Challenging Frontiers
The frontier reality of confronting new conditions, adapting cultural inclinations, and dealing with a volatile environment in an effort to establish and nurture new communities is central to the western Canadian experience. It has shaped many aspects of our heritage, and it is within that context the essays assembled here strive to identify and c …
Alliance and Conflict
Alliance and Conflict combines a richly descriptive study of inter–societal relations in early nineteenth–century Northwest Alaska with a bold theoretical treatise on the structure of the world system as it might have been in ancient times. Basing his account on interviews with Indigenous historians, observations made by early Western explorer …
Canadian Women Shaping Diasporic Religious Identities
This collection of essays explores how women from a variety of religious and cultural communities have contributed to the richly textured, pluralistic society of Canada. Focusing on women’s religiosity, it examines the ways in which they have carried and conserved, and brought forward and transformed their cultures—old and new—in modern Canad …
The Fence and the Bridge
The Fence and the Bridge is about the development of the Canada-US border-security relationship as an outgrowth of the much lengthier Canada-US relationship. It suggests that this relationship has been both highly reflexive and hegemonic over time, and that such realities are embodied in the metaphorical images and texts that describe the Canada-US …
On the Frontier
First published more than twenty years ago as My Dear Maggie, this new edition of William Wallace's letters home to England provides rare documentation of the earliest days of settlement in the West. The correspondence conveys a sense of unspoken courage--the courage that was needed to make a fresh start in a strange new land.
"William's letters con …
Holocaust Survivors in Canada
In the decade after the Second World War, 35,000 Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution and their dependants arrived in Canada. This was a watershed moment in Canadian Jewish history. The unprecedented scale of the relief effort required for the survivors, compounded by their unique social, psychological, and emotional needs challenged both the estab …
Engendering Transnational Voices
Engendering Transnational Voices examines the transnational practices and identities of immigrant women, youth, and children in an era of global migration and neoliberalism, addressing such topics as family relations, gender and work, schooling, remittances, cultural identities, caring for children and the elderly, inter- and multi-generational rel …
Transnational Radicals
Italian anarchism emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, during that country’s long and bloody unification. Often facing economic hardship and political persecution, many of Italy’s anarchists migrated to North America. Wherever Italian anarchists settled they published journals, engaged in labour and political activism, and atte …
Women's History
This fifth volume of the History of the Prairie West Series contains a broad range of articles spanning the 1870s to the present and examines the mostly unexplored place of women in the history of the Canada's Prairie Provinces. From "Spinsters Need Not Apply" to "Negotiating Sex: Gender in the Ukrainian Bloc Settlement," women’s roles in politic …
Invisible Immigrants
Despite being one of the largest immigrant groups contributing to the development of modern Canada, the story of the English has been all but untold. In Invisible Immigrants, Barber and Watson document the experiences of English-born immigrants who chose to come to Canada during England’s last major wave of emigration between the 1940s and the 19 …
Reclaiming Canadian Bodies
The central focus of Reclaiming Canadian Bodies is the relationship between visual media, the construction of Canadian national identity, and notions of embodiment. It asks how particular representations of bodies are constructed and performed within the context of visual and discursive mediated content. The book emphasizes the ways individuals des …
Disengaged?
Elections are a critical componenet of democracy, yet civic engagement has reached a post-war low in Manitoba. Barely half of all eligible voters showed up to vote in the last three provincial elections. Surveys show that many of these non-voters feel alienated from the political process, or have other priorities on Election Day. Of particular inte …
Kinds of Winter
A veteran dog musher, Dave Olesen finished the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race eight times. After a fifteen-year career as a sled dog racer, Olesen set out to fulfill a lifelong dream. In four successive winters he steered his dogs and sled on long trips away from his remote Northwest Territories homestead, setting out in turn to the south, east, nort …
A Brief History of Women in Quebec
A Brief History of Women in Quebec examines the historical experience of women of different social classes and origins (geographic, ethnic, and racial) from the period of contact between Europeans and Aboriginals to the twenty-first century to give a nuanced and complex account of the main transformations in their lives.
Themes explored include demo …
Conrad Kain
Conrad Kain is a titan amongst climbers in Canada and is well-known in mountaineering circles all over the world. His letters to Amelie Malek-a life-long friend-offer a candid view into the deepest thoughts of the Austrian mountain guide, and are a perfect complement to his autobiography, Where the Clouds Can Go. The 144 letters provide a unique an …
The Showman and the Ukrainian Cause
A quixotic figure, Vasile Avramenko (1895-1981) used folk culture and modern media in a life-long crusade to promote Ukraine’s struggle for independence to North American audiences. From his base in New York City, he built a network of folk dance schools and produced musical spectacles to help Ukrainian immigrants sustain their identity. His feat …
Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable
Between 1973 and 1978, six thousand Chileans leftists took refuge in central Canada after the Pinochet coup d’état. Once resettled at the northern extreme of the Americas, these political exiles had to find ways of coping with an abrupt and violent separation from their homeland that had deep material and emotional repercussions. In Young, Well- …
small things left behind
"Freedom is something my father has never known. How do I explain freedom to the ones born bent?" -from "Not Scared" Ella Zeltserman's poetry cuts both ways. The story of her flight from the USSR in 1979-of the young family she brought to Edmonton and the older one she left behind-does "explain freedom to the ones born bent," but it also explains o …
Painted Fires
Painted Fires, first published in 1925, narrates the trials and tribulations of Helmi Milander, a Finnish immigrant, during the years approaching the First World War. The novel serves as a vehicle for McClung’s social activism, especially in terms of temperance, woman suffrage, and immigration policies that favour cultural assimilation. In her af …
Film and the City
Most Canadians are city dwellers, a fact often unacknowledged by twentieth-century Canadian films, with their preference for themes of wilderness survival or rural life. Modernist Canadian films tend to support what film scholar Jim Leach calls “the nationalist-realist project,” a documentary style that emphasizes the exoticism and mythos of th …
Homelessness & Health in Canada
Homelessness & Health in Canada explores, for the first time, the social, structural, and environmental factors that shape the health of homeless persons in Canada. Covering a wide range of topics from youth homelessness to end-of-life care, the authors strive to outline policy and practice recommendations to respond to the ongoing public health cr …
Not the Whole Story
Not the Whole Story is a compilation of sixteen stories narrated by single mothers in their own way and about their own lives. Each story is unique, but the same issues appear again and again. Abuse, parenting as single mothers, challenges in the labour market, mental health and addictions issues, a scarcity of quality childcare, immigration and st …
The Foreigner
The Foreigner (1909) tells the story of Kalman Kalmar, a young Ukrainian immigrant working in rural Saskatchewan. It addresses the themes of male maturation, cultural assimilation, and a form of “muscular Christianity” recurring in Connor’s popular Western tales. Daniel Coleman’s afterword considers the text’s departure from Connor’s es …
Cloudburst
Cloudburst is a milestone in Canadian literature. For over a half-century, beginning with the Spanish Civil War and continuing through the coups d’état and military repression in South and Central America in the 1970s and 80s, Spanish-speaking writers have been arriving in Canada as exiles and immigrants and have been creating new works in thei …
Sanctioned Ignorance
"There is no such thing as 'the ivory tower.' Rather, there sit side by side numerous windowless towers of knowledge, each seeming to have only a small entrance and no discernable exit." -Paul Martin Multilingual, multicultural, and vast, Canada enjoys a rich diversity of literatures. So, why does "Canadian Literature," as it has been taught, fail …
Rewriting the Break Event
Despite the fact that Russian Mennonites began arriving in Canada en masse in the 1870s, Mennonite Canadian literature has been marked by a compulsive retelling of the mass migration of some 20,000 Russian Mennonites to Canada following the collapse of the “Mennonite Commonwealth” in the 1920s. This privileging of a seminal dispersal within the …
Youth, Education, and Marginality
Youth, Education, and Marginality: Local and Global Expressions is a close examination of the lives of marginalized young people in schools. Essays by scholars and educators provide international insights grounded in educational and community practice and policy. They cover the range and intersections of marginalization: poverty, Aboriginal culture …
The Newfoundland Diaspora
Out-migration, driven by high unemployment and a floundering economy, has been a defining aspect of Newfoundland society for well over a century, and it reached new heights with the cod moratorium in 1992. This Newfoundland “diaspora” has had a profound impact on the province’s literature.
Many writers and scholars have referred to Newfoundlan …
Place and Replace
Place and Replace is a collection of recent interdisciplinary research into Western Canada that calls attention to the multiple political, social, and cultural labours performed by the concept of “place.” The book continues a long-standing tradition of situating questions of place at the centre of analyses of Western Canada’s cultures, pasts, …
The Constructed Mennonite
John Werner was a storyteller. A Mennonite immigrant in southern Manitoba, he captivated his audiences with tales of adventure and perseverance. With every telling he constructed and reconstructed the memories of his life. John Werner was a survivor. Born in the Soviet Union just after the Bolshevik Revolution, he was named Hans and grew up in a Ge …
Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground
Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground contains thirty-five of F.R. Scott’s poems from across the five decades of his career. Scott’s artistic responses to a litany of social problems, as well as his emphasis on nature and landscapes, remain remarkably relevant. Scott weighed in on many issues important to Canadians today, using different terms …
The Unwritten Diary of Israel Unger
At the beginning of the Nazi period, 25,000 Jewish people lived in Tarnow, Poland. By the end of the Second World War, nine remained. Like Anne Frank, Israel Unger and his family hid for two years in an attic crawl space. Against all odds, they emerged alive. Now, after decades of silence, here is Israel’s “unwritten diary.”
Nine people lived …
Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity
Ethnic elites, the influential business owners, teachers, and newspaper editors within distinct ethnic communities, play an important role as self-appointed mediators between their communities and “mainstream” societies. In Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity, Aya Fujiwara examines the roles of Japanese, Ukrainian, and Scottish elites during th …
Game Plan
How deep is the importance and influence of organized sports in Alberta? Discover key episodes and players in the history of Alberta's organized sports and read how sport shaped the lives of individuals as well as of communities of indigenous people, settlers, and immigrants. Read new perspectives on well-known sports stories along with tales of le …
Centre and Periphery, Roots and Exile
This book examines the impact place and displacement can have on the composition and interpretation of Western art music, using as its primary objects of study the work of István Anhalt (1919–2012), György Kurtág (1926–), and Sándor Veress (1907–92).
Although all three composers are of Hungarian origin, their careers followed radically di …
Making It Like a Man
Making It Like a Man: Canadian Masculinities in Practice is a collection of essays on the practice of masculinities in Canadian arts and cultures, where to “make it like a man” is to participate in the cultural, sociological, and historical fluidity of ways of being a man in Canada, from the country’s origins in nineteenth-century Victorian v …
Looking Back
When we think about women settlers on the Prairies, our notions tend to veer between the nostalgic image of the "cheerful helpmate" and the grim deprivation of the "reluctant immigrant." In this ground-breaking new study, Leigh Matthews shows how a critical approach to the life-writing of individual prairie women can broaden and deepen our understa …
Cold War Comforts
Cold War Comforts examines Canadian women’s efforts to protect children’s health and safety between the dropping of the first atomic bomb in Hiroshima in 1945 and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Amid this global insecurity, many women participated in civil defence or joined the disarmament movement as means to protect their families from th …
Borrowed Tongues
Borrowed Tongues is the first consistent attempt to apply the theoretical framework of translation studies in the analysis of self-representation in life writing by women in transnational, diasporic, and immigrant communities. It focuses on linguistic and philosophical dimensions of translation, showing how the dominant language serves to articulat …
Hearts and Minds
What was romance like for Canadians a century ago? What qualities did marriageable men and women look for in prospective mates? How did they find suitable partners in difficult circumstances such as frontier isolation and parental disapproval, and, when they did, how did courtship proceed in the immediate post-Victorian era, when traditional romant …
Our Union
The post-war period witnessed dramatic changes in the lives of working-class families. Wages rose, working hours were reduced, pension plans and state social security measures offered greater protection against unemployment, illness, and old age, the standard of living improved, and women and members of immigrant communities entered the labour mark …
Imagining Resistance
Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada offers two separate but interconnected strategies for reading alternative culture in Canada from the 1940s through to the present: first, a history of radical artistic practice in Canada and, second, a collection of eleven essays that focus on a range of institutions, artists, events, and …
Community and Frontier
A social and economic history of one of the oldest Ukrainian settlements in Western Canada. Established in 1896, the Stuartburn colony was one of the earliest Ukrainian settlements in western Canada. Based on an analysis of government records, pioneer memoirs, and the Ukrainian and English language press, Community and Frontier is a detailed examin …
Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood
Mennonites and their forebears are usually thought to be a people with little interest or involvement in politics. Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood reveals that since their early history, Mennonites have, in fact, been active participants in worldly politics. From western to eastern Europe and through different migrations to North America, Jame …
Mennonite Women in Canada
Mennonite Women in Canada traces the complex social history and multiple identities of Canadian Mennonite women over 200 years. Marlene Epp explores women’s roles, as prescribed and as lived, within the contexts of immigration and settlement, household and family, church and organizational life, work and education, and in response to social trend …
Promoters, Planters, and Pioneers
In this comprehensive study of Belgian settlement in western Canada, Cornelius Jaenen shows that Belgian immigration was unique in its character and brought with it significant benefits out of proportion to its comparatively small numbers.
Canada's first Immigration Act (1869) included Belgium among the "preferred countries" from which immigrants sh …
The China Challenge
With the exception of Canada’s relationship with the United States, Canada’s relationship with China will likely be its most significant foreign connection in the twenty-first century. As China’s role in world politics becomes more central, understanding China becomes essential for Canadian policymakers and policy analysts in a variety of are …
Racial Attitudes in English-Canadian Fiction, 1905-1980
Racial Attitudes in English-Canadian Fiction is a critical overview of the appearances and consequences of racism in English-Canadian fiction published between 1905 and 1980.
Based on an analysis of traditional expressions in literature of group solidarity and resentment, the study screens English-Canadian novels for fictional representations of su …
The Waterloo Mennonites
The Waterloo Mennonites is truly a communal book: the substance treats the communal aspect of the Mennonite community in all its complexity, while the book itself came about through communal effort from the students and researchers assisting Fretz, the various organizations and individuals providing support, the larger community including the two u …
How Silent Were the Churches?
Winner of the 1997 Jewish Book Committee award for scholarship on a Canadian Jewish subject.
Ever since Abella and Troper (None Is too Many, 1982) exposed the anti-Semitism behind Canada’s refusal to allow Jewish escapees from the Third Reich to immigrate, the Canadian churches have been under a shadow. Were the churches silent or largely silent, …