Upcoming Publications in Canadian History – November 2017

We Interrupt This Program tells the story of how Indigenous people are using media tactics in the realms of art, film, television, and journalism to rewrite Canada’s national narratives from Indigenous perspectives.

Miranda Brady and John Kelly showcase the diversity of these interventions by offering personal accounts and reflections on key moments – witnessing survivor testimonies at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, attending the opening night of the ImagineNative Film + Media Festival, and discussing representations of Indigenous people with artists such as Kent Monkman and Dana Claxton and with CBC journalist Duncan McCue. These scene-setting moments bring to life their argument that media tactics, as articulations of Indigenous sovereignty, have the power not only to effect change from within Canadian institutions and through established mediums but also to spark new forms of political and cultural expression in Indigenous communities and among Indigenous youth.

Theoretically sophisticated and eminently readable, We Interrupt This Program reveals how seemingly unrelated acts by Indigenous activists across Canada are decolonizing our cultural institutions from within, one intervention at a time.

Built within an exceptional watershed, the city of Montreal is intertwined with the waterways that ring its island and flow beneath it in underground networks. Even as the city has pushed its suburbs deeper into the interior of the island and onto the mainland, the daily lives and leisure activities of its inhabitants have remained closely bound to water.

Montreal, City of Water focuses on water not only as a physical element of the urban landscape – both shaping and shaped by its development – but also as a sociocultural component of the life of the city. This unique study considers the role of water in the production and transformation of urban space over the last two hundred years, telling the story of Montreal through its connections to the natural elements on which it depends.

To explore how Montrealers have conceived of and experienced their relationship to water, Montreal, City of Water looks to both past and present. It traces the decisive role of water in the historical process of urbanization. And it shines a light on current concerns about water pollution, river rehabilitation, and renewed public access to the riverfront – and the power relations involved in addressing those concerns.

Across the British Empire and the world, the 1920s and 1930s were a time of unprecedented social and cultural change. Girls and young women were at the heart of many of these shifts, which included the aftermath of the First World War, the enfranchisement of women, and the rise of the flapper or “Modern Girl.” Out of this milieu, the Girl Guide movement emerged as a response to popular concerns about age, gender, race, class, and social instability.

The British-based Guide movement attracted more than a million members in over forty countries during the interwar years. Its success, however, was neither simple nor straightforward. Using an innovative multi-sited approach, Kristine Alexander digs deeper to analyze the ways in which Guiding sought to mould young people in England, Canada, and India. She weaves together a fascinating account that connects the histories of girlhood, internationalism, and empire, while asking how girls and young women understood and responded to Guiding’s attempts to lead them toward a service-oriented, “useful” feminine future.

Guiding Modern Girls adds new depth to what are largely separate understandings of interwar girlhood, British imperialism, and internationalism. By analyzing the Guides as a worldwide organization whose early twentieth-century leaders sought to create a conservatively modern ideal of gender, class, age, and race relations, this book also reveals how girls and young women understood, reworked, and sometimes challenged the expectations placed on them by the world’s largest voluntary organization for girls.

Drawing on extensive interviews and records from Canada, NATO, the US, and Germany, The Price of Alliance balances high politics with military requirements in the first major reappraisal of Pierre Trudeau’s defence policy.

For forty years during the Cold War, Canada garrisoned troops and tanks near the Iron Curtain. In the late 1960s, Pierre Trudeau announced plans to remove these tanks and focus on home defence, but allies resisted this decision. After six years of overt and subtle pressures, Trudeau was at last convinced that Canadian tanks in Europe were necessary to support foreign policy objectives. The Leopard tanks, purchased in 1976, symbolized an increased Canadian commitment to NATO and came with the promise of billions of dollars for new armoured vehicles, aircraft, and ships.

Addressing the struggles of the military to equip itself within the constraints of a declining budget and reduced personnel levels, Frank Maas illuminates the problem of defence policymaking in a multi-country alliance as well as the opportunities and difficulties of defence procurement. At the same time, he challenges the relevance of NATO to Canada – and the influence that Canada wields within it.

Tillotson launches her story with the 1917 war income tax, takes us through the tumultuous tax fights of the interwar years, proceeds to the remaking of income taxation in the 1940s and onwards, and finishes by offering a fresh angle on the fierce conflicts surrounding tax reform in the 1960s.

Taxes show us the power of the state, and Canadians often resisted that power, disproving the myth that we have all been good loyalists. But Give and Take is neither a simple tale of tax rebels nor a tirade against the taxman. Canadians also made real contributions to democracy when they taxed wisely and paid willingly.

When citizens confront taxation, it is a sign of a vigorously democratic political life. Our unruly tax history should be better known, and perhaps even celebrated.

Canadian politicians, like many of their circumpolar counterparts, brag about their country’s “Arctic identity” or “northern character,” but what do they mean, exactly? Stereotypes abound, from Dudley Do-Right to Northern Exposure, but these southern perspectives fail to capture northern realities. In this passionate, deeply personal account of modern developments in the Canadian North, Tony Penikett corrects confused and outdated notions of a region he became fascinated with as a child and for many years called home.

During decades of service as a legislator, mediator, and negotiator, Penikett bore witness to the advent of a new northern consciousness. Out of sight of New Yorkers, and far from the minds of Copenhagen’s citizens, Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders came together to forge new Arctic realities as they dealt with the challenges of the Cold War, climate change, land rights struggles, and the boom and bust of resource megaprojects.

This lively account of their struggles and accommodations not only retraces the footsteps of Penikett’s personal hunt for a northern identity but also tells the story of an Arctic that the world does not yet know.

Above the entrance to the Finnish Labour Temple, in what was once Port Arthur in northern Ontario, is the motto labor omnia vincit – “hard work conquers all.” Since 1910, these words have reflected the dedication of the Finnish community in Canada.

Hard Work Conquers All is a social history of Finnish immigration and community building in Canada during the twentieth century. The first Finns to arrive ranged from conservative churchgoers to radical socialists, reflecting the ideologies that divided their homeland. After the First World War, left-wing Finns fled persecution; following the Second World War, Finns sought the economic security that Canada offered. Each new wave of immigration imbued the relationship between people, homeland, and host country with the politics, ideologies, and cultural expressions of its time.

The story of Finns in Canada dovetails with the larger literature on immigration and enriches the history of socialism and ethnic repression in this country. The insightful essays in Hard Work Conquers All explore the nuanced cultural identities of Finnish Canadians, their continued ties to Finland, intergenerational cultural transfer, and the community’s connections with socialism and labour movements. This is a fresh interpretation of the successive waves of Finnish immigration and their influence on Canadian politics and society.