Mapping the history of Canadian Jews from the arrival of the first settlers before 1750 through to the 1860s, Search Out the Land introduces a new set of colourful players on Canada's stage. Ezekiel Solomons, John Franks, Jacob Franks, Chapman Abraham, Rachel Myers, Moses David, Samuel Hart, Elizabeth Lyons, and a host of others now take their appropriate place in Canadian history. Focusing on the significant role played by Jews in British North America in the fight for civil and political rights, the authors compare the development of Canadians' rights with that in other British...

Noivo examines how the intersection of migration and family projects affect kin ties, analyses the multiple burdens generated by migration, class, gender, generation, and minority status, and discusses the interplay between family and economic life. Although forced to cope with marital and intergenerational tensions and conflicts, these families demonstrate impressive coping mechanisms, ingenious economic strategies, and psychopolitics aimed at family survival and individual and collective welfare. Giving voice to an "invisible" cultural minority, Inside Ethnic Families exposes the pains and...

Arguing that Jewish North American writing is too commonly discussed as part of the mainstream, neglecting the Jewish aspects of the works, Ravvin places the writing of Bellow, Richler, Cohen, West, Mandel, Roth, and Rosenfarb within the Jewish context that the works demand. Ravvin depicts a Jewish cultural landscape within which postwar writers contend with community and identity, continuity and loss, and highlights the way this particular landscape is entangled with broader literary and cultural traditions. He considers Bellow and West alongside apocalyptic narratives, discusses Cohen in...

Noivo examines how the intersection of migration and family projects affect kin ties, analyses the multiple burdens generated by migration, class, gender, generation, and minority status, and discusses the interplay between family and economic life. Although forced to cope with marital and intergenerational tensions and conflicts, these families demonstrate impressive coping mechanisms, ingenious economic strategies, and psychopolitics aimed at family survival and individual and collective welfare. Giving voice to an "invisible" cultural minority, Inside Ethnic Families exposes the pains and...

Dirk Hoerder shows us that it is not shining railroad tracks or statesmen in Ottawa that make up the story of Canada but rather individual stories of life and labour - Caribbean women who care for children born in Canada, lonely prairie homesteaders, miners in Alberta and British Columbia, women labouring in factories, Chinese and Japanese immigrants carving out new lives in the face of hostility. Hoerder examines these individual experiences in Creating Societies, the first systematic overview of the total Canadian immigrant experience. Using letters, travel accounts, diaries, memoirs, and...

By examining Social Credit's anti-Semitic propaganda and the reaction of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Stingel details their mutual antagonism and explores why Congress was unable to stop Social Credit's blatant defamation. She argues that Congress's ineffective response was part of a broader problem in which passivity and a belief in "quiet diplomacy" undermined many of its efforts to combat intolerance. Stingel shows that both Social Credit and Congress changed considerably in the post-war period, as Social Credit abandoned its anti-Semitic trappings and Congress gradually adopted an...

From the mid-eighteenth century on, cultural life in the northern valley of the St John River blended the traditions of Acadian and French Canadian settlers with those of American immigrants. In the southern valley, Mi'kmaq interacted with American newcomers and Loyalist settlers, while the later influx of Scottish and Irish immigrants introduced more layers of cultural traditions. Using an impressively diverse combination of artifacts, artwork, maps, and primary literature from over sixty museum collections and archives, Cook addresses the experiences of immigrants and artisans and their...

The work is the result of over thirty years of oral fieldwork among the last Gaels in Cape Breton, for whom piping fit unself-consciously into community life, as well as an exhaustive synthesis of Scottish archival and secondary sources. Reflecting the invaluable memories of now-deceased new world Gaelic lore-bearers, John Gibson shows that traditional community piping in both the old and new world Gaihealtachlan was, and for a long time remained, the same, exposing the distortions introduced by the tendency to interpret the written record from the perspective of modern,...

Ward draws upon a rich record of events and opinion in the provincial press, manuscript collections, and successive federal enquiries and royal commissions on Asian immigration. He locates the origins of west coast racism in the frustrated vision of a white British Columbia and an unshakeable belief in the unassimilability of the Asian immigrant. Canadian attitudes were dominated by a series of interlocking, hostile stereotypes derived from western perceptions of Asia and modified by the encounter between whites and Asians on the north Pacific coast. Public pressure on local, provincial, and...

Based on interviews with Leamington greenhouse growers and migrant Mexican workers, Tanya Basok offers a timely analysis of why the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program is needed. She argues that while Mexican workers do not necessarily constitute cheap labour for Canadian growers, they are vital for the survival of some agricultural sectors because they are always available for work, even on holidays and weekends, or when exhausted, sick, or injured. Basok exposes the mechanisms that make Mexican seasonal workers unfree and shows that the workers' virtual inability to refuse the employer's...