project of nation-building. The book will be a welcome addition to undergraduate courses in Canadian history, and will interest social historians; historians of Native peoples, the working class, and women; criminologists; and political scientists.

The history of the family is a relatively new, yet rapidly developing area of academic study. With this book, Cynthia Comacchio presents the first historical overview of domestic life in Canada.According to Comacchio, the social anxiety resulting from an ongoing perception of the family as being 'in crisis' has had a significant influence on evolving social policy. Comacchio shows how families have both changed and remained the same, through transitions brought about by urbanization, industrialization, and war. Her many stories of individual families highlight both historical trends and the more intimate issues related to race, gender, class, region, and age.This is the only synthesis to date of the historical literature on Canadian families. Designed for students at graduate and undergraduate levels, it not only introduces the key concepts and approaches of a developing field of study, but also summarizes the major issues and trends that affected Canadian families from 1850 to1940.

The history of Canada's Aboriginal peoples after European contact is a hotly debated area of study. In Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900, Sarah Carter looks at the cultural, political, and economic issues of this contested history, focusing on the western interior, or what would later become Canada's prairie provinces.This wide-ranging survey draws on the wealth of interdisciplinary scholarship of the last three decades. Topics include the impact of European diseases, changing interpretations of fur trade interaction, the Red River settlement as a cultural crossroad, missionaries, treaties, the disappearance of the buffalo, the myths about the Mounties, Canadian 'Indian' policy, and the policies of Aboriginal peoples towards Canada.Carter focuses on the multiplicity of perspectives that exist on past events. Referring to nearly all of the current scholarship in the field, she presents opposing versions on every major topic, often linking these debates to contemporary issues. The result is a sensitive treatment of history as an interpretive exercise, making this an invaluable text for students as well as all those interested in Aboriginal/Non-Aboriginal relations.

Blood, Sweat, and Cheers looks at the contribution of sport to the making of the Canadian nation, focusing on the gradual transition from rural sporting practices to the emphasis on contemporary team sports that accompanied the industrial and urban transition. The book also analyzes sport's pre-eminent place in our contemporary consumer-oriented culture, and the sometimes ambivalent contribution of sport to a sense of Canadian identity. Intended as an introduction to the way in which social historians approach the history of sport, rather than as an exhaustive narrative of our sporting heritage, Colin D. Howell introduces readers to a number of important issues, including amateurism and professionalism, race and ethnicity, regionalism and nationalism, the impact of British and American sporting traditions upon Canadian sporting life, and the contemporary meaning of sport in a globalizing capitalist economy. He also investigates discourses about respectability and the display of the body, gender construction and sexual identities, the changing nature of the sporting marketplace over time, as well as the involvement of spectators, the media, and the state in the production of our national sporting life.While theoretical in approach, Blood, Sweat and Cheers also looks at the accomplishments of individual athletes, including Ned Hanlan, Maurice Richard, Barbara Ann Scott, Wayne Gretzky, and Donovan Bailey, as well as major sports teams, and covers a wide array of activities from hunting, rodeo, and native sporting traditions to those associated with the Olympic Games.

Creeping Conformity, the first history of suburbanization in Canada, provides a geographical perspective – both physical and social – on Canada's suburban past. Shaped by internal and external migration, decentralization of employment, and increased use of the streetcar and then the automobile, the rise of the suburb held great social promise, reflecting the aspirations of Canadian families for more domestic space and home ownership.After 1945 however, the suburbs became stereotyped as generic, physically standardized, and socially conformist places. By 1960, they had grown further away – physically and culturally – from their respective parent cities, and brought unanticipated social and environmental consequences. Government intervention also played a key role, encouraging mortgage indebtedness, amortization, and building and subdivision regulations to become the suburban norm. Suburban homes became less affordable and more standardized, and for the first time, Canadian commentators began to speak disdainfully of 'the suburbs,' or simply 'suburbia.' Creeping Conformity traces how these perceptions emerged to reflect a new suburban reality.

Before the Second World War, Canada was a rural country. Unlike most industrializing countries, Canada’s rural population grew throughout the century after 1871 – even if it declined as a proportion of the total population. Rural Canadians also differed in their lives from rural populations elsewhere. In a country dominated by a harsh northern climate, a short growing season, isolated households and communities, and poor land, they typically relied on three ever-shifting pillars of support: the sale of cash crops, subsistence from the local environment, and wage work off the farm.Canada’s Rural Majority is an engaging and accessible history of this distinctive experience, including not only Canada’s farmers, but also the hunters, gardeners, fishers, miners, loggers, and cannery workers who lived and worked in rural Canada. Focusing on the household, the environment, and the community, Canada’s Rural Majority is a compelling classroom resource and an invaluable overview of this understudied aspect of Canadian history.

Before the Second World War, Canada was a rural country. Unlike most industrializing countries, Canada’s rural population grew throughout the century after 1871 – even if it declined as a proportion of the total population. Rural Canadians also differed in their lives from rural populations elsewhere. In a country dominated by a harsh northern climate, a short growing season, isolated households and communities, and poor land, they typically relied on three ever-shifting pillars of support: the sale of cash crops, subsistence from the local environment, and wage work off the farm.Canada’s Rural Majority is an engaging and accessible history of this distinctive experience, including not only Canada’s farmers, but also the hunters, gardeners, fishers, miners, loggers, and cannery workers who lived and worked in rural Canada. Focusing on the household, the environment, and the community, Canada’s Rural Majority is a compelling classroom resource and an invaluable overview of this understudied aspect of Canadian history.

The First and Second World Wars were two of the most momentous events of the twentieth century. In Canada, they claimed 110,000 lives and altered both the country’s domestic life and its international position. A Nation in Conflict is a concise, comparative overview of the Canadian national experience in the two world wars that transformed the nation and its people.With each chapter, military historians Jeffrey A. Keshen and Andrew Iarocci address Canada’s contribution to the war and its consequences. Integrating the latest research in military, social, political, and gender history, they examine everything from the front lines to the home front. Was conscription necessary? Did the conflicts change the status of Canadian women? Was Canada’s commitment worth the cost?Written both for classroom use and for the general reader, A Nation in Conflict is an accessible introduction to the complexities of Canada’s involvement in the twentieth century’s most important conflicts.

The Dominion of Shoppers is a concise introduction to the long history of Canadian consumption. Building on the “four Ps” of consumer history – place, product, payment, and power – historian Steve Penfold traces the complex mix of business, economic, social, and cultural dynamics that shaped shopping and exchange from the bygone fur trade to contemporary online buying. Stretching from the 17th to the 21st century, The Dominion of Shoppers builds its narrative around several key moments in the history of the (now bankrupt) Hudson’s Bay Company, leading the reader through the exchanges of the fur trade, retail in settler colonialism, modern consumption, post-World War Two consumer boom, consumer nationalism, state regulation, and more recent technological and retail disruptions. Through the pages of this book, readers will visit fur trade posts, public markets, small rural shops, department stores, shopping malls, power centres, discount houses, and online markets. The Dominion of Shoppers is a valuable introduction to Canadian consumerism for historians, students, and anyone interested in Canada’s past and present.

Commemorating Canada is a concise narrative overview of the development of history and commemoration in Canada, designed for use in courses on public history, historical memory, heritage preservation, and related areas.Examining why, when, where, and for whom historical narratives have been important, Cecilia Morgan describes the growth of historical pageantry, popular history, textbooks, historical societies, museums, and monuments through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Showing how Canadians have clashed over conflicting interpretations of history and how they have come together to create shared histories, she demonstrates the importance of history in shaping Canadian identity. Though public history in both French and English Canada was written predominantly by white, middle-class men, Morgan also discusses the activism and agency of women, immigrants, and Indigenous peoples. The book concludes with a brief examination of present-day debates over Canada’s history and Canadians’ continuing interest in their pasts.

A concise, elegant survey of a complex aspect of Canadian history, A Short History of the State in Canada examines the theory and reality of governance within Canada’s distinctive political heritage: a combination of Indigenous, French, and British traditions, American statism and anti-statism, and diverse, practical experiments and experiences.E.A. Heaman takes the reader through the development of the state in both principle and practice, examining Indigenous forms of government before European contact; the interplay of French and British colonial institutions before and after the Conquest of New France; the creation of the nineteenth-century liberal state; and, finally, the rise and reconstitution of the modern social welfare state. Moving beyond the history of institutions to include the development of political cultures and social politics, A Short History of the State in Canada is a valuable introduction to the topic for political scientists, historians, and anyone interested in Canada’s past and present.

A concise, elegant survey of a complex aspect of Canadian history, A Short History of the State in Canada examines the theory and reality of governance within Canada’s distinctive political heritage: a combination of Indigenous, French, and British traditions, American statism and anti-statism, and diverse, practical experiments and experiences.E.A. Heaman takes the reader through the development of the state in both principle and practice, examining Indigenous forms of government before European contact; the interplay of French and British colonial institutions before and after the Conquest of New France; the creation of the nineteenth-century liberal state; and, finally, the rise and reconstitution of the modern social welfare state. Moving beyond the history of institutions to include the development of political cultures and social politics, A Short History of the State in Canada is a valuable introduction to the topic for political scientists, historians, and anyone interested in Canada’s past and present.