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.
October 1
Veronica Strong-Boag, The Last Suffragist Standing: The Life and Times of Laura Marshall Jamieson (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018)
Canada’s vibrant suffrage movement was a complicated story of achievement and loss. The Last Suffragist Standing is an unprecedented study of a pioneering Canadian suffragist and politician, a New Woman who tested Canadian democracy.
A rich product of archival and public sources, this biography of Laura Marshall Jamieson (1882–1964) opens a window onto the political and social landscape of the time. Veronica Strong-Boag chronicles Jamieson’s life from orphaned child of marginal Ontario farmers to member of British Columbia’s Legislative Assembly and Vancouver city councillor. The last suffragist in Canada to be elected to a provincial or federal legislature, Jamieson embraced issues such as factory labour conditions, minimum wage, feminist pacifism, housing, municipal franchise, and employment equality throughout her six decades of activism. Jamieson’s political radicalism was forged by the suffragist movement and the Great Depression, whetted by her exposure to mainstream and fringe activist groups, and tempered during her tenures in office.
Strong-Boag’s meticulous research and deep knowledge of the history of the women’s movement and Canadian politics turn this compelling account of a woman’s life into an illuminating work on the history of feminism, socialism, internationalism, and activism in Canada.
Of particular interest to scholars and students in women’s studies and Canadian history, this book will also appeal to feminists with an interest in history and enthusiasts of British Columbia history.
Available Formats: Hardcover
Publisher’s Link: https://www.ubcpress.ca/the-last-suffragist-standing
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Last-Suffragist-Standing-Marshall-Jamieson/dp/077483868X/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1537452307&sr=1-5
October 15
Marian Jago, Live at The Cellar: Vancouver’s Iconic Jazz Club and the Canadian Co-operative Jazz Scene in the 1950s and ‘60s (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018)
In the 1950s and ’60s, co‐operative jazz clubs such as Vancouver’s Cellar, Edmonton’s Yardbird Suite, and Halifax’s 777 Barrington Street opened their doors in response to new forms of jazz expression emerging after the war and a lack of available performance spaces outside major urban centres. Operated on a not‐for-profit basis by the musicians themselves, these hip new clubs eschewed commercial concerns and created spaces where young jazz musicians could practise their art and stay close to home.
This book looks at this unique period in the development of jazz in Canada. Centered on Vancouver’s legendary Cellar club, as well as co-ops in four other cities, it explores the ways in which these clubs functioned not only as sites for the performance and exploration of jazz but also as magnets for postwar countercultural expression in other arts, such as literature, poetry, painting, theatre, and film. Marian Jago’s deft combination of new, original research with archival evidence, interviews, oral testimony, and photographs, allows us to witness the beginnings of a pan-Canadian jazz scene; the emergence of key Canadian jazz figures, such as P.J. Perry, Don Thompson, and Terry Clark; as well as early development in the careers of figures such as Paul Bley and Ornette Coleman.
Live at the Cellar shines a light on the fascinating musical lives and social interactions of the Canadian jazz musicians who performed at the Cellar and other jazz co-ops in the 1950s and ’60s. Although the clubs have long been shuttered, in their day they created a new and infectious energy for jazz that paved the way for the jazz societies, radio programs, festivals, and university-level courses that are so much a part of the Canadian jazz scene today.
This book will appeal to jazz enthusiasts, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, ethnographers, cultural studies scholars, and those who are passionate about the history of Vancouver’s music scene.
Available Formats: Hardcover, Paperback.
Publisher’s Link: https://www.ubcpress.ca/live-at-the-cellar
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Live-Cellar-Vancouvers-Canadian-Co-operative/dp/0774837683/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1537459885&sr=1-1&keywords=Live+at+the+cellar
Tarah Brookfield, Our Voices Must Be Heard: Women and the Vote in Ontario (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018)
On Election Day 1844, seven widows cast ballots in Canada West, a display of feminist effrontery that was quickly punished: the government struck a law excluding women from the vote. It would be seven decades before women regained voting rights in Ontario.
Our Voices Must Be Heard asks why the vote mattered. It explores Ontario’s suffrage history, examining its ideals and failings, its daring supporters and thunderous enemies, and its blind spots on matters of race and class. Historian Tarah Brookfield looks at how and why women and their male allies from around the province, urban and rural, joined an international movement they called “the great cause.”
Ontario’s suffragists were varied in their politics and objectives, and their interests overlapped with temperance, socialism, and pacifism. Yet too often, the movement as a whole only focused on achieving the rights most relevant to white, middle-class women. The book makes apparent the parallel work and efforts by women whose race, ethnicity, class, and religion made them largely unwelcome in the mainstream suffrage movement. Ultimately, the vote was but one outlet for women’s protest against a status quo that consigned women and many others to subordination.
This is the second volume in a seven-part series on the history of the vote in Canada, Women’s Suffrage and the Struggle for Democracy. These short, insightful books present a history of the vote, with vivid accounts of famous and unsung suffragists. This series provides a deeper understanding of Canadian society and politics, serving as a well-timed reminder never to take political rights for granted.
This book is written for readers who want to know more about Canadian history, women’s history, and the history of our democratic traditions, including secondary school and university students in Ontario.
Available Formats: Hardcover
Publisher’s Link: https://www.ubcpress.ca/our-voices-must-be-heard
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Live-Cellar-Vancouvers-Canadian-Co-operative/dp/0774837683/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1537459885&sr=1-1&keywords=Live+at+the+cellar
Jean-François Lozier, Flesh Reborn: The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Settlements through the Seventeenth Century (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2018)
The Saint Lawrence valley, connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, was a crucible of community in the seventeenth century. While the details of how this region emerged as the heartland of French colonial society have been thoroughly outlined by historians, much remains unknown or misunderstood about how it also witnessed the formation of a string of distinct Indigenous communities, several of which persist to this day.
Drawing on a range of ethnohistorical sources, Flesh Reborn reconstructs the early history of seventeenth-century mission settlements and of their Algonquin, Innu, Wendat, Iroquois, and Wabanaki founders. Far from straightforward byproducts of colonialist ambitions, these communities arose out of an entanglement of armed conflict, diplomacy, migration, subsistence patterns, religion, kinship, leadership, community-building, and identity formation. The violence and trauma of war, even as it tore populations apart and from their ancestral lands, brought together a great human diversity.
By foregrounding Indigenous mission settlements of the Saint Lawrence valley, Flesh Reborn challenges conventional histories of New France and early Canada. It is a comprehensive examination of the foundation of these communities and reveals the fundamental ways they, in turn, shaped the course of war and peace in the region.
Available Formats: Hardcover, Paperback
Publisher’s Link: http://www.mqup.ca/flesh-reborn-products-9780773553453.php?page_id=73&#!prettyPhoto
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Flesh-Reborn-Lawrence-Settlements-Seventeenth/dp/0773553452/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1537454008&sr=8-1&keywords=flesh+reborn
Jonathan F. Vance, A Township at War (Waterloo: WLU Press, 2018)
A Township at War is the story of one community, the southern Ontario township of East Flamborough, during the First World War. It takes the reader from rural Canadian field and farm to the slopes of Vimy Ridge and the mud of Passchendaele, and shows how a tightly knit community was consumed and transformed by the trauma of war.
In 1914, East Flamborough was like a thousand other rural townships in Canada, broadly representative in its wartime experience. A Township at War draws from rich narrative sources to reveal what rural people were like a century ago – how they saw the world, what they valued, and how they lived their lives. We see them coming to terms with global events that took their loved ones to distant battlefields, and dealing with the prosaic challenges of everyday life. Fall fairs, recruiting meetings, church services, school concerts – all are re-imagined to understand how rural Canadians coped with war, modernism, and a world that was changing more quickly than they were.
This is a story of resilience and idealism, of violence and small-mindedness, of a world that has long disappeared and one that remains with us to this day.
Available Formats: Hardcover
Publisher’s Link: https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/A/A-Township-at-War
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Township-at-War-Jonathan-Vance/dp/1771123869/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1537458088&sr=1-1&keywords=a+township+at+war
Joshua MacFadyen, Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil that Covered a Continent (Kingston: MQUP, 2018)
Farmers feed cities, but starting in the nineteenth century they painted them too. Flax from Canada and the northern United States produced fibre for textiles and linseed oil for paint – critical commodities in a century when wars were fought over fibre and when increased urbanization demanded expanded paint markets. Flax Americana re-examines the changing relationships between farmers, urban consumers, and the land through a narrative of Canada’s first and most important industrial crop.
Initially a specialty crop grown by Mennonites and other communities on contracts for small-town mill complexes, flax became big business in the late nineteenth century as multinational linseed oil companies quickly displaced rural mills. Flax cultivation spread across the northern plains and prairies, particularly along the edges of dryland settlement, and then into similar ecosystems in South America’s Pampas. Joshua MacFadyen’s detailed examination of archival records reveals the complexity of a global commodity and its impact on the eastern Great Lakes and northern Great Plains. He demonstrates how international networks of scientists, businesses, and regulators attempted to predict and control the crop’s frontier geography, how evolving consumer concerns about product quality and safety shaped the market and its regulations, and how the nature of each region encouraged some forms of business and limited others.
The northern flax industry emerged because of border-crossing communities. By following the plant across countries and over time Flax Americana sheds new light on the ways that commodities, frontiers, and industrial capitalism shaped the modern world.
Available Formats: Hardcover, Paperback
Publisher’s Link: http://www.mqup.ca/flax-americana-products-9780773553477.php?page_id=73&
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Flax-Americana-History-Covered-Continent/dp/0773553479/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1537454040&sr=1-1&keywords=flax+americana
October 16
Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, & Adrian Werner, Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Metis Community, 1901–1961 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018)
Melonville. Smokey Hollow. Bannock Town. Fort Tuyau. Little Chicago. Mud Flats. Pumpville. Tintown. La Coulee. These were some of the names given to Métis communities at the edges of urban areas in Manitoba. Rooster Town, which was on the outskirts of southwest Winnipeg, endured from 1901 to 1961.
Those years in Winnipeg were characterized by the twin pressures of depression and inflation, chronic housing shortages, and a spotty social support network. At the city’s edge, Rooster Town grew without city services as rural Métis arrived to participate in the urban economy and build their own houses while keeping Métis culture and community as a central part of their lives.
In other growing settler cities, the Indigenous experience was largely characterized by removal and confinement. But the continuing presence of Métis living and working in the city, and the establishment of Rooster Town itself, made the Winnipeg experience unique.
Rooster Town documents the story of a community rooted in kinship, culture, and historical circumstance, whose residents existed unofficially in the cracks of municipal bureaucracy, while navigating the legacy of settler colonialism and the demands of modernity and urbanization.
Available Formats: Paperback
Publisher’s Link: https://uofmpress.ca/books/detail/rooster-town
October 26
Mary-Ellen Kelm and Keith D. Smith, eds. Talking Back to the Indian Act: Critical Readings in Settler Colonial Histories (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018)
Talking Back to the Indian Act is a comprehensive “how-to” guide for engaging with primary source documents. The intent of the book is to encourage readers to develop the skills necessary to converse with primary sources in more refined and profound ways. As a piece of legislation that is central to Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples and communities, and one that has undergone many amendments, the Indian Act is uniquely positioned to act as a vehicle for this kind of focused reading.
Through an analysis of thirty-five sources pertaining to the Indian Act—addressing governance, gender, enfranchisement, and land—the authors provide readers with a much better understanding of this pivotal piece of legislation, as well as insight into the dynamics involved in its creation and maintenance.
Available Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, ePub
Publisher’s Link: https://utorontopress.com/ca/talking-back-to-the-indian-act-2
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Talking-Back-Indian-Act-Histories/dp/148758735X/ref=sr_1_18?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1537452419&sr=1-18
Kayanesenh Paul Williams, Kayanerenkó:wa: The Great Law of Peace (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018)
Several centuries ago, the five nations that would become the Haudenosaunee—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—were locked in generations-long cycles of bloodshed. When they established Kayanerenkó:wa, the Great Law of Peace, they not only resolved intractable conflicts, but also shaped a system of law and government that would maintain peace for generations to come. This law remains in place today in Haudenosaunee communities: an Indigenous legal system, distinctive, complex, and principled. It is not only a survivor, but a viable alternative to Euro-American systems of law. With its emphasis on lasting relationships, respect for the natural world, building consensus, and on making and maintaining peace, it stands in contrast to legal systems based on property, resource exploitation, and majority rule.
Although Kayanerenkó:wa has been studied by anthropologists, linguists, and historians, it has not been the subject of legal scholarship. ere are few texts to which judges, lawyers, researchers, or academics may refer for any understanding of speci c Indigenous legal systems. Following the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and a growing emphasis on reconciliation, Indigenous legal systems are increasingly relevant to the evolution of law and society.
In Kayanerenkó:wa: The Great Law of Peace Kayanesenh Paul Williams, counsel to Indigenous nations for forty years, with a law practice based in the Grand River Territory of the Six Nations, brings the sum of his experience and expertise to this analysis of Kayanerenkó:wa as a living, principled legal system. In doing so, he puts a powerful tool in the hands of Indigenous and settler communities.
Available Formats: Hardcover, Paperback
Publisher’s Link: https://uofmpress.ca/books/detail/kayanerenkowa
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Kayanerenk%C3%B3-wa-Great-Law-Peace/dp/0887558216/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1537453822&sr=1-1&keywords=Kayanerenk%C3%B3%3Awa+The+Great+Law+of+Peace
October 27
Jennifer Wemigwans, A Digital Bundle: Protecting and Promoting Indigenous Knowledge Online (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2018)
An essential contribution to Internet activism and a must read for Indigenous educators, A Digital Bundle frames digital technology as an important tool for self-determination and idea sharing, ultimately contributing to Indigenous resurgence and nation building.
By defining Indigenous Knowledge online in terms of “digital bundles,” Jennifer Wemigwans elevates both cultural protocol and cultural responsibilities, grounds online projects within Indigenous philosophical paradigms, and highlights new possibilities for both the Internet and Indigenous communities.
Available Formats: Paperback
Publisher’s Link: https://uofrpress.ca/Books/A/A-Digital-Bundle
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Digital-Bundle-Protecting-Promoting-Indigenous/dp/0889775516/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1537462751&sr=8-1&keywords=A+DIGITAL+BUNDLE+PROTECTING+AND+PROMOTING+INDIGENOUS+KNOWLEDGE+ONLINE
October 31
Daniel Heidt, Reconsidering Confederation: Canada’s Founding Debates, 1864-1999 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2018)
July 1st 1867 is celebrated as Canada’s Confederation – the date that Canada became a country. But 1867 was only the beginning. As the country grew from a small dominion to a vast federation encompassing ten provinces, three territories, and hundreds of First Nations, its leaders repeatedly debated Canada’s purpose, and the benefits and drawbacks of the choice to be Canadian.
Reconsidering Confederation brings together Canada’s leading historians to explore how the provinces, territories, and Treaty areas became the political frameworks we know today. In partnership with The Confederation Debates, an ongoing crowdsourced, non-partisan, and non-profit initiative to digitize all of Canada’s founding colonial and federal records, this book breaks new ground by integrating the treaties between Indigenous peoples and the Crown into our understanding of Confederation.
Rigorously researched and eminently readable, this book traces the unique paths that each province and territory took on their journey to Confederation. It shows the roots of regional and cultural grievances, as vital and controversial in early debates as they are today. Reconsidering Confederation tells the sometimes rocky, complex, and ongoing story of how Canada has become Canada.
Available Formats: Paperback, PDF, ePub
Publisher’s Link: https://press.ucalgary.ca/books/9781773850153
Better Late than Never
Sandra Rollings-Magnusson, The Homesteaders (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2018)
The Homesteaders covers the whole settler experience, beginning the year Canada was founded and the first sodbusters appeared in what is now Saskatchewan, right through the immigration boom years preceding the First World War. In their own words, settlers recount their lives from the moment they registered for their “home quarter” — 160 acres of land given to them, so long as they could cultivate it. Homesteaders describe the formidable task of building the family home from sod or logs, the back-breaking labour of cropping and harvesting the fields, the patience needed when working with draught animals, and the misery of dealing with the pests which threatened their livelihood. Their reminiscences extend further as they discuss the type of food that was available, the medical practicesthey had to endure, and the educational experiences of their children in one-room schoolhouses, as well as their hobbies, the books that they read, the songs they sang, the pets that they owned, the games that they played, and the local dances, picnics, weddings, and chivarees that they attended during these early years.
Available Formats: Paperback
Publisher’s Link: https://uofrpress.ca/Books/T/The-Homesteaders
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Homesteaders-Sandra-Rollings-Magnusson/dp/088977515X/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1532643338&sr=8-5&keywords=THE+HOMESTEADERS
Peter John Loewen, Carolyn Hughes Tuohy, Andrew Potter, & Sophie Borwein, eds. Canada and Its Centennial and Sesquicentennial: Transformative Policy Then and Now (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018)
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Canada’s centennial anniversary in 1967 coincided with a period of transformative public policymaking. This period saw the establishment of the modern welfare state, as well as significant growth in the area of cultural diversity, including multiculturalism and bilingualism. Meanwhile, the rising commitment to the protection of individual and collective rights was captured in the project of a “just society.”
Tracing the past, present, and future of Canadian policymaking, Canada and Its Centennial and Sesquicentennial examines the country’s current and most critical challenges: the renewal of the federation, managing diversity, Canada’s relations with Indigenous peoples, the environment, intergenerational equity, global economic integration, and Canada’s role in the world. Scrutinizing various public policy issues through the prism of Canada’s sesquicentennial, the contributors consider the transformation of policy and present an accessible portrait of how the Canadian view of policymaking has been reshaped, and where it may be heading in the next fifty years.
Available Formats: Hardcover, Paperback
Publisher’s Link: https://utorontopress.com/ca/canada-and-its-centennial-and-sesquicentennial-2
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Canada-Its-Centennial-Sesquicentennial-Transformative/dp/1487523246/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1537455792&sr=1-1&keywords=canada+and+its+centennial
Marcel Fournier, La Contribution des pionniers de la ville de Paris au peuplement du Canada, 1617-1850 (Québec: Septentrion, 2018)
À l’époque de la Nouvelle-France, les Parisiens ne représentent qu’un vingtième des habitants d’une France alors largement rurale. Siège de l’administration royale, la capitale exercera sur le peuplement de la colonie laurentienne une influence que l’on peut estimer de cinq à six fois supérieure à cette proportion.
L’information dont on disposait jusqu’à présent sur les colons parisiens était assez déficiente, du fait de l’inestimable perte au fil du temps de presque tous les registres paroissiaux du Paris intra-muros. Marcel Fournier vient ici combler en partie une importante lacune que connaissent bien les chercheurs.
L’auteur ne se limite pas seulement à la constitution d’un répertoire biographique. Après le survol de la riche histoire de Paris, il s’attarde sur les lieux ayant un lien historique avec le Québec, ce qui inclut rues, places, églises et autres monuments. Ce livre constitue donc un véritable guide historico-touristique de la capitale française en plus d’être une source inédite sur plus de 900 ancêtres d’origine parisienne.
Available Formats: Paperback
Publisher’s Link: https://www.septentrion.qc.ca/catalogue/contribution-des-pionniers-de-la-ville-de-paris-au-peuplement-du-canada-la
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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