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  • Each year, for generations, poor, ill-clad Newfoundland fishermen sailed out "to the ice" to hunt seals in the hope of a few pennies in wages from the prosperous merchants of St. John's. The year 1914 witnessed the worst in a long line of tragedies that were part of their way of life. For two long days and freezing nights a party of seal hunters - one hundred thirty-two men - were left stranded on a ice field floating in the North Atlantic in winter. They were thinly dressed, with almost no food, and with no hope of shelter on the ice against the snow or the constant, bitter winds. To survive, they had to keep moving, always moving. Those who lay down to rest died.... Publisher's description

  • This is a local study of steelworkers employed at, or aid off from, Stelco’s Hilton Works in Hamilton, Ontario. This local study has been situated in the context of the global restructuring of capitalism. The authors content that more than ever before the dynamics of the whole world economy limit and shape the actions of its past - a process referred to as “globalizing the local.” Restructuring is taking place in response to global demands. As the global net tighten, local regions and industry have less and less autonomy for independent development. Stelco is best conceived as a sit of the worldwide process of capital accumulation. How has this restructuring impacted on local regions and local worked? This question is the focus of this book, often answered in workers’ and management’s own words. --Publisher's description

  • During the five decades of the transformation of the policies which regulated the importation and placement of immigrant women into household service work, the policy was variously regulated by internal procedures, policy statement, and operational guidelines. This book examines these changes with a focus on understanding how bureaucracy such as Employment and Immigration Canada contributes, through its mandate, to shaping social relationships in the Canadian labour force and society. --Publisher's description

  • Why do men rape women? This is a question for which there are many political, psychological, and sociological answers, but few historical ones. Improper Advances is one of the first books to explore the history of sexual violence in any country. A study of women, men, and sexual crime in rural and northern Ontario, it expands the terms of current debates about sexuality and sexual violence. --Publisher's description

  • The Lower Canadian Rebellion of 1837 has been called the most important event in pre-Confederation history. Previously, it has been explained as a response to economic distress or as the result of manipulation by middle-class politicians. Lord Durham believed it was an expression of racial conflict. The Patriots and the People is a fundamental reinterpretation of the Rebellion. Allan Greer argues that far being passive victims of events, the habitants were actively responding to democratic appeals because the language of popular sovereignty was in harmony with their experience and outlook. He finds that a certain form of popular republicanism, with roots deep in the French-Canadian past, drove the anti-government campaign. Institutions such as the militia and the parish played an important part in giving shape to the movement, and the customs of the maypole and charivari provided models for the collective actions against local representatives of the colonial regime. In looking closely into the actions, motives, and mentality of the rural plebeians who formed a majority of those involved in the insurrection, Allan Greer brings to light new causes for the revolutionary role of the normally peaceful French-Canadian peasant. By doing so he provides a social history with new dimensions. --Publisher's description

  • During the last century, 26 million Italian women, men, and children have traded an uncertain future in Italy for the prospect of a better life elsewhere. Canada has long been home to Italian immigrants, but in the years just after the Second World War they began to arrive in multitudes. Toronto emerged as the most popular Canadian destination and now, with more than 400,000 residents of Italian heritage, has one of the largest Italian populations outside Italy. Franca Iacovetta describes the working-class experiences of those who came to Toronto from southern Italy between 1946 and 1965, focusing on the relations between newly arrived immigrant workers and their families." "The Italians who came to Toronto before 1965 were predominantly young, healthy women and men eager to secure jobs and prepared to make sacrifices in order to secure a more comfortable life for themselves and their children. Franca Iacovetta examines the changes many of them had to face during the transition from peasant worker in an under-developed, rural economy to wage-earner in an urban, industrial society." "Although both women and men had to struggle and were exploited, Iacovetta shows that they found innovative ways to recreate cherished rituals and customs from their homeland and to derive a sense of dignity and honour from the labours they performed." "Such Hardworking People is informed by a feminist analysis. Iacovetta shows that for both sexes work patterns and experiences, as well as self-perceptions, were influenced by domestic responsibilities and gender relations within the household and by the labour market, employer strategies, and kin-linked networks of support. In addition to conducting numerous interviews with some of the immigrants, she has drawn on recent scholarship in immigration, family, labour studies, oral history, and women's history. --Publisher's description

  • In the early 1970s, when women's history began to claim attention as an emerging discipline in North American universities, it was dominated by a middle-class Anglo-Saxon bias. Today the field is much more diverse, a development reflected in the scope of this volume. Rather than documenting the experiences of women solely in a framework of gender analysis, its authors recognize the interaction of race, class, and gender as central in shaping women's lives, and men's. These essays represent an exciting breakthrough in women's studies, expanding the borders of the discipline while breaking down barriers between mainstream and women's history. --Publisher's description. Contents: When the mother of the race is free': Race, reproduction, and sexuality in first-wave feminism / Mariana Valverde -- Maidenly girls' or 'designing women'? The crime of seduction in turn-of-the-century Ontario / Karen Dubinsky -- The 'hallelujah lasses': Working-class women in the Salvation Army in English Canada, 1882-92 / Lynne Marks -- The alchemy of politicization: Socialist women and the early Canadian left / Janice Newton -- Wounded womanhood and dead men: Chivalry and the trials of Clara Ford and Carrie Davies / Carolyn Strange -- Class, ethnicity, and gender in the Eaton strikes of 1912 and 1934 / Ruth A. Frager -- 'Feminine trifles of vast importance': Writing gender into the history of consumption / Cynthia Wright -- Making 'new Canadians': Social workers, women, and the reshaping of immigrant families / Franco Iacovetta.

  • This volume completes the series of Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Bulletins for late 1933 and 1934. It begins a new series on the Depression years. These Bulletins allow us to see not only the nature of RCMP Security concerns but also the underlying ideology of the Security Service. The volume also contains a critical introduction by Gregory S. Kealey. --Publisher's description

  • This volume documents the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's surveillance activities during 1935 and contains informants', agents', and operatives' perspectives on developments within the Communist Party of Canada on labour unions, and on unemployed organizations. It includes coverage of the 1935 federal election, the successes of red unions, and the development of popular front strategies. The introduction by historian John Manley provides a considered overview of the events. The volume is fully indexed. --Publisher's description

  • This volume is a continuation of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Bulletins series on the Depression. The RCMP Security Service reported in these Bulletins on security and intelligence matters to Cabinet and other government officals. Those for 1936 contain much material on labour and the left. --Publisher's description

  • These Bulletins show that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's continued fascination with the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) was broadened to include the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) in 1937. The RCMP believed the CPC's fingerprints were all over the CIO. Other topics examined in the bulletins include reports on the Spanish Civil War, municipal elections, ethnic newspapers and strikes. --Publisher's description

  • This volume completes the Depression Years Series and, for the time being, our publication of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Bulletins, John Manley examines the RCMP fascination with the CPC and how the CPC coped with the Popular Front and the Nazi-Soviet pact. Manley concludes that the CPC's anti-war line was a disaster, claiming that "undoubtedly..., the Comintern was the RCMP's best friend"(29) --Publisher's description

  • This volume completes the series of Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Bulletins for World War II, following on the War Series, Vol. 1, 1939-1941. These Bulletins allow us to see not only the nature of RCMP Security concerns but also the underlying ideology of the Security Service. The volume also contains a critical introduction by the editors. --Publisher's description

  • First published in England in 1958, this book is a bitter, critical reassessment of the moral and cultural values of Canada. Levine's account of his three-month journey from Halifax to Ucluelet, a fishing village on the west coast, is an unconventional portrait of Canada's underbelly. The book ends with the words: `I wondered why I felt so bitter about Canada. After all, it was all part of a dream, an experiment that could not come off. It was foolish to believe that you can take the throwouts, the rejects, the human kickabouts from Europe and tell them: Here you have a second chance. Here you can start a new life. But no one ever mentioned the price one had to pay; how much of oneself you had to betray.' Canada Made Me was regarded as so controversial that it did not appear in a Canadian edition until 1979. Critical opinion, however, has slowly swung around to the point the book was recently described in the Globe and Mail as a `laconic classic'. For this new edition Norman Levine has written an introduction which traces the book's publishing history and reputation.

  • This innovative collection of articles approaches American Indian history and culture from a Marxist perspective. The contributors, from the United States and Canada, have jumped the boundaries among the social sciences to consider issues of macroeconomics and intercultural conflict. The result is a stimulating and substantial contribution that will interest any reader concerned with policy affecting North American Indians. The contributors are particularly attentive to process and change. They show the relationships among the historical periods characterized by the fur trade, land cessions, and the reservation education system. They expose the collusion among agencies of the dominant society and how Indian people reacted, reorganizing themselves and their institutions to face every new, changed situation. --Publisher's description

  • Fishing rights are one of the major areas of dispute for aboriginals in Canada today. Dianne Newell explores this controversial issue and looks at the ways government regulatory policy and the law have affected Indian participation in the Pacific Coast fisheries." "For centuries, the economies of Pacific Coast Indians were based on their fisheries. Marine resources, mainly salmon, were used for barter, trade, ceremony, and personal consumption. This pattern persisted after the arrival of European and Asian immigrants, even during the first phases of the non-Indian commercial fishing industry when Indian families were depended upon for their labour and expertise. But as the industrial fishery grew, changes in labour supply, markets, and technology rendered Pacific Coast Indians less central to the enterprise and the aboriginal fishery became legally defined as food fishing. By the late 1960s, rigid new licence-limitation policies were introduced and regulations transformed the processing sector." "The result was reduced participation for fishers and shoreworkers, and the opportunities for Indian men and women declined dramatically. Government programs to increase or even stabilize Indian participation ultimately failed. Newell concludes that the governments of Canada and British Columbia have historically regarded the aboriginal fishery narrowly and unjustly as a privilege, not a right, and have in fact moved against any changes that might put Indians into competition with non-Indians. Recently, BC Indians won a Supreme Court victory in Regina v. Sparrow (1990) that will make it easier to change federal fisheries policies, but aboriginal fishing rights remain before the courts and under federal government investigation. --Publisher's description

  • During the mid to late 1840s, dramatic riots shook the communities of Woodstock, Fredericton, and Saint John. Irish-Catholic immigrants fought Protestant Orangemen, with fists, club, and firearms. The violence resulted in death and destruction unprecedented in the British North American colonies. This book is the first serious historical treatment of the bloody riots and the tangled events that led to them. Scott See shows mid-century New Brunswick roughly awakened from the slumbering provincialism of its post-Loyalist phase by the stirrings of capitalism and by the tidal wave of Irish immigration that followed the potato famine. His main focus is the Loyal Orange Order, the anti-Catholic organization that clashed with the immigrants, many of them impoverished exiles. See presents an extraordinary profile of the Orange Order and concludes provocatively that it was a nativist organization similar to the xenophobic groups active at the time in the United States. Unlike other recent works on the Order, his book emphasizes the importance of the organization's specifically North American concerns, and questions the significance of its connections to Old World sectarianism. --Publisher's description

  • Frances Swyripe here presents the interpretive study of women of Ukrainian origin in Canada. She analyses the images and myths that have grown up around them, why they arose, and how they were used by the leaders of the community. Swyripa argues that ethnicity combined with gender to shape the experience of Ukrainian-Canadian women, as statelessness and national oppression in the homeland joined with a negative group stereotype and minority status in emigration to influence women's roles and options. She explores community attitudes towards the peasant immigrant pioneer, towards her daughters exposed to the opportunities, prejudice, and assimilatory pressure of the Anglo-Canadian world, towards the 'Great Women' evoked as models and sources of inspiration, and towards the familiar baba. In these stereotypes of the female figure, and in the activities of women's organizations, the community played out its many tensions: between a strong attachment to canada and an equally strong attachment to Ukraine; between nationalists who sought to liberate Ukraine from Polish and Soviet rule and progressives who saw themselves as part of an international proletariat; between women's responsibilities as mothers and homemakers and their obligation to participate in both Canadian and community life. Swyripa finds that the concerns of community leaders did not always coincide with those of the grassroots. The differences were best expressed in the evolution of the peasant immigrant pioneer woman as a group symbol, where the tensions between a cultural ethnic consciousness and a politicized national consciousness as the core of Ukrainian-Canadian identity were played out in the female figure. --Publisher's description

  • The autobiography of Fred W. Thompson - socialist, Wobbly, organizer, soapboxer, editor, class-war prisoner, educator, historian, and publisher. This book is an important contribution to the understanding of working-class radicalism in twentieth-century North America. --Website description

Last update from database: 3/14/25, 4:10 AM (UTC)

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