Welcome back to our monthly series, “Upcoming Publications in Canadian History,” where I’ve compiled information on all the new and upcoming releases for the following month in the field of Canadian history from every Canadian academic press, all in one place. This includes new books in both English and French. To see last month’s releases, click here.
***Please note that the cover images and book blurbs are used with permission from the publishers.***
***Contains affiliate links***
October 1, 2016
*This book came out early, on September 21st
Douglas E. Delaney and Serge Marc Durflinger, eds., Capturing Hill 70: Canada’s Forgotten Battle of the First World War (Vancouver: UBC, 2016)
In August 1917, the Canadian Corps captured Hill 70, vital terrain just north of the French town of Lens. The Canadians suffered some 5,400 casualties and in three harrowing days defeated twenty-one German counterattacks. This spectacularly successful but shockingly costly battle was as innovative as Vimy, yet few Canadians have heard of it. Capturing Hill 70 marks the centenary of this triumph by dissecting different facets of the battle, from planning and conducting operations to long-term repercussions and commemoration. It reinstates Hill 70 to its rightful place among the pantheon of battles that forged the reputation of the famed Canadian Corps during the First World War.
Formats available: Hardcover
Publisher’s link: http://www.ubcpress.ca/search/title_book.asp?BookID=299175469
Buy it on Amazon.ca: Capturing Hill 70: Canada’s Forgotten Battle of the First World War
Jean Barman, Abenaki Daring: The Life and Writings of Noel Annance, 1792-1869 (Montreal: MQUP, 2016)
An Abenaki born in St Francis, Quebec, Noel Annance (1792-1869), by virtue of two of his great-grandparents having been early white captives, attended Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Determined to apply his privileged education, he was caught between two ways of being, neither of which accepted him among their numbers.
Despite outstanding service as an officer in the War of 1812, Annance was too Indigenous to be allowed to succeed in the far west fur trade, and too schooled in outsiders’ ways to be accepted by those in charge on returning home. Annance did not crumple, but all his life dared the promise of literacy on his own behalf and on that of Indigenous peoples more generally. His doing so is tracked through his writings to government officials and others, some of which are reproduced in the text. Annance’s life makes visible how the exclusionary policies towards indigenous peoples, generally considered to have originated with the Indian Act of 1876, were being put in place a half century earlier.
On account of his literacy, Annance’s story can be told. Recounting a life marked equally by success and failure, and by perseverance, Abenaki Daring speaks to similar barriers that to this day impede many educated Indigenous persons from realizing their life goals. To dare is no less essential than it was for Noel Annance.
Formats available: Hardcover, Kindle
Publisher’s link: http://www.mqup.ca/abenaki-daring-products-9780773547926.php?page_id=46&
Buy it on Amazon.ca: Abenaki Daring: The Life and Writings of Noel Annance, 1792-1869
Donald G. Wetherell, Wildlife, Land, and People: A Century of Change in Prairie Canada (Montreal: MQUP, 2016).
*Again, I keep seeing conflicting dates…*
Encounters with wild animals are among the most significant relationships between humans and the natural world. Presenting a history of human interactions with wildlife in Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan between 1870 and 1960, Wildlife, Land, and People examines the confrontations that led to diverse consequences – from the near annihilation of some species to the extraordinary preservation of others – and skilfully finds the roots of these relationships in people’s needs for food, sport, security, economic development, personal fulfillment, and identity.
Donald Wetherell shows how utilitarian practices, in which humans viewed animals either as friendly sources of profit or as threats to their economic and personal security, dominated until the 1960s. Alongside these views, however, other attitudes asserted that wild animals were part of the beauty, mystery, and order of the natural world. He outlines the ways in which this later attitude gained strength after World War II, distinguished by a growing conviction that every species has ecological value. Through a century in which the natural landscape of the prairie region was radically transformed by human activity, conflicts developed over fur and game management, over Aboriginal use of the land, and over the preservation of endangered species like bison and elk. Yet the period also saw the creation of national parks, zoos, and natural history societies.
Drawing on a wide array of historical sources and photographs as well as current approaches to environmental history, Wildlife, Land, and People enriches our understanding of the many-layered relationships between humans and nature.
Formats available: Hardcover, Kindle
Publisher’s link: http://www.mqup.ca/wildlife–land–and-people-products-9780773547919.php?page_id=46&
Buy it on Amazon.ca: Wildlife, Land, and People: A Century of Change in Prairie Canada (Carleton Library Series)
October 4, 2016
Lee Windsor, Roger Sarty, and Marc Milner, Loyal Gunners: 3rd Field Artillery Regiment (The Loyal Company) and the History of New Brunswick’s Artillery, 1893-2012 (Waterloo: WLUP, 2016)
Loyal Gunners uniquely encapsulates the experience of Canadian militia gunners and their units into a single compelling narrative that centres on the artillery units of New Brunswick. The story of those units is a profoundly Canadian story: one of dedication and sacrifice in service of great guns and of Canada.
The 3rd Field Regiment (The Loyal Company), Royal Canadian Artillery, is Canada’s oldest artillery unit, dating to the founding of the Loyal Company in Saint John in 1793. Since its centennial in 1893, 3rd Field—in various permutations of medium, coastal, and anti-aircraft artillery—has formed the core of New Brunswick’s militia artillery, and it has endured into the twenty-first century as the last remaining artillery unit in the province.
This book is the first modern assessment of the development of Canadian heavy artillery in the Great War, the first look at the development of artillery in general in both world wars, and the first exploration of the development and operational deployment of anti-tank artillery in the Second World War. It also tells a universal story of survival as it chronicles the fortunes of New Brunswick militia units through the darkest days of the Cold War, when conventional armed forces were entirely out of favour. In 1950 New Brunswick had four and a half regiments of artillery; by 1970 it had one—3rd Field.
Loyal Gunners traces the rise and fall of artillery batteries in New Brunswick as the nature of modern war evolved. From the Great War to Afghanistan it provides the most comprehensive account to date of Canada’s gunners.
Formats available: Hardcover
Publisher’s link: http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/press/Catalog/windsor.shtml
Buy it on Amazon.ca: Loyal Gunners: 3rd Field Artillery Regiment (The Loyal Company) and the History of New Brunswick’s Artillery, 1893-2012
David Campbell, It Can’t Last Forever: The 19th Battalion and the Canadian Corps in the First World War (Waterloo: WLUP, 2016)
The 19th Battalion was an infantry unit that fought in many of the deadliest battles of the First World War. Hailing from Hamilton, Toronto, and other communities in southern Ontario and beyond, its members were ordinary men facing extraordinary challenges at the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Amiens, and other battlefields on Europe’s Western Front.
Through his examination of official records and personal accounts, the author presents vivid descriptions and assessments of the rigours of training, the strains of trench warfare, the horrors of battle, and the camaraderie of life behind the front lines. From mobilization in 1914 to the return home in 1919, Campbell reveals the unique experiences of the battalion’s officers and men and situates their service within the broader context of the battalion’s parent formations—the 4th Infantry Brigade and the 2nd Division of the Canadian Corps. Readers will gain a fuller appreciation of the internal dynamics of an infantry battalion and how it functioned within the larger picture of Canadian operations.
Formats available: Hardcover
Publisher’s link: http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/press/Catalog/campbell-19th.shtml
Buy it on Amazon.ca: It Can’t Last Forever: The 19th Battalion and the Canadian Corps in the First World War
October 15
Caitlin Gordon-Walker, Exhibiting Nation: Multicultural Nationalism (and Its Limits) in Canada’s Museums (Vancouver: UBC, 2016)
[Cover image not available]
Canada’s brand of nationalism celebrates diversity – so long as it doesn’t challenge the unity, authority, or legitimacy of the state. Caitlin Gordon-Walker explores this tension between unity and diversity in three nationally recognized museums, institutions that must make judgments about what counts as “too different” in order to celebrate who we are as a people and nation through exhibits, programs, and design. Although the contradictions that lie at the heart of multicultural nationalism have the potential to constrain political engagement and dialogue, the sensory feasts on display in Canada’s museums provide a space for citizens to both question and renegotiate the limits of their national vision.
Formats available: Hardcover
Publisher’s link: http://www.ubcpress.ca/exhibiting-nation
Buy it on Amazon.ca: Exhibiting Nation: Multicultural Nationalism (and Its Limits) in Canada’s Museums
Paul Litt, Trudeaumania (Vancouver: UBC, 2016)
In 1968, Canadians dared to take a chance on a new kind of politician. Pierre Trudeau, a relative newcomer to federal politics, became the leader of the Liberal Party in April. Within two months he was prime minister of Canada. His meteoric rise to power was driven by Trudeaumania, a phenomenon that generated the same media hype, sexual sizzle, and adoring crowds as its rock star equivalent Beatlemania. What did it all mean?
This book examines the origins, dynamics, and enduring significance of Trudeaumania. Combining an engaging narrative with well-informed analysis, Paul Litt shows that Trudeaumania was the product of a conjunction of circumstances — most notably the rise of 1960s radicalism, modern mass media, and nationalist aspirations. Within this politically charged setting, Trudeau was seen as a transformative figure who would rejuvenate the nation in keeping with the idealistic hopes of the times.
Still high on the heady nationalist experiences of the Centennial and Expo 67, Canadians wanted to modernize their nation, differentiate it from the United States, and thwart the threat of Quebec separatism. And Trudeau became their means of doing so. In terms of its significance, the mania that swept Canada fifty years ago was not just a sixties crazy moment. It was also an exercise in national identity formation that would define the values of Canadians for decades to come.
Formats available: Hardcover
Publisher’s link: http://www.ubcpress.ca/search/title_book.asp?BookID=299175488
Buy it on Amazon.ca Trudeaumania
October 17, 2016
James Muir, Law, Debt, and Merchant Power: The Civil Courts of 18th Century Halifax (Toronto: UTP, 2016).
In the early history of Halifax (1749-1766), debt litigation was extremely common. People from all classes frequently used litigation and its use in private matters was higher than almost all places in the British Empire in the 18th century.
In Law, Debt, and Merchant Power, James Muir offers an extensive analysis of the civil cases of the time as well as the reasons behind their frequency. Muir’s lively and detailed account of the individuals involved in litigation reveals a paradoxical society where debtors were also debt-collectors. Law, Debt, and Merchant Power demonstrates how important the law was for people in their business affairs and how they shaped it for their own ends.
Formats available: Hardcover
Publisher’s link: http://www.utppublishing.com/Law-Debt-and-Merchant-Power-The-Civil-Courts-of-18th-Century-Halifax.html
Buy it on Amazon.ca Law, Debt, and Merchant Power: The Civil Courts of 18th Century Halifax
Lori Chambers, A Legal History of Adoption in Ontario, 1921-2015 (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 2016).
Lori Chambers’ fascinating study explores the legal history of adoption in Ontario since the passage of the first statute in 1921. This volume explores a wide range of themes and issues in the history of adoption including: the reasons for the creation of statutory adoption, the increasing voice of unmarried fathers in newborn adoption, the reasons for movement away from secrecy in adoption, the evolution of step-parent adoption, the adoption of Indigenous children, and the growth of international adoption.
Unlike other works on adoption, Chambers focuses explicitly on statutes, statutory debates and the interpretation of statues in court. In doing so, she concludes that adoption is an inadequate response to child welfare and on its own cannot solve problems regarding child neglect and abuse. Rather, Chambers argues that in order to reform the area of adoption we must first acknowledge that it is built upon social inequalities within and between nations.
Formats available: Hardcover
Publisher’s link: http://www.utppublishing.com/A-Legal-History-of-Adoption-in-Ontario.-1921-2015.html
Buy it on Amazon.ca: A Legal History of Adoption in Ontario. 1921-2015
October 18, 2016
Sarah Carter, Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies (Winnipeg: UofM, 2016).
Sarah Carter’s Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies examines the goals, aspirations, and challenges met by women who sought land of their own.
Supporters of British women homesteaders argued they would contribute to the “spade-work” of the Empire through their imperial plots, replacing foreign settlers and relieving Britain of its surplus women. Yet far into the twentieth century there was persistent opposition to the idea that women could or should farm: British women were to be exemplars of an idealized white femininity, not toiling in the fields. In Canada, heated debates about women farmers touched on issues of ethnicity, race, gender, class, and nation.
Despite legal and cultural obstacles and discrimination, British women did acquire land as homesteaders, farmers, ranchers, and speculators on the Canadian prairies. They participated in the project of dispossessing Indigenous people. Their complicity was, however, ambiguous and restricted because they were excluded from the power and privileges of their male counterparts.
Imperial Plots depicts the female farmers and ranchers of the prairies, from the Indigenous women agriculturalists of the Plains to the land army women of the First World War.
Formats available: Paperback
Publisher’s link: https://uofmpress.ca/books/detail/imperial-plots
Buy it on Amazon.ca: Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies
October 24, 2016
George Cartwright, edited by Marianne P. Stopp, George Cartwright’s The Labrador Companion (Montreal: MQUP, 2016).
New manuscripts directly related to Canada’s history rarely come to light. The Labrador Companion, written in 1810 by Captain George Cartwright (1739-1819), and discovered in 2013, is a fascinating and unusual find because of its level of detail, its setting in a hardly studied part of Britain’s fur-trade empire, and because it is a personal account rather than a trade outfit ledger or government document.
This annotated edition transcribes The Labrador Companion in full. Cartwright documented the everyday work of Labrador’s particular kind of fur-trade life based on his experiences operating a series of merchant stations in southern Labrador between 1770 and 1786. Although his focus is firmly on instruction in the manifold ways of capturing animals, he also provides rare glimpses of Innu and Inuit life as well as of housekeeping and gardening. The Labrador Companion includes a lengthy description of Labrador’s fauna – of land, sea, and air – that counts among Canada’s earliest natural history writing based on first-hand observation.
A revealing account of fur-trade-era technology, methods, and materials, conveyed through one man’s acquired knowledge and skills, The Labrador Companion gives a close-to-the-ground picture of the resource industries that were at the heart of British, and French, colonial presence in the Canadian northeast.
Formats available: Cloth, Paperback
Publisher’s link: http://www.mqup.ca/george-cartwright—s-the-labrador-companion-products-9780773548060.php
Buy it on Amazon.ca: George Cartwright’s The Labrador Companion
Erin Morton, For Folk’s Sake: Art and Economy in Twentieth Century Nova Scotia (Montreal: MQUP, 2016).
Folk art emerged in twentieth-century Nova Scotia not as an accident of history, but in tandem with cultural policy developments that shaped art institutions across the province between 1967 and 1997. For Folk’s Sake charts how woodcarvings and paintings by well-known and obscure self-taught makers – and their connection to handwork, local history, and place – fed the public’s nostalgia for a simpler past.
The folk artists examined here range from the well-known self-taught painter Maud Lewis to the relatively anonymous woodcarvers Charles Atkinson, Ralph Boutilier, Collins Eisenhauer, and Clarence Mooers. These artists are connected by the ways in which their work fascinated those active in the contemporary Canadian art world at a time when modernism – and the art market that once sustained it – had reached a crisis. As folk art entered the public collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the private collections of professors at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, it evolved under the direction of collectors and curators who sought it out according to a particular modernist aesthetic language. Morton engages national and transnational developments that helped to shape ideas about folk art to show how a conceptual category took material form.
Generously illustrated, For Folk’s Sake interrogates the emotive pull of folk art and reconstructs the relationships that emerged between relatively impoverished self-taught artists, a new brand of middle-class collector, and academically trained professors and curators in Nova Scotia’s most important art institutions.
Formats available: Cloth, Paperback
Publisher’s link: http://www.mqup.ca/for-folk—s-sake-products-9780773548121.php?page_id=73&
Buy it on Amazon.ca For Folks Sake: Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia
October 31, 2016
Richard A. Jarrell, Educating the Neglected Majority: The Struggle for Agricultural and Technical Education in Nineteenth Century Ontario and Quebec (Montreal: MQUP, 2016).
Educating the Neglected Majority is Richard Jarrell’s pioneering survey of the attempt to develop and diffuse agricultural and technical education in nineteenth-century Canada’s most populous regions. It explores the efforts and achievements of educators, legislators, and manufacturers as they responded to the rapid changes resulting from the Industrial Revolution.
Identifying the resources that the state, philanthropic organizations, private schools, moral reform societies, and churches harnessed to implement technical education for the rural and industrial working classes, Jarrell illuminates the formal and informal learning networks of Upper Canada/Ontario and Lower Canada/Quebec at this time. As these colonial societies moved towards mechanization, industrialization, and nationhood, their educational leaders looked to US and British developments in pedagogy and technology to create academic journals, collèges classiques, evening classes, libraries, mechanics’ institutes, museums, specialist societies, and women’s institutes. Supervising these varied activities were legislatures and provincial boards, where key figures such as E.-A. Barnard, J.-B. Meilleur, and Egerton Ryerson played dominant roles.
Portraying the powerful hopes and sometimes unrealistic dreams that motivated energetic and determined reformers, Educating the Neglected Majority presents Ontario and Quebec’s response to the powerful industrial and demographic forces that were reshaping the North Atlantic world.
Formats available: Cloth, Paperback
Publisher’s link: http://www.mqup.ca/educating-the-neglected-majority-products-9780773547384.php
Buy it on Amazon.ca: Educating the Neglected Majority: The Struggle for Agricultural and Technical Education in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec
It looks like there will be lots of great books coming out this month. Is there anything you’re looking forward to? Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments below! Check back on Sunday for your weekly Canadian history roundup!
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