Welcome back to our monthly series, “Upcoming Publications in Canadian History,” where I’ve compiled information on all the upcoming releases for the following month in the field of Canadian history from every Canadian academic press, all in one place. This includes releases in both English and French. To see the releases from last month, click here.
***Please note that the cover images and book blurbs are used with permission from the publishers.***
N.B. This list only includes new releases, not rereleases in different formats.
March 1
Geoffrey Hayes, Crerar’s Lieutenants: Inventing the Canadian Junior Army Officer, 1939-45 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018)
At the height of the war in 1943, the future head of the First Canadian Army, General Harry Crerar, penned a long memorandum in which he noted that there was still much confusion as to “what constitutes an ‘Officer.’” His words reflected the army’s preoccupation with creating an ideal officer who would not only satisfy the immediate demands of war but also conform to pervasive, little-discussed notions of social class and masculinity.
Drawing on a wide range of sources and exploring the issue of leadership through new lenses, this book looks at how the army selected and trained its junior officers after 1939 to embody the new ideal. It finds that these young men – through the mentors they copied, the correspondence they left, even the songs they sang – practised a “temperate heroism” that distinguished them from the idealized, heroic visions of officership from the First World War, and also from British and even German representations of wartime officership.
Fascinating and highly original, Crerar’s Lieutenants sheds new light on the challenges many junior officers faced during the Second World War – not only on the battlefield but from Canadians’ often conflicted views about social class and gender.
This work is primarily directed at scholars and students of Canadian history, military history, and gender history (especially masculinity studies). Because of its subject matter and the author’s engaging writing style, it’s likely to also attract general readers.
Available Formats: Paperback, Hardcover, ePub, PDF
Publisher’s Link: https://www.ubcpress.ca/crerars-lieutenants
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Crerars-Lieutenants-Inventing-Canadian-Officer/dp/0774834846/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1519303241&sr=1-4
Peter Neary, Alan Caswell Collier, Relief Stiff: An Artist’s Letters from Depression-Era British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018)
In 1934, aspiring Toronto-born artist Alan Collier wrote to his intended from Vancouver, “I have decided that it is impossible for me to get a job … if I can’t get in a relief camp for the winter, I’ll be back to Toronto sometime this fall.”
Alan Caswell Collier (1911–90) went on to become one of Canada’s most successful landscape artists, but during the Depression he joined the thousands of single, unemployed men who rode the rails and hitchhiked across North America in search of jobs. He eventually made his way to British Columbia’s remote government-run relief camps. Labouring for twenty cents a day, he detailed camp life and politics in letters to his fiancée and depicted his fellow “relief stiffs” and the BC landscape in character sketches and paintings.
llustrated with well-known paintings and never-before-published sketches, portraits, and landscapes, Alan Caswell Collier, Relief Stiff captures in vivid detail a world where the Department of National Defence offered youths bed and board, clothes, tobacco, and twenty cents a day but few outlets for their anger and discontent. In the spring of 1935, men from the camps participated in the Communist-led On-to-Ottawa Trek, a defining event in Canadian history. Collier, a born contrarian with a strong sense of social superiority, resisted the mobilization that led to the Trek, but in the 1940s he became a union activist and an ardent social democrat.
Incisive, fresh, and opinionated, Collier’s letters peel back time, opening a window on the feelings and thoughts of an eminent Ontario artist and on a generation who came of age during an era of economic upheaval and class conflict.
This book will appeal to anyone interested in the lives of Canadian artists, the Great Depression, BC history, art history, labour history, or narratives of disaffected youth.
Available Formats: Hardcover
Publisher’s Link: https://www.ubcpress.ca/alan-caswell-collier-relief-stiff
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Alan-Caswell-Collier-Relief-Stiff/dp/0774834986/ref=sr_1_39?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1519303481&sr=1-39
Lindsay Keegitah Borrows, Otter’s Journey through Indigenous Language and Law (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018)
Otter’s Journey employs the Anishinaabe tradition of storytelling to explore how Indigenous language revitalization can inform the emerging field of Indigenous legal revitalization. Indigenous languages and laws need bodies to live in. Learning an endangered language and a suppressed legal system are similar experiences. When we bring language back to life, it becomes a medium for developing human relationships. Likewise, when laws are written on people’s hearts, true revitalization has occurred.
Storytelling has the capacity to address feelings and demonstrate themes – to illuminate beyond argument and theoretical exposition. In Otter’s Journey, Lindsay Keegitah Borrows follows Otter, a dodem (clan) relation from the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation, on a journey across Anishinaabe, Inuit, Māori, Coast Salish, and Abenaki territories, through a narrative of Indigenous resurgence. While Otter’s Journey is guided by a literal truth, it also splices and recombines real-world events and characters.
Through her engaging protagonist, Borrows reveals that the processes, philosophies, and practices flowing from Indigenous languages and laws can emerge from under the layers of colonial laws, policies, and languages to become guiding principles in people’s contemporary lives. We need the best of all people’s teachings to lead us into the future.
Students and scholars in a wide range of subfields within Indigenous studies will find this book of considerable appeal, as will scholars and students of law, literature, education, and language studies, and those with an interest in Indigenous methodologies.
Available Format: Hardcover
Publisher’s Link: https://www.ubcpress.ca/otters-journey-through-indigenous-language-and-law
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Otters-Journey-through-Indigenous-Language/dp/0774836571/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1519304198&sr=8-1&keywords=Otter%E2%80%99s+Journey+through+Indigenous+Language+and+Law
March 8
Joan Sangster, One Hundred Years of Struggle: The History of Women and the Vote in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018)
The achievement of the vote in 1918 is often celebrated as a triumphant moment in the onward, upward advancement of Canadian women, a moment symbolized by famous suffragists such as Nellie McClung and famous events such as the Winnipeg Mock Parliament.
In One Hundred Years of Struggle, acclaimed historian Joan Sangster looks beyond the shiny rhetoric of anniversary celebrations and Heritage Minutes to show that the struggle for equality included gains and losses, inclusions and exclusions, depending on a woman’s race, class, and location in the nation.
Beginning with debates by anti-slavery advocate Mary Shadd Cary in the 1850s and ending with Indigenous women’s struggle to gain the vote in the 1950s and 1960s, Sangster travels back in time to tell a new, more inclusive story for a new generation.
The history of the vote, as Joan Sangster tells it, offers vital insights into our political life, exposing not only the fissures of inequality that cut deep into our country’s past but also their weaknesses in the face of resistance, optimism, and protest – an inspiring legacy that resonates to this day.
This book is for all Canadians who want to know more about our history, the history of women, and the state of our democratic traditions.
Available Formats: Hardcover
Publisher’s Link: https://www.ubcpress.ca/one-hundred-years-of-struggle
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/One-Hundred-Years-Struggle-History/dp/0774835338/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1519303241&sr=1-12
March 15
Allan K. McDougall, Lisa Philips and Daniel L. Boxberger, Before and After the State: Politics, Poetics, and People(s) in the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018)
The creation of the Canada–US border in the Pacific Northwest is often presented as a tale of two nations and two ideologies, but beyond the macro-political dynamics is the experience of individuals.
Before and After the State takes a multidisciplinary approach to examining the imposition of a border across a region that already held a vibrant, highly complex society and dynamic trading networks. It details the evolution of local, trading, and immigrant populations as they moved into the Pacific Northwest and imposed control over public power. Allan McDougall, Lisa Philips, and Daniel Boxberger use case studies to document the malleable character of identity – the discrepancy between individual lives and externally imposed assessments of those lives – and review the strength of national narratives north and south of the border.
The authors explore fundamental questions of state formation, social transformation, and the (re)construction of identity to expose the devices and myths of nation building. In revealing the mechanics of this transformation, they demonstrate how the creation of nation states and borders affected the people who lived in the region before and through the transition – with repercussions that still reverberate.
This book will find an audience among scholars of Pacific Northwest and BC studies, Indigenous studies, anthropology, history, and borderland studies. It will also be of interest to political scientists and legal scholars of borderland issues.
Available Formats: Hardcover
Publisher’s Link: https://www.ubcpress.ca/before-and-after-the-state
March 28
L. Iris Newbold, K. Bruce Newbold, eds. “Without fear and with a manly heart”: The Great War Letters and Diaries of Private James Herbert Gibson (Waterloo: WLU Press, 2018)
Private James Herbert (Herb) Gibson was 26 years old when he volunteered for service in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the First World War. Born near Perth, Ontario and descended from Scottish settlers, Gibson enlisted against his father’s wishes because he viewed the war as justified and felt he needed to do his part. “Without fear and with a manly heart” collects his personal letters and diaries as well as those sent to him by family and friends. They reveal his beliefs, hopes, realizations, and tragedies through an account of his contribution to the war.
The letters trace Gibson’s wartime service from 1916 to 1919 from his enlistment and training with the 130th (Lanark and Renfrew) Battalion to his service on the Western Front with the 75th Battalion. Gibson was wounded twice, first near Vimy during the Gas Raid of March 1917 and again more seriously during a night patrol in July 1918 which ended his war. He also had to deal with tragedy on the home front from afar. Gibson’s religious beliefs significantly influenced and sustained him through his darkest hours. He felt himself a gentle man caught up “on an errand the full consequences of which we did not realize.”
Available Formats: Paperback
Publisher’s Link: https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/W/Without-fear-and-with-a-manly-heart
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Without-fear-manly-heart-Letters/dp/1771123451/ref=sr_1_52?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1519303560&sr=1-52
March 31
Thomas J. Courchene, Indigenous Nationals, Canadian Citizens: From First Contact to Canada 150 and Beyond (Kingston: MQUP, 2018)
Indigenous Nationals, Canadian Citizens offers a new paradigm for the relationship of Indigenous peoples with the settler societies in Canada. Thomas Courchene argues this model should be preferred to Canadian nationals, Canadian citizens (the traditional Assembly of First Nations vision) as well as to Indigenous nationals, Indigenous citizens (the Trudeau-Chrétien White Paper proposal).
Courchene begins with a detailed policy history from first contact to the 150th anniversary of Confederation, followed by chapters on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and recent dramatic and empowering Supreme Court decisions. The two penultimate chapters detail the manner in which this Indigenous nationals/Canadian citizens model has been successfully applied to the Yukon First Nations as well as to the four Inuit Land Claims Agreements. The final substantive chapter applies this model hypothetically to the entirety of the more than seventy First Nations in the province of Saskatchewan. Referred to as the Commonwealth of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (CSIN), the model would embrace provincial-type powers within, and closely coordinated with, the province of Saskatchewan. Among other features, CSIN would embody the requisite degree of self-government and scale economies essential for the Saskatchewan-based First Nations to successfully make the transition to Indigenous nationals and Canadian citizens.
Available Formats: Paperback
Publisher’s Link: http://www.mqup.ca/indigenous-nationals–canadian-citizens-products-9781553394525.php?page_id=73&#!prettyPhoto
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Indigenous-Nationals-Canadian-Citizens-Contact/dp/1553394526/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1519304972&sr=8-2&keywords=indigenous+nationals+canadian+citizens
That’s all for this month! I hope you enjoyed this blog post. If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice! Are there any books in particular that you are looking forward to? Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments below! And don’t get to check back on Sunday for a brand new Canadian history roundup! See you then!
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