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.
December 4
Earle H. Waugh, Al Rashid Mosque: Building Canadian Muslim Communities (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2017)
Forty years ago, as a young scholar in Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta, Al Rashid’s Muslims welcomed my queries, tolerated my ignorance, and joyfully opened their homes and their hearts.
Edmonton’s Al Rashid Mosque has played a key role in Islam’s Canadian development. Founded by Muslims from Lebanon, it has grown into a vibrant community fully integrated into Canada’s cultural mosaic. The mosque continues to be a concrete expression of social good, a symbol of a proud Muslim-Canadian identity. Al Rashid Mosque provides a welcome introduction to the ethics and values of homegrown Muslims. The book traces the mosque’s role in education and community leadership, and celebrates the numerous contributions of Muslim Canadians in Edmonton and across Canada. Written to mark the 75th anniversary of the mosque’s opening in 1938, Al Rashid Mosque is a timely and important volume of Islamic and Canadian history.
Formats Available: Paperback
Publisher’s Link: http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/titles/897-9781772123333-al-rashid-mosque
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=al+rashid+mosque
December 11
Doris Jeanne MacKinnon, Metis Pioneers: Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2017)
In Metis Pioneers, Doris Jeanne MacKinnon compares the survival strategies of two Metis women born during the fur trade—one from the French-speaking free trade tradition and one from the English-speaking Hudson’s Bay Company tradition—who settled in southern Alberta as the fur trade transitioned to a sedentary agricultural and industrial economy. MacKinnon provides rare insight into their lives, demonstrating the contributions Metis women made to the building of the prairie west. This is a compelling tale of two women’s acts of quiet resistance in the final days of the British Empire.
Formats Available: Paperback
Publisher’s Link: http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/titles/893-9781772122718-metis-pioneers
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Metis-Pioneers-Isabella-Hardisty-Lougheed/dp/1772122718/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510759295&sr=1-1&keywords=metis+pioneers
December 15
Paul Nadasdy, Sovereignty’s Entailments: First Nation State Formation in the Yukon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017)
In recent decades, indigenous peoples in the Yukon have signed land claim and self-government agreements that spell out the nature of government-to-government relations and grant individual First Nations significant, albeit limited, powers of governance over their peoples, lands, and resources. Those agreements, however, are predicated on the assumption that if First Nations are to qualify as governments at all, they must be fundamentally state-like, and they frame First Nation powers in the culturally contingent idiom of sovereignty.
Based on over five years of ethnographic research [carried out] in the southwest Yukon, Sovereignty’s Entailments is a close ethnographic analysis of everyday practices of state formation in a society whose members do not take for granted the cultural entailments of sovereignty. This approach enables Nadasdy to illustrate the full scope and magnitude of the “cultural revolution” that is state formation and expose the culturally specific assumptions about space, time, and sociality that lie at the heart of sovereign politics.
Nadasdy’s timely and insightful work illuminates how the process of state formation is transforming Yukon Indian people’s relationships with one another, animals, and the land.
Formats available: Hardcover, paperback (ePub available January 2018)
Publisher’s Link: https://utorontopress.com/ca/sovereignty-s-entailments-2
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Sovereigntys-Entailments-First-Nation-Formation/dp/148752207X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510762338&sr=1-1&keywords=sovereignty%27s+entailments
December 27
Myra Rutherdale, Whitney Lackenbauer, & Kerry Abel (eds), Roots of Entanglement: Essays in the History of Native-Newcomer Relations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017)
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Roots of Entanglement offers an historical exploration of the relationships between Indigenous peoples and European newcomers in the territory that would become Canada. Various engagements between Indigenous peoples and the state are emphasized and questions are raised about the ways in which the past has been perceived and how those perceptions have shaped identity and, in turn, interaction both past and present.
Specific topics such as land, resources, treaties, laws, policies, and cultural politics are explored through a range of perspectives that reflect state-of-the-art research in the field of Indigenous history. Editors Myra Rutherdale, Whitney Lackenbauer, and Kerry Abel have assembled an array of top scholars including luminaries such as Keith Carlson, Bill Waiser, Skip Ray, and Ken Coates. Roots of Entanglement is a direct response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call for a better appreciation of the complexities of history in the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada.
Formats Available: Hardcover, Paperback, ePub
Publisher’s Link: https://utorontopress.com/ca/roots-of-entanglement-2
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Roots-Entanglement-History-Native-Newcomer-Relations/dp/1487521375/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510761409&sr=1-1&keywords=roots+of+entanglement
January 15
Allan Downey, The Creator’s Game Lacrosse, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018)
A gift from the Creator – that is where it all began. The game of lacrosse has been a central element of many Indigenous cultures for centuries, but once non-Indigenous players entered the sport, it became a site of appropriation – then reclamation – of Indigenous identities. Focusing on the history of lacrosse in Indigenous communities from the 1860s to the 1990s, The Creator’s Game explores Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations and Indigenous identity formation. While the game was being stripped of its cultural and ceremonial significance and being appropriated to construct a new identity for the nation-state of Canada, it was also being used by Indigenous peoples for multiple ends: to resist residential school experiences; initiate pan-Indigenous political mobilization; and articulate Indigenous sovereignty and nationhood on the world stage.
The multilayered story of lacrosse serves as a potent illustration of how identity and nationhood are formed and reformed. Engaging and innovative, The Creator’s Gameprovides a unique view of Indigenous self-determination in the face of settler-colonialism.
The Creator’s Game will be of interest to scholars and students of Canadian history, Indigenous studies, political science, and sports history.
Formats Available: Hardcover
Publisher’s Link:http://www.ubcpress.ca/the-creators-game
Buy it from Amazon.ca:https://www.amazon.ca/Creators-Game-Lacrosse-Indigenous-Nationhood/dp/0774836024/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510759858&sr=1-1&keywords=the+creator%27s+game
Jane Nicolas, Canadian Carnival Freaks and the Extraordinary Body, 1900-1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018)
In 1973, a five year old girl known as Pookie was exhibited as “The Monkey Girl” at the Canadian National Exhibition. Pookie was the last of a number of children exhibited as ‘freaks’ in twentieth-century Canada.
Jane Nicholas takes us on a search for answers about how and why the freak show persisted into the 1970s. In Canadian Carnival Freaks and the Extraordinary Body, 1900–1970s, Nicholas offers a sophisticated analysis of the place of the freak show in twentieth-century culture. Freak shows survived and thrived because of their flexible business model, government support, and by mobilizing cultural and medical ideas of the body and normalcy. This book is the first full length study of the freak show in Canada and is a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of Canadian popular culture, attitudes toward children, and the social construction of able-bodiness. Based on an impressive research foundation, the book will be of particular interest to anyone interested in the history of disability, the history of childhood, and the history of consumer culture.
Formats Available: ePub (Hardcover/Paperbacks available in February)
Publisher’s Link: https://utorontopress.com/ca/canadian-carnival-freaks-and-the-extraordinary-body-1900-1970s-2
Buy it on Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Canadian-Carnival-Freaks-Extraordinary-1900-1970s/dp/1487522088/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510761083&sr=1-1&keywords=canadian+carnival+freaks
Julie Guard, Radical Housewives: Price Wars and Food Politics in Mid-Twentieth Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018)
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Radical Housewives is a history of the Canada’s Housewives Consumers Association. This association was a community-based women’s organization with ties to the communist and social democratic left that, from 1937 until the early 1950s, led a broadly based popular movement for state control of prices and made other far-reaching demands on the state. As radical consumer activists, the Housewives engaged in gender-transgressive political activism that challenged the government to protect consumers’ interests rather than just those of business while popularizing socialist solutions to the economic crises of the Great Depression and the immediate postwar years.
Julia Guard’s exhaustive research, including archival research and interviews with twelve former Housewives, recovers a history of women’s social justice activism in an era often considered dormant and adds a Canadian dimension to the history of politicized consumerism and of politicized materialism. Radical Housewives reinterprets the view of postwar Canada as economically prosperous and reveals the left’s role in the origins of the food security movement.
Formats Available: Hardcover, paperback, ePub
Publisher’s Link: https://utorontopress.com/ca/radical-housewives-2
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Radical-Housewives-Politics-Mid-Twentieth-Century/dp/1487521812/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510761809&sr=1-1&keywords=radical+housewives
Jason Ellis, A Class by Themselves?: Children, Youth, and Special Education in a North American City – Toronto, 1910-45 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018)
In A Class by Themselves?, Jason Ellis provides a erudite and balanced history of special needs education, an early twentieth century educational innovation that continues to polarize school communities across Canada, the United States, and beyond.
Ellis situates the evolution of this educational innovation in its proper historical context to explore the rise of intelligence testing, the decline of child labour and rise of vocational guidance, emerging trends in mental hygiene and child psychology, and the implementation of a new progressive curriculum. At the core of this study are the students. This book is the first to draw deeply on rich archival sources, including 1000 pupil records of young people with learning difficulties, who attended public schools between 1918 and 1945. Ellis uses these records to retell individual stories that illuminate how disability filtered down through the school system’s many nooks and crannies to mark disabled students as different from (and often inferior to) other school children. A Class by Themselves? sheds new light on these and other issues by bringing special education’s curious past to bear on its constantly contested present.
Formats Available: Hardcover, paperback, ePub
Publisher’s Link: https://utorontopress.com/ca/a-class-by-themselves-2
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Class-Themselves-Children-Education-American/dp/1442628715/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510762083&sr=1-1&keywords=a+class+by+themselves
Julia Christensen, Christopher Cox, & Lisa Szabo-Jones (eds), Activating the Heart: Storytelling, Knowledge Sharing, and Relationship (Waterloo: WLU Press, 2018)
Activating the Heart is an exploration of storytelling as a tool for knowledge production and sharing to build new connections between people and their histories, environments, and cultural geographies. The collection pays particular attention to the significance of storytelling in Indigenous knowledge frameworks and extends into other ways of knowing in works where scholars have embraced narrative and story as a part of their research approach.
In the first section, Storytelling to Understand, authors draw on both theoretical and empirical work to examine storytelling as a way of knowing. In the second section, Storytelling to Share, authors demonstrate the power of stories to share knowledge and convey significant lessons, as well as to engage different audiences in knowledge exchange. The third section, Storytelling to Create, contains three poems and a short story that engage with storytelling as a means to produce or create knowledge, particularly through explorations of relationship to place.
The result is an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural dialogue that yields important insights in terms of qualitative research methods, language and literacy, policy-making, human–environment relationships, and healing. This book is intended for scholars, artists, activists, policymakers, and practitioners who are interested in storytelling as a method for teaching, cross-cultural understanding, community engagement, and knowledge exchange.
Formats Available: Paperback
Publisher’s Link: https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/A/Activating-the-Heart
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Activating-Heart-Storytelling-Knowledge-Relationship/dp/1771122196/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510762707&sr=1-1&keywords=activating+the+heart
January 25
Peter J. Usher, Joey Jacobson’s War: A Jewish-Canadian Airman in the Second World War (Waterloo: WLU Press, 2018)
In the spring of 1940 Canada sent hundreds of highly trained volunteers to serve in Britain’s Royal Air Force as it began a concerted bombing campaign against Germany. Nearly half of them were killed or captured within a year. This is the story of one of those airmen, as told through his own letters and diaries as well as those of his family and friends.
Joey Jacobson, a young Jewish man from Westmount on the Island of Montreal, trained as a navigator and bomb-aimer in Western Canada. On arriving in England he was assigned to No. 106 Squadron, a British unit tasked with the bombing of Germany. Joey Jacobson’s Wartells, in his own words, why he enlisted, his understanding of strategy, tactics, and the effectiveness of the air war at its lowest point, how he responded to the inevitable battle stress, and how he became both a hopeful idealist and a seasoned airman. Jacobson’s written legacy as a serviceman is impressive in scope and depth and provides a lively and intimate account of a Jewish Canadian’s life in the air and on the ground, written in the intensity of the moment, unfiltered by the memoirist’s reflection, revision, or hindsight. Accompanying excerpts from his father’s diary show the maturation of the relationship between father and son in a dangerous time.
Formats Available: Paperback
Publisher’s Link: https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/J/Joey-Jacobson-s-War
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Joey-Jacobsons-War-Jewish-Canadian-Airman/dp/1771123427/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1510840603&sr=8-1&keywords=joey+jacobson%27s+war
Better Late than Never
Here are some of the books we missed in past posts:
Jean-Claude Massé, Le Témiscouata. De la Préhistoire à la Confédération (Québec: PUL, 2017)
Au fil du temps, le toponyme Témiscouata a désigné un lac, un portage, une seigneurie, et plus récemment, une région administrative sous la forme d’abord d’une circonscription électorale, aujourd’hui d’une municipalité régionale de comté. Cet ouvrage retrace l’histoire du Témiscouata d’avant la Confédération. Plusieurs sujets y sont traités en profondeur parmi lesquels l’état du territoire pendant et après la dernière glaciation, les occupants préhistoriques, les Etchemins-Malécites, le Portage de Témiscouata, les premiers projets de colonisation, la vie précaire des pionniers, la seigneurie du lac Témiscouata et de Madawaska, le séjour du seigneur Alexandre Fraser au lac Témiscouata, l’arrivée des barons du bois américains, la frontière internationale, l’occupation militaire, le traité de Webster-Ashburton, l’exploitation forestière avant 1850, la frontière avec le Nouveau-Brunswick, l’essor démographique d’après 1850, la construction du chemin neuf entre 1856 et 1866, l’ouverture des terres de la Couronne à la colonisation.
Formats Available: Paperback
Publisher’s Link: https://www.pulaval.com/produit/le-temiscouata-et-son-portage-des-origines-a-la-confederation
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/T%C3%A9miscouata-Pr%C3%A9histoire-%C3%A0-Conf%C3%A9d%C3%A9ration/dp/2763736602/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510840975&sr=1-1&keywords=le+t%C3%A9miscouata
Jean Des Gagniers, Le voyage au bout du vent. La Nouvelle-France et la mer aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Québec: PUL 2017)
” Le voyage au bout du vent a pour modeste ambition de retracer de façon globale et donc simplifiée l’ensemble des activités maritimes qui ont précédé et accompagné la création et le développement de la Nouvelle-France jusqu’à la fin du règne de Louis XIV.
Ce livre qui n’a pas la prétention d’être savant est pour moi une sorte de retour à la mer à laquelle les miens sont étroitement liés depuis trois siècles. Davantage, même, si je songe à un lointain ascendant, Vénitien blanc vivant à Chypre au temps des Lusignan. Peut-être est-ce à la suite de la désastreuse invasion mamelouke de 1426 qu’un de ses descendants a pu fuir l’île et se réfugier au Poitou d’où est parti un ancêtre en 1663. C’est, à travers les époques, traverser bien des mers. ”
Formats Available: Paperback, PDF
Publisher’s Link: https://www.pulaval.com/produit/le-voyage-au-bout-du-vent-la-nouvelle-france-et-la-mer-aux-xvie-et-xviie-siecles
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/voyage-bout-vent-Nouvelle-France-mer/dp/2763730450/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510841394&sr=1-1&keywords=Le+voyage+au+bout+du+vent
Jordan Stranger-Ross & Pamela Sugiman (eds), Witness to Loss: Race, Culpability, and Memory in the Dispossession of Japanese Canadians (Kingston: MQUP 2017)
When the federal government uprooted and interned Japanese Canadians en masse in 1942, Kishizo Kimura saw his life upended along with tens of thousands of others. But his story is also unique: as a member of two controversial committees that oversaw the forced sale of the property of Japanese Canadians in Vancouver during the Second World War, Kimura participated in the dispossession of his own community.
In Witness to Loss Kimura’s previously unknown memoir – written in the last years of his life – is translated from Japanese to English and published for the first time. This remarkable document chronicles a history of racism in British Columbia, describes the activities of the committees on which Kimura served, and seeks to defend his actions. Diverse reflections of leading historians, sociologists, and a community activist and educator who lived through this history give context to the memoir, inviting readers to grapple with a rich and contentious past. More complex than just hero or villain, oppressor or victim, Kimura raises important questions about the meaning of resistance and collaboration and the constraints faced by an entire generation.
Illuminating the difficult, even impossible, circumstances that confronted the victims of racist state action in the mid-twentieth century, Witness to Loss reminds us that the challenge of understanding is greater than that of judgment.
Formats Available: Hardcover, Paperback
Publisher’s Link: http://www.mqup.ca/witness-to-loss-products-9780773551213.php?page_id=73&
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Witness-Loss-Culpability-Dispossession-Canadians/dp/0773551212/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510841728&sr=1-1&keywords=witness+to+loss
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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