Kategoria BISAC: History >> Canada - Post-Confederation (1867-)

The Canadian prairies are often envisioned as dry, windswept fields; however, much of southern Manitoba is not arid plain but wet prairie, poorly drained land subject to frequent flooding.

Wet Prairie brings to light the problems and complexities of surface water management in Manitoba, from early efforts to drain the landscape to late-twentieth-century attempts to establish watershed management. Irregular water-flow patterns challenged the checkerboard landscape of the 1872 federal Dominion Lands Act, and homesteaders found their agricultural ambitions at odds with local...

Westward Bound debunks the myth of Canada's peaceful West and the masculine conceptions of law and violence upon which it rests by shifting the focus from Mounties and whisky traders to criminal cases involving women between 1886 and 1940. Erickson's analysis of these cases shows that, rather than a desire to protect, official responses to the most intimate or violent acts betrayed an impulse to maintain boundaries between men and women, Native people and newcomers, and capital and labor. Victims and accused could only hope to harness entrenched ideas about masculinity, femininity,...

In Wife to Widow, historian Bettina Bradbury explores the little studied phenomenon of the transition from wife to widowhood to offer new insights into the law, politics, demography, religion, and domestic life of early nineteenth-century Montreal.

Bradbury's unique history spans the lives of two generations of Montreal women who married either before or after the Patriote rebellions of 1837-38 to reveal a picture of a city and its inhabitants across a period of profound change. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, from church and court records, censuses, and tax documents,...

In 1910, young Pierre Maturie bid farewell to his comfortable bourgeois existence in rural France and travelled to northern Alberta in search of independence, adventure, and newfound prosperity. Some sixty years later, he wrote of the four years he spent in Canada before he returned to France in 1914 to fight in the First World War. Like that of so many youthful pioneers, his story is one of adventure and hardship - perilous journeys, railroad construction in the Rockies, panning for gold in swift-flowing streams, transporting goods for the Hudson's Bay Company along the Athabasca River....

In the early twentieth century, the Canadian Lakehead was known as a breeding ground for revolution, a place where harsh conditions in dockyards, lumber mills, and railway yards drove immigrants into radical labour politics.

This intensely engaging history reasserts Northwestern Ontario's rightful reputation as a birthplace of leftism in Canada by exposing the conditions that gave rise to an array of left-wing organizations, including the Communist Party, the One Big Union, and the Industrial Workers of the World. Yet, as Michel Beaulieu shows, the circumstances and actions of...

During the first two decades of this century, the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway played an important part in the development of the north-central corridor of British Columbia. The GTP, which ran from Winnipeg via the Yellowhead Pass and Edmonton to Prince Rupert on the northwest coast, was built to supplant the Canadian Pacific line to Vancouver. The B.C. line was the most expensive and least remunerative of its sections and contributed ultimately to the company's collapse in 1919.

In A Thousand Blunders, Frank Leonard looks at why the 'Road of a Thousand Wonders' failed to live...

During the Second World War, thousands of First Nations people joined in the national crusade to defend freedom and democracy. High rates of Native enlistment and public demonstrations of patriotism encouraged Canadians to re-examine the roles and status of Native people in Canadian society. The Red Man's on the Warpath explores how wartime symbolism and imagery propelled the "Indian problem" onto the national agenda, and why assimilation remained the goal of post-war Canadian Indian policy--even though the war required that it be rationalized in new ways.

The word "Indian"...

The government of Alberta in the 1990s actively contested the legal rights of sexual minority citizens. Provincial premier Ralph Klein defended this position by claiming that most Albertans, whom he characterized as "severely normal," were not in favor of recognizing homosexuality as a protected category in the provincial human rights code.

Gloria Filax explores how youth identities have been constructed through dominant and often competing discourses about youth, sexuality, and gender, and how queer youth in the province of Alberta negotiated the contradictions of these discourses....

When Vincent Massey wrote On Being Canadian in 1948, he acknowledged the importance of the arts to education and citizenship. He did not consider what the arts can tell us about being Canadian or about being ourselves. In On the Art of Being Canadian, Sherrill Grace traces how painters, writers, and filmmakers have shaped Canadian identity in three fields of representation that are staples in Canadian culture ? the North, iconic national figures, and war. By telling stories in their chosen medium and genre about life here or about events and figures from the past, she shows that...