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As a window into contemporary debates about the concept of experience, this essay examines 1934's Vancouver Through the Eyes of a Hobo, which may have the distinction of being the only extant book about hoboing in Depression-era Canada written by a self-identified transient, Victor Wadham Forster. Forster mapped for his readers a dialectic: Nature -- an antimodern pastoral refuge where hoboes lived in freedom -- stood against the City -- a wholly modern capitalist nightmare, home to economic exploitation and its attendant moral degradations. Yet, the author also articulated his desire to destroy this way of life -- and the foundation of his claims to authority as a writer -- in order to effect his and every hobo's reintegration with society. Casting off his avowed allegiance to tramping, Forster divined for his readers a third social formation, a new kind of capitalism infused with a Christian ethos of brotherhood and cooperation, and propped up by an unbounded white supremacy and a rigidly patriarchal division of labour. Herein lies the tragedy of Vancouver Through the Eves of a Hobo: to save the hobo required the destruction of the hobo way of life.
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The article reviews the book, "Labour before the Law: The Regulation of Workers' Collective Action in Canada, 1900-1948," by Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker.
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In March 1919, over 230 union delegates assembled at the Western Labor Conference in Calgary to chart a radical new direction for wage workers through the creation of a revolutionary industrial union centre, the One Big Union (OBU). This essay argues that the practices of the OBU's radical manhood, their particular sense of what it meant to be a union man, shaped the organization's structure and politics as well as the emergent culture which fostered such widespread working-class radicalism. Drawing upon already existing practices espoused by Canadian labourists and American Wobblies as well as fashioning new ones, OBU men distinguished radical manhood from both the class politics and the masculinities of male bosses and scabs. While the organization of working women was not seen as an important issue at the WLC, the upsurge in women's militancy during the labour revolt prompted OBU supporters to encourage these women to join their male comrades. At times, advocates of the One Big Union posed the questions of women's oppression and emancipation as crucial elements of the union's purpose; their infrequent ideological commitment, however, too often failed to translate into organizational gains for working-class women and the development of feminist practices within the union. In their challenge to the bourgeois order, OBU men created a program that, in the prevailing context of gender relations, meant that the One Big Union would bring about the transformation, but not the eradication, of men's power.
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The article reviews the book, "Woody, Cisco, and Me: Seamen Three in the Merchant Marine," by Jim Longhi.
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The article reviews the book, "The Centralia Tragedy of 1919: Elmer Smith and the Wobblies," by Tom Copeland.
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This article reviews the book, "Toronto's Poor: A Rebellious History," by Bryan D. Palmer and Gaétan Héroux.
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The article reviews and comments on "The Tramp in America" by Tim Creswell, "Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America" by Todd DePastino, and "Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930" by Frank Tobias Higbie.
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In April 2017, more than 100 people gathered at the Halifax North Memorial Library for the official launch of the Lynn Jones African-Canadian and Diaspora Heritage Collection, housed at Saint Mary's University. ...This is a personal archive whose creation was an intentional act. At the tender age of eight, Lynn Jones began cutting out articles from the Truro newspaper, preserving stories pertaining to Black life in Nova Scotia and around the world. One of ten children, Lynn kept busy documenting the many activities of generations of the Jones family, from those who fought with the Black Battalion in World War I to those active today. Along the way, she added numerous documents – many of them not found elsewhere – and correspondence related to organizations such as the Black Working Group and the Public Service Alliance of Canada (psac) and individuals like Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael). The result is eighteen boxes, with talk of more to come. While the collection stretches from the 1960s to the 2010s, the bulk of material pertains to the 1980s and 1990s. -- Introduction
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Discusses the anti-Chinese racism surrounding the No. 1 Mine disaster of 1887, when Chinese miners were unfairly blamed for the tragedy. A sign and plaque were unveiled in 1999 at the disaster's site in Nanaimo, BC, where 53 of the 150 miners killed were Chinese.
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Introduces the second of the two-part series in the journal on the 50th anniversary of the publication of "The Making of the English Working Class" by E.P. Thompson. Articles include: "The Lost Causes of E. P. Thompson" by Dipesh Chakrabarty; "Class Formation, Politics, Structures of Feeling" by Geoff Eley; "Comrade Thompson and Saint Foucault" by Todd McCallum; "Exploitation: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?" by James Epstein; "Looking Back and Ahead" by August Carbonella; "The Making dans les eaux troubles de l’historiographie québécoise : réception hésitante d’un livre en avant de son temps" by Robert Tremblay; "Who now reads E.P. Thompson? Or, (Re)reading The Making at UQAM" by Magda Fahrni; and "Individual Statements on E.P. Thompson" by, respectively, Jesse Lemisch, Alice Kessler-Harris, and June Hannam.