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 Goodlooks 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 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...

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...