Anxious Days and Tearful Nights


Book Description

What was it like to be a soldier's wife in Canada during the First World War? More than 80,000 Canadian women were married to men who left home to fight in the war, and its effects on their lives were transformative and often traumatic. Yet the everyday struggles of Canadian war wives, lived far from the battlefields of France, have remained in the shadows of historical memory. Anxious Days and Tearful Nights highlights how Canadian women's experiences of wartime marital separation resembled and differed from those of their European counterparts. Drawing on the letters of married couples separated by wartime service and the military service records of hundreds of Canadian soldiers, Martha Hanna reveals how couples used correspondence to maintain the routine and the affection of domestic life. She explores how women managed households and budgets, how those with children coped with the challenges of what we today would call single parenthood, and when and why some war wives chose to relocate to Britain to be nearer to their husbands. More than anything else, the life of a war wife - especially a war wife separated from her husband for years on end - was marked and marred by unrelieved psychological stress. Through this close personal lens Hanna reveals a broader picture of how war's effects persist across time and space.




Anxious Days and Tearful Nights


Book Description

What was it like to be a soldier's wife in Canada during the First World War? More than 80,000 Canadian women were married to men who left home to fight in the war, and its effects on their lives were transformative and often traumatic. Yet the everyday struggles of Canadian war wives, lived far from the battlefields of France, have remained in the shadows of historical memory. Anxious Days and Tearful Nights highlights how Canadian women's experiences of wartime marital separation resembled and differed from those of their European counterparts. Drawing on the letters of married couples separated by wartime service and the military service records of hundreds of Canadian soldiers, Martha Hanna reveals how couples used correspondence to maintain the routine and the affection of domestic life. She explores how women managed households and budgets, how those with children coped with the challenges of what we today would call single parenthood, and when and why some war wives chose to relocate to Britain to be nearer to their husbands. More than anything else, the life of a war wife - especially a war wife separated from her husband for years on end - was marked and marred by unrelieved psychological stress. Through this close personal lens Hanna reveals a broader picture of how war's effects persist across time and space.




Peopling the North American City


Book Description

Benefiting from Montreal's remarkable archival records, Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton use an ingenious sampling of twelve surnames to track the comings and goings, births, deaths, and marriages of the city's inhabitants. The book demonstrates the importance of individual decisions by outlining the circumstances in which people decided where to move, when to marry, and what work to do. Integrating social and spatial analysis, the authors provide insights into the relationships among the city's three cultural communities, show how inequalities of voice, purchasing power, and access to real property were maintained, and provide first-hand evidence of the impact of city living and poverty on families, health, and futures. The findings challenge presumptions about the cultural "assimilation" of migrants as well as our understanding of urban life in nineteenth-century North America. The culmination of twenty-five years of work, Peopling the North American City is an illuminating look at the humanity of cities and the elements that determine whether their citizens will thrive or merely survive.




The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World


Book Description

The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World explores the question of how a culture - a collective consciousness - is born. Gérard Bouchard compares the histories of New World collectivities, which were driven by a dream of freedom and sovereignty, and finds both major differences and striking commonalities in their formation and evolution. He also considers the myths and discursive strategies devised by elites in their efforts to unite and mobilize diversified populations.




Lost in the Crowd


Book Description

In December 1915, as the First World War wore on, Acadian leaders meeting in New Brunswick deplored how soldiers from their communities were “lost in the crowd” of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. They successfully lobbied the federal government for the creation of an Acadian national unit that would be French-speaking, Catholic, and led by their own. More than a thousand Acadians from across the Maritime provinces, Quebec, and the American northeast answered the call. In Lost in the Crowd Gregory Kennedy draws on military archives, census records, newspapers, and soldiers’ letters to present a new kind of military history focusing on the experiences of Acadian soldiers and their families before, during, and after the war. He shows that Acadians were just as likely to enlist as their English-speaking counterparts across the Maritimes, though the backgrounds of the volunteers were quite different. Kennedy tackles controversial topics often missing from the previous historiography, such as underage recruits, desertion, and army discipline. With the help of the 1921 Canadian Census, he explores the factors that influenced post-war outcomes, both positive and negative, for soldiers, families, and communities. Lost in the Crowd offers a completely new and replicable approach to the traditional regimental history, reconstituting the lives of soldiers and their families. The focus on the Acadians, a francophone minority group in the Maritime provinces, significantly shifts our understanding of French Canada and the First World War.




Children of Aataentsic


Book Description

Trigger's work integrates insights from archaeology, history, ethnology, linguistics, and geography. This wide knowledge allows him to show that, far from being a static prehistoric society quickly torn apart by European contact and the fur trade, almost every facet of Iroquoian culture had undergone significant change in the centuries preceding European contact. He argues convincingly that the European impact upon native cultures cannot be correctly assessed unless the nature and extent of precontact change is understood. His study not only stands Euro-American stereotypes and fictions on their heads, but forcefully and consistently interprets European and Indian actions, thoughts, and motives from the perspective of the Huron culture. The Children of Aataentsic revises widely accepted interpretations of Indian behaviour and challenges cherished myths about the actions of some celebrated Europeans during the "heroic age" of Canadian history. In a new preface, Trigger describes and evaluates contemporary controversies over the ethnohistory of eastern Canada.




Harriet’s Legacies


Book Description

Historic freedom fighter and conductor of the Underground Railroad Harriet Tubman risked her life to ferry enslaved people from America to freedom in Canada. Her legacy instigates and orients this exploration of the history of Black lives and the future of collective struggle in Canada. Harriet’s Legacies recuperates the significance of Tubman’s time in Canada as more than just an interlude in her American narrative: it is a new point from which to think about Black diasporic mobilities, possibilities, and histories. Through essays and creative works this collection articulates new territory for Tubman in relation to the Black Atlantic archive, connecting her legacies of survival, freedom, and cultural expression within a transnational framework. Contributors take up the question of legacy in ways that remap discourses of genealogy and belonging, positioning Tubman as an important part of today’s freedom struggles. Integrating scholarship with creative and curatorial practices, the volume expands conversations about culture and expression in African Canadian life across art, literature, performance, politics, and public pedagogy. Considering questions of culture, community, and futures, Harriet’s Legacies explores what happened in the wake of Tubman’s legacy and situates Canada as a key part of that dialogue.




Take a Number


Book Description

Inspired by American studies of the impact of government programs on clients' political activity, Take a Number breaks new ground by investigating the lessons that people draw from their experiences with government bureaucracies, reaching very different conclusions about the effects of program participation in Canada. People's experiences with service providers matter. Far from being de-politicizing, negative experiences can be empowering, stimulating greater political interest and more political activity. In contrast to the findings of some American studies, there is no evidence that these encounters leave claimants in Canada with the sense that they are neither legitimate nor effective actors in the public sphere. Rather than discouraging participation in politics, being a recipient of means-tested benefits likewise seems to be politically mobilizing. Based on extensive survey data, Take a Number casts new light on the problem of non-take-up of social benefits. Elisabeth Gidengil reveals that those who are most likely to benefit are often unaware of government programs. The more demanding and intrusive the claiming process, the more likely claimants are to find it difficult to access the program. These experiences with government programs prove to have larger implications for users' confidence in institutions and their satisfaction with democracy. A wide-ranging study of the politicizing effects of social program participation, Take a Number introduces a compelling new dimension to our understanding of why some citizens are politically active while others remain quiescent.




How Schools Worked


Book Description

A richly textured study of educational developments in English-speaking Canada from the close of the Victorian Age to the eve of World War II.




Staples and Beyond


Book Description

Mel Watkins is an iconic figure in the development of the 'new' political economy. Bringing together Watkins' scholarly articles, this collection addresses the 'staple thesis' of Canadian economic and political development and the effort to extend Harold Innis' work by considering class relations and the role of the state.