Canadian History

Harold Coward's Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada (2014) would seem to provide the long awaited concluding installment to the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion (CCSR)-sponsored and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded State-of-the-Art Review of the academic study of religion in Canada that began in the early 1980s. Under his general editorship, the series set out to provide a history, description, and comprehensive analysis of Religious Studies as conceived and practiced in its Canadian context. 1 Although all the volumes certainly provided exhaustive and detailed, if now largely out of date, accounts of specific regions, missing was a synthetic and comparative overview to pull them all together. 2 Such a volume would ideally serve as a prolegomenon to writing a national history of the field that could, among other things, note trans-regional themes, document common trends, and so on. That Coward's volume is written as a memoir, however, means that that overview continues to remain a scholarly desideratum. In what follows I wish to reflect on some of the possibilities and problems inherent to the series with an eye toward writing a proper history of the academic study of religion in Canada. 3 Any attempt to write this history has to take into account at least two factors. The first is regionalism (which includes bilingualism) and the second is the general proximity to the United States. Let me take up each of these in turn. Regionalism Canada, as should be clear from even the quickest glances at a globe or map, is a huge country, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward into the Arctic Ocean,

This article interrogates the settler colonial history of Thunder Bay through place names and argues that gendered forms of anti-Indigenous violence are part of the city's social architecture. Between 1860 and 1910, settlers produced vast amounts of wealth and built a local industrial economy founded upon land-based resources such as silver, timber, and shale; at the same time, settlers forcefully relocated Anishnaabe peoples to multiple reserve sites, prevented them from participating in the emergent industrial economy, and used their sacred mountain as a quarry for brick-making and as a stop-butt for a settler rifle range. The article deploys the concept of settler colonial reterritorialization to critique the ways in which this history has been sanctioned and celebrated through local place names such as Mount McKay, Fort William, Port Arthur, and Simpson Street. Ultimately, I show that the material violence of enfolding the land and its resources into an exploitative and exclusive settler colonial economy emerged in tandem with the power to name the land in honour of white men who played primary roles in that very violent historical process.

Until the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, the Catholic Church had an almost unchallenged monopoly on public education in French Canada. Generations of French Canadian children were taught at the primary and secondary levels by various male and female religious orders according to a curriculum that infused almost every element of education with the fundaments of the Catholic Faith. But there is something of an apparent paradox at work when we consider this curriculum: how can an educational system that is so fundamentally Catholic give such prominence to pre-Christian Greek and Latin authors, and why did ‘pagan’ mythology and religious traditions figure so prominently in studies of all levels? Why did a Catholic system spend so much time teaching non-Catholic literature and religious material? This chapter addresses this question by examining in detail the place of mythology in a variety of primary pedagogical materials used in French Canadian schools from the foundation of the colony until the publication of the Commission Parent’s report in 1964. The evolving place of classical mythology in French Canadian education is tracked from the establishment of the colony in the 17th century through to the vociferous debates among the clergy over the place of pre-Christian authors in Catholic education which erupted in France in the mid-19th century and then spilled into French Canadian in the 1860s. The perceived benefits and threats posed by such a mythological education are analysed through the assertions of a variety of contemporary commentators. By means of conclusion, the prominence of Classical mythology and ancient authors in the curriculum is viewed in relation to the evolving national mythology of French Canada itself, according to which the French Canadian Catholic establishment becomes the direct successor to the Classical past.

Full volume is available open-access at this link:
https://www.wuw.pl/product-pol-14887-Our-Mythical-Education-The-Reception-of-Classical-Myth-Worldwide-in-Formal-Education-1900-2020-PDF.html

NATIVE MESSENGERS OF GOD IN CANADA?:
A TEST CASE FOR BAHA’I UNIVERSALISM (1996)

*** Christopher Buck, “Native Messengers of God in Canada?: A Test Case for Baha’i Universalism.” Baha’i Studies Review 6 (1996): 97–133.

*** Award for Excellence in Baha’i Studies. Association for Baha’i Studies, 1994.

EPILOGUE

Thereupon Tekanawitaˀ [Deganawida, the Peacemaker] stood up in the center of the gathering place, and then he said, “First I will answer what it means to say, ‘Now it is arriving, the Good Message.’ This indeed, is what it means: When it stops, the slaughter of your own people who live here on earth, then everywhere peace will come about, by day and also by night, and it will come about that as one travels around, everyone will be related. …

Now again, secondly, I say, ‘Now it is arriving, the power,’ and this means that the different nations, all the nations, will become just a single one, and the Great Law will come into being, so that now all will be related to each other, and there will come to be just a single family, and in the future, in days to come, this family will continue on.

Now in turn, the other, my third saying, ‘Now it is arriving, the Peace,’ this means that everyone will become related, men and also women, and also the young people and the children, and when all are relatives, every nation, then there will be peace as they roam about by day and also by night. …

Then there will be truthfulness, and they will uphold hope and charity, so that it is peace that will unite all the people, indeed, it will be as though they have but one mind, and they are a single person with only one body and one head and one life, which means that there will be unity.” …

When they are functioning, the Good Message and also the Power and the Peace, moreover, these will be the principal things everybody will live by; these will be the great values among the people.”

– Chief John Arthur Gibson, Concerning the League: The Iroquois League as Dictated in Onondaga, newly elicited, edited and translated by Hanni Woodbury in Collaboration with Reg Henry and Harry Webster on the Basis of A.A. Goldenweiser’s Manuscript. Memoir 9 (Winnipeg: Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics, 1992): 36–41. 

ABSTRACT

Academic and popular interest has lent prestige to native spirituality and has brought it into prominence. The United Nations proclamation of 1993 as the International Year of Indigenous People gave native peoples international recognition. A corresponding interest in native culture has “valorised” (brought respect to) native spirituality.

The National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Canada took a position of advocacy on behalf of First Nations Canadians in its formal submission to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in the fall of 1993. The strong native presence in Canadian Bahá’í community life raises the question of the place of native spirituality within a Bahá’í worldview.

Homefront “pioneers” have extended Bahá’í universalism to a recognition of the richness and authenticity of native cultural values. Such recognition has been supported by local Bahá’í policy, as attested in teaching pamphlets addressed to native peoples, in which the concept of First World messengers of God has been validated. Although theoretically acknowledged, explicit recognition of native messengers of God has yet to be formalised in Bahá’í doctrine.

This study discusses the possibilities of incorporating the principle of “Messengers of God to Indigenous Peoples” within formal Bahá’í doctrine, reflecting a development that has already taken place in popular Bahá’í belief in the North American context. A hitherto under-studied Persian text of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá establishes the principle in such a way that its explicit enunciation is now possible.

The problem of historical attestation remains. The prophetic credentials of Iroquois culture hero and statesman Deganawida are critically examined as a test case. The legend of Deganawida has a kernel of historicity overlaid by hagiography, with admitted Christian influence. Nonetheless, if the Bahá’í principle of “Progressive Revelation” can assimilate the Amerindian spiritual legacy as distinct from and developmentally asynchronous with Irano-Semitic and Sino-Indic religious histories, then it might be possible to accord Deganawida a provisional status with Bahá’í prophetology, and still affirm Bahá’u’lláh’s unific role in world history, as oral cultures take their place alongside the more familiar “literate” traditions.

https://www.academia.edu/36294314/_Native_Messengers_of_God_in_Canada_1996_

The Gouzenko Affair is referred to as the event that started the Cold War. This article draws on recently declassified documents that shed new light on Britain’s role in this affair, particularly that of the Foreign Office and the British High Commissioner to Canada. The documents reveal how the British had a major part in directing the response to Igor Gouzenko’s defection in 1945. This event revealed the need for increased counterespionage security, but it also became a spectacle that directed the public’s attention away from the British connection: specifically, the role of Alan Nunn May, a British nuclear scientist who had provided the Soviets with classified information. Instead, the public’s interest was centred on Soviet spies, communism as a subversive force, and the brewing Soviet-US conflict. These newly declassified sources demonstrate how it was the British intelligence services and the British government that went to great lengths to help focus the public’s attention in this direction. They took great pains to direct Canadian policy making, which included working to discourage Canada’s prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King from handling the affair privately with the Soviet ambassador, and were likely behind the infamous press leak to US reporter Drew Pearson that forced King to call a Royal Commission and publicize the affair. With the help of the British government and intelligence services, the Cold War began.

Cette thèse de doctorat porte sur la manière dont s’exerce localement le pouvoir politique au sein de deux communautés autochtones de la vallée du Saint-Laurent (Kahnawake et Odanak) entre la Conquête (1760) et le transfert de Londres vers l’administration coloniale de la pleine responsabilité dans la gestion des Affaires indiennes (1860). Délaissant la question traditionnelle du rôle diplomatique des chefs auprès des autorités coloniales, cette thèse se concentre plutôt sur leurs prérogatives liées à la gestion des terres et des ressources dans les terres « seigneuriales » du Sault-Saint-Louis (Kahnawake) et de Saint-François (Odanak). À partir de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, les chefs font en effet de la gestion des terres et des ressources possédées communalement l’une des principales assises de leur autorité.
Après la Conquête et le départ de leurs anciens tuteurs officieux (les jésuites), les chefs autochtones de Kahnawake et d’Odanak agissent comme « seigneurs », sans l’intervention des autorités coloniales. À ce titre, ils concèdent des censives à des Canadiens, gèrent le moulin banal, nomment des intermédiaires et déterminent de l’utilisation des redevances « seigneuriales ». Dans la même foulée, les chefs cherchent à affermir leur autorité sur leur « domaine », soit sur les terres que les membres de ces communautés se réservent pour leur propre usage. Les prérogatives revendiquées par les chefs, notamment celles de réglementer l’usage des terres et des ressources, sont toutefois contestées par certains membres de leur communauté. Au cœur de notre problématique se situe donc la manière dont les Autochtones conçoivent et contestent la légitimité de l’autorité exercée par leurs chefs et les modalités de la réponse de ces derniers qui tentent de maîtriser ces contestations.
Cette thèse met également en lumière la manière dont le gouvernement colonial entend asseoir son autorité sur les terres des Autochtones de la vallée du Saint-Laurent à partir des années 1820. Les autorités coloniales nomment alors des agents pour récolter les redevances « seigneuriales » à la place des intermédiaires nommés par les chefs. Tirant profit des conflits intracommunautaires, les officiers des Affaires indiennes accroissent, dans la décennie suivante, leur contrôle sur la gestion des fonds publics des communautés autochtones dans le but que ces revenus soient utilisés en vertu des visées de la nouvelle politique de civilisation. L’autorité des chefs autochtones se trouve dès lors fragilisée, car ceux-ci doivent désormais rendre compte de la manière dont ils emploient les fonds publics aux officiers des Affaires indiennes. Des membres des communautés autochtones réclament en outre de plus en plus d’avoir un mot à dire à cet égard.
Finalement, cette thèse démontre comment les transformations de l’État bas-canadien dans les années 1840 et 1850 influencent le pouvoir des chefs autochtones ainsi que le statut de leurs terres. Pour se distinguer des nouvelles structures de pouvoir local que sont les corporations municipales, les Autochtones revendiquent un statut de pupille de la Couronne britannique et favorisent également l’uniformisation du statut de leurs terres. La mise en évidence de l’absence de personnalité juridique des communautés autochtones permet également aux Affaires indiennes d’accroître leur contrôle sur les terres des Autochtones au détriment de l’autorité des chefs, qui apparaît alors de plus en plus précarisée au milieu du XIXe siècle.

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada.

While highlighting the ubiquity of Black resistance, Policing Black Lives traces the still-living legacy of slavery across multiple institutions, shedding light on the state’s role in perpetuating contemporary Black poverty and unemployment, racial profiling, law enforcement violence, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and low graduation rates.

Emerging from a critical race feminist framework that insists that all Black lives matter, Maynard’s intersectional approach to anti-Black racism addresses the unique and understudied impacts of state violence as it is experienced by Black women, Black people with disabilities, as well as queer, trans, and undocumented Black communities.

A call-to-action, Policing Black Lives urges readers to work toward dismantling structures of racial domination and re-imagining a more just society.

Available now from UBC Press and the University of Washington Press
*Awarded the 2019 Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences Canada Prize
*Award the 2018 Canadian Studies Book Prize
*Short-listed for the 2019 Wilson Prize in Canadian History

Lacrosse has been a central element of Indigenous cultures for centuries, but once non-Indigenous players entered the sport, it became a site of appropriation – then reclamation – of Indigenous identities. The Creator’s Game focuses on the history of lacrosse in Indigenous communities from the 1860s to the 1990s, exploring Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations and Indigenous identity formation. While the game was being appropriated in the process of constructing a new identity for the nation-state of Canada, it was also being used by Indigenous peoples to resist residential school experiences, initiate pan-Indigenous political mobilization, and articulate Indigenous sovereignty. This engaging and innovative book provides a unique view of Indigenous self-determination and nationhood 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, sociology, and sports history.

This thesis proposes an analysis of the infantry reinforcement NCOs training during the Second World War in order to expose the creation and administration of the training organization as well as the nature of this training. In order to maintain the combat effectiveness of its units and formations on the Northwest European theater from June 1944 to May 1945, the First Canadian Army had to provide units with infantry reinforcements corporals able to face the battlefield challenges. Because of the importance of their task on the modern battlefield, these men were the backbone of the Canadian infantry battalions military effectiveness. The study of the policy and developments at the origin of this massive training organization shows that the system deficiencies still evident at the beginning of the Normandy campaign were largely due to the Canadian high command's lack of concern. This condition delayed the adoption of essential measures for the dissemination of a standard training in line with the developments of the modern battlefield until autumn 1944.
Despite Canada's involvement alongside Britain from 1914 to 1918, the policies adopted in the inter-war period by senior Canadian military leaders hampered the development of regular force's military expertise and more severely limited the attention paid to the militia preparation. The lack of a competent instructional staff at the outbreak of the Second World War hindered the development of a realistic training. The massive growth launched following the dramatic strategic change in 1940 only made worse the material and human resources deficiencies in addition to diverted the Canadian General Staff focus away from the NCOs infantry reinforcement organization. Nevertheless, the introduction of new training methods in the NCOs reinforcement organization in 1942 were a significant progress in the knowledge imparted to new corporals for their survival on the battlefield. However, their implementation were delayed by the difficult collaboration between the various headquarters and the diversity of approaches to disseminate the infantry tactical doctrine until 1944. The NCOs reinforcements revised training policy and organizational structure in the United Kingdom adopted early in 1944 and the introduction of the lessons learned at the front, especially after the start of operations in Northwest Europe, gradually ensured the arrival of more qualified candidates in field units. Finally, the measures adopted following the major infantry shortages at the end of August 1944 met an undeniable success and guaranteed the continuation of the campaign until its final conclusion. The implementation of a truly effective liaison between the different headquarters in charge of the infantry reinforcement training and the obvious interest of the First Canadian Army General Staff formed the vital elements for the arrival of well-trained NCOs in the Canadian battalions for the rest of the duration of the campaign. In the end, the analysis of the reinforcements training organization brings a new perspective on the reinforcement crisis and the need to resort to conscription in the fall of 1944.

Cette thèse propose une analyse de la formation des sous-officiers de renfort d’infanterie au cours de la Seconde Guerre mondiale dans le but d’exposer la création et l’administration de l’organisation d’instruction de ces hommes en plus d’étudier la nature de l’enseignement donné. Afin de maintenir l’efficacité au combat de ses unités et formations sur le théâtre opérationnel du nord-ouest de l’Europe à partir de juin 1944, la Première Armée canadienne devait fournir des caporaux de renforts d’infanterie aptes à faire face aux défis du champ de bataille. En raison de l’importance de leur tâche sur le champ de bataille moderne, ces hommes constituent véritablement l’épine dorsale de l’efficacité militaire des bataillons d’infanterie canadiens. L’analyse des politiques et des développements à l’origine de la filière d’instruction de masse pour des renforts d’infanterie montre que les déficiences du système encore présentes au début de la campagne de Normandie étaient dues en grande partie à la négligence du haut commandement militaire canadien. Cette condition retarda l’adoption de mesures essentielles à la dissémination d’un enseignement uniforme et en concordance avec les développements du champ de bataille moderne jusqu’à l’automne 1944.
Malgré l’implication canadienne au côté de la Grande-Bretagne de 1914 à 1918, les politiques adoptées dans l’entre-deux-guerres par les hauts dirigeants militaires canadiens gênèrent le développement de l’expertise militaire des membres de la force régulière en plus de limiter considérablement l’attention accordée à la préparation de la milice. L’absence d’un cadre d’instruction compétent au moment du déclenchement de la Seconde Guerre mondiale entrava la mise sur pied d’une formation réaliste. L’expansion massive entreprise à la suite du changement dramatique du contexte stratégique en 1940 ne fit qu’aggraver la carence en ressources matérielles et humaines en plus de détourner l’attention des généraux canadiens de l’organisation de la filière d’instruction des sous-officiers de renfort d’infanterie. Malgré tout, l’introduction de nouvelles méthodes d’instruction et d’entraînement dans l’organisation destinées aux sous-officiers de renfort à partir de 1942 constitua un progrès sensible dans le savoir communiqué aux nouveaux caporaux pour leur survie sur le champ de bataille. Cependant, sa mise en œuvre fut retardée par la collaboration difficile entre les différents quartiers généraux et par la diversité des approches adoptées pour disséminer une doctrine d’infanterie jusqu’en 1944. La révision de la politique d’instruction des sous-officiers de renfort et de sa structure d’organisation au Royaume-Uni au début de l’année 1944 eut progressivement pour effet de garantir l’envoi de candidats de qualité aux unités au front tout comme l’introduction des leçons tirées de l’expérience au front, plus particulièrement après le déclenchement des opérations en Europe du Nord-Ouest. Enfin, les mesures adoptées à la suite des importantes pénuries de fantassins connurent un succès indéniable pour la poursuite de la campagne. La mise en œuvre d’une coordination véritablement efficace entre les quartiers généraux responsables de la formation et l’intérêt manifeste de l’état-major de la Première Armée canadienne à partir du mois d’août 1944 pour la formation de ses renforts d’infanterie constituèrent les éléments indispensables à l’arrivée de sous-officiers de qualité au sein des bataillons canadiens pour le reste de la durée de la campagne. Au final, l’analyse de l’organisation d’instruction des renforts apporte une nouvelle perspective sur la crise des effectifs de renfort et sur la nécessité du recours à la conscription à l’automne 1944.

The Popularization of Belly Dance in Toronto, Canada (1950-1990): Hybridization and Uneven Exchange Anne Vermeyden Advisors: University of Guelph, 2016 Dr. Femi Kolapo and Dr. Renée Worringer Belly dance was first performed publicly in Toronto during the late nineteenth century. While immigrants to Canada from the Middle East faced discrimination, white audiences could not get enough of stereotypical portrayals of danse du ventre. Hollywood further popularized the Orientalist image of the belly dancer, and beginning in the 1950s, star Middle Eastern dancers like Samia Gamal and Nejla Ateş were making appearances on Toronto stages. By the 1960s, American, Middle Eastern, and Canadian dancers were performing belly dance in Toronto’s hotel nightclubs and restaurants. During belly dance’s peak popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, multiple venues were running two belly dance shows a night, six days a week, and belly dance classes were so popular they were often waitlisted. Why and how did ...

There has never been a book quite like Tax, Order, and Good Government, a history of Canada's first half-century of political development in which "the language of outraged taxpayers is given prominent place," in Canadian scholarship and not simply because the history of taxation has gone essentially unwritten since J. Harvey Perry's Taxes, Tariffs and Subsidies was published in 1955 or because political history more broadly became methodologically moribund in the 1980s and is only slowly recovering recently after two decades of desperate, life-sustaining interventions.

In the coming decades, the platforms and formalisms scholars employ to display, transform, and transmit information will continue to evolve. Innovations in information management did not stop with the codex. They will not stop with the PC. The purpose of this paper is to explore a specific implication that new paradigms of computing—especially those pertaining to 3D objects and 3D environments—will present for the discipline of history. Put simply, this study suggests historians will need to re‐think the aesthetics of their discipline. Drawing on the experience of the<it> 3D Virtual Buildings Project</it>, it suggests there are two possibilities historians can and ought to explore. The first is to test the efficacy of 3D objects as cognitive tools, tools designed to assist student realization that historical works are models, models that must be distinguished from the objects they represent. The second is to explore the use of 3D‐immersive environments as platforms to display research findings. If Virtual Reality is to emerge as a viable medium for the historical discipline, scholars will need to transform their practice. Assumptions regarding the constitution of narrative, authorship and the scholarly work will all require modification.

Many observers were surprised by the scope of the bicentennial celebrations of the war of 1812-1814 organized by the Conservative government. This paper approaches this enterprise as part of an attempt to reconstruct Canada’s national and international identity around a neoconservative and neocontinentalist world-view. However, an examination of the centennial celebration of this same war, scheduled for 1915, shows that the Harper government’s project is not unique and that this conflict has been previously reinterpreted in order to promote an alternative vision of Canada’s place in the world, this time around liberal values. Indeed, the plans laid out by the Canadian Peace Centenary Association aimed at celebrating the community of identity uniting the “English-speaking peoples” and the peace that North America experienced thanks to rational methods of conflict resolution, notably through a program of popular education. As such, the CPCA was a vehicle for an alternative conception to the imperialist ideas that dominated at the time, and it prefigures the emergence of a more nationalist conception of Canada’s place in the world.

On the 25 th anniversary of the Air India bombings, June 23, 2010, Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered an apology at a commemorative ceremony in Toronto on behalf of the federal government to those who lost loved ones on Air India Flight 182. Yet even while pointing to an apparent crisis in multiculturalism, the text of the apology, which is analyzed here, does not put the Canadian state’s official multiculturalism policy into question. In seeking to offer redress, the official apology in effect functions as a tool of the state to manage the grief and grievance of racialized minorities, even as the state works toward increased surveillance of racialized minorities. Reading the apology in conjunction with two fictional remembrances of the Air India bombings, Bharati Mukherjee’s 1988 short story “The Management of Grief” and Anita Rau Badami’s 2006 novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? , this essay addresses the politics of official apology/official multiculturalism. Where the ap...

What Pierre Trudeau did is important enough to discuss, because he changed Canada forever. He made English and French an equal status and he created the status of women office. His government also declared the Multicultural policy. The Multicultural policy is ensuring that Canadians receive, regardless of their race, equal treatment. Trudeau's government also enacted the Canada Health Act in 1984.

Although it is not generally done, it is useful to compare the history of the evolution of universal health coverage (UHC) in Canada and Sweden. The majority of citizens in both countries have shared, and continue to share, a commitment to a strong form of single-tier universality in the design of their respective UHC systems. In the postwar era, they also share a remarkably similar timeline in the emergence and entrenchment of single-tier UHC, despite the political and social differences between the two countries. At the same time, UHC was initially designed, implemented, and managed by social democratic governments that held power for long periods of time, creating a path dependency for single-tier Medicare that was difficult for future governments of different ideological persuasions to alter. Résumé. Même si peu de recherches le font, il est utile de comparer l'évolution des systèmes universels de santé (SUS) au Canada et en Suède. La majorité des citoyens de ces deux pays ont manifesté-et manifestent toujours-un attachement fort à l'égard système sanitaire de ce type. Durant l'après-guerre, leurs SUS respectifs émergent et s'enracinent d'ailleurs au fil d'une chronologie remarquablement similaire dans les deux pays, malgré les différences politiques et sociales qui les distinguent. Il est vrai que leurs systèmes de santé ont été initialement conçus, mis en oeuvre et gérés par des gouvernements sociaux-démocrates qui sont longtemps resté au pouvoir. Cette situation a créé une sorte d'accoutumance à l'universalité en matière de santé que les gouvernements ultérieurs, aux orientations idéologiques différentes, ont eu de la difficulté à remettre en cause. Methods and Issues / Problématiques et méthodes

Anderson House at 42 Powers Court, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada, is a familiar sight for those going up and down Signal Hill. The building was designated a Registered Heritage Structure by the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador on March 23, 1996. The building is named after James Anderson (c1768-1852), a sergeant in the militia, entrepreneur, and brewer of spruce beer and other temperance beverages.

This article examines the political satire of Nova Scotian writer and politician Thomas Chandler Haliburton through the lens of early nineteenth-century transatlantic debates over reform and the best form of government. Haliburton’s Sam Slick sketches, featuring a charismatic Yankee commenting on global political affairs, were immensely popular at the time, being published and read in Britain, Canada, and the US. The following pages argue that Haliburton’s portrayal of American culture is informed by his negative views on popular democracy and on its relationship with the nascent industrial capitalism transforming North America. Haliburton’s political satire was meant to persuade colonial readers that the introduction of American-style elective institutions in Nova Scotia had the potential to radically alter British North American culture, and push the colonies out of the orbit of the Empire.

The paper addresses questions concerning the place and role of Canadian sociology in the larger global context. In what ways can
Canadian sociology complementglobal sociology? What challenges face Canadian sociology in universities today? The authors review trajectories and paradigms of Canadian sociology, its history, and recent developments. The institutional structures of Canadian sociology are observed in the framework of 'sociology as a scientific and academic discipline' (SaSAD). The article provides a brief historical account to the Anglo/French division in Canadian sociology, examines its relationship with the country's legacy and complex interplay between social movements, political parties and social science. The case of Canada helps to address principal questions concerning the place of sociology as a scientific and academic discipline in the contemporary university.

Though it has been home for centuries to indigenous peoples who have mastered its conditions, the Arctic has historically proven to be a difficult region for governments to administer. Extreme temperatures, vast distances, and widely dispersed patterns of settlement have made it impossible for bureaucracies based in far-off capitals to erect and maintain the kind of infrastructure and institutions that they have built elsewhere. As climate change transforms the polar regions, this book seeks to explore how the challenges of governance are developing and being met in Alaska, the Canadian Far North, and Greenland, while also drawing upon lessons from the region's past. Though the experience of each of these jurisdictions is unique, their place within democratic, federal systems and the prominence within each of them of issues relating to the rights of indigenous peoples situates them as part of an identifiably 'North American Arctic.' Today, as this volume shows, their institutions are evolving to address contemporary issues of security, environmental protection, indigenous rights, and economic development.

Have transnational currents (Atlantic, borderlands, continentalist) in the history of colonial North America overcome the distortions long associated with a national framing of research on the early modern period? Have we left behind the tendency to read the political geography of the nineteenth century back into the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Taking the example of writings on New France, a colonial formation that sprawled across large parts of what was to become Canada and the United States, this article argues that national historio-graphic traditions continue to exert a powerful influence. Even as they pursue their subject across modern borders, Canadian, Quebec and United States historians frequently view New France through the lens of their own respective national traditions. The recent upsurge of interest in New France on the part of Early Americanists is a welcome development, but its impact is somewhat vitiated by a tendency to retain a United States-centric intellectual agenda while annexing new territories and cultures to what remains a national intellectual enterprise. The article concludes with the suggestion that New France specialists situate their work more in a wider hemispheric context, one that includes comparative perspectives on Latin America and the Caribbean. Résumé : Les courants transnationaux (l'atlantique, le frontalier, le continental) ont-ils su corriger les distorsions qui ont longtemps accompagné la recherche sur la période modern menée dans un cadre national? Avons-nous dé laissé la tendance à interpréter l'histoire des dix-septième et dix-huitième siècles en fonction de la géographie politique du dix-neuvième siècle? À partir de l'exemple de la Nouvelle-France, une entité coloniale recouvrant de larges pans de ce qui deviendrait le Canada et les É tats-Unis, cet article affirme que les traditions historiographiques nationales exercent toujours une influence considérable. Dans la poursuite de leurs travaux par delà les frontières modernes, les historiens du Canada, du Québec et des É tats-Unis observent fréquem-ment la Nouvelle-France par la lentille de leurs traditions nationales respectives. S'il est heureux que les spécialistes des É tats-Unis des premiers temps s'intéressent aujourd'hui à la Nouvelle-France, leur tendance à suivre un programme intellectuel centré sur les The Canadian Historical Review 91, 4, December 2010

In the spring and early summer of 1977, Toronto was on tenterhooks. Violent crime shook the Yonge Street “strip,” a few city blocks in the downtown core that featured pornographic bookstores, strip clubs, illicit drug sales, and sex work. The strip was also a fading centre of Toronto’s “Gay village.” In July, two men raped and murdered twelve-year-old Emanuel Jaques, the son of Portuguese immigrants, who worked regularly as a shoeshine boy on the strip. In short order, the two men accused of the killing were released from prison on their own recognizance, as was a man accused of raping three teenage girls at knifepoint, and fourth charged with raping a twenty-one-year-old in her apartment. Of the alleged Jaques murderers, the Toronto Sun newspaper editorialized that it was “astonishing that the pair would be turned loose on the community.” Those charged with “crimes of perversion” were “the vilest of all. Society should not be jeopardized by unleashing people who may have weird, uncontrollable appetites that are slaked or satisfied by violating children.”

The Jaques killing coincided with the appointment of Phil Givens chair of the Metropolitan Toronto Police Board, which oversaw the city police, but had long taken a hands-off approach to day-to-day police operations. Givens fell instantly into a political maelstrom. A newly vociferous and politicized Gay liberation movement in Toronto had begun confronting police violence against LGBT people,  a struggle now complicated by the dangerous conclusion reached by many Torontonians that the Jaques killing was somehow the fault of LGBT people. There was growing public sentiment against the violent treatment of black Torontonians by the police. In August 1979, police officers shot Albert Johnson to death in his home. Two police constables were charged with manslaughter in the case. “I never realized just how close to the surface one would find racial tensions,” Toronto mayor John Sewell told an audience at the Toronto Liberal Forum in September 1979. Dismayed, he quoted from a letter he had received from an elderly couple unhappy with the mayor’s criticisms of police violence and in reference to members of the black community: “If they don’t like our laws… why do they come here, we don’t need them….”  Two years into Givens’ term as chair, tensions between the police and black community reached a peak when on October 14, 1979, 1200 people rallied against racism and police violence at City Hall. A small number of demonstrators began fighting with members of the neo-Nazi Nationalist Party of Canada who had arrived to oppose the demonstration with placards reading “White Unity” and “Boat them Back.” One counter-demonstrator appeared in a gorilla suit carrying a sign stating, “I demand equal rights too.” In the aftermath of the melee, police charged eight of the anti-racism demonstrators with assaulting police officers and breach of the peace. 

Meanwhile, in late 1977, a crowd of twenty bystanders watched and chanted, “Kill the cop” as five attackers kicked and punched an officer trying to separate a man and woman fighting in the street. David Keefer was only one of 988 officers assaulted by members of the public that year. In another case, an officer answering a domestic quarrel call found two women fighting. When he tried to separate them, they threw him down a flight of stairs. Other residents who joined the fray knocked him out.  Through it all, Givens worked tirelessly to explain police conduct to a divided city. In March 1978, in an echo of police positions, Givens told a reporter that before the Jaques murder, the police had done everything possible to crack down on sex work on the Yonge Street strip, as though sex workers were partially to blame for the murder of a child. At the same time, Givens invoked a longstanding police grievance that community-police conflict was the result of the federal government tying the hands of officers with legislation that prevented them from doing their jobs. The police fight against sex work, he argued, was hampered by the removal of “vagrancy” from the Criminal Code. Now, irate and still commenting on the Jaques murder, Givens told the media, “to get a conviction a morality officer has to practically crawl into bed with a hooker.”

This chapter focuses on Phil Givens’ term as Police Commission chair from 1977 to 1985. Givens led Canada’s largest urban police force during a period of enormous change in Toronto during which the police came under continuous criticism from the media, local politicians, immigrant community leaders, and many others for violence, racial discrimination, the mistreatment of LGBT Torontonians, and rogue behaviour. When Givens was appointed Commission chair, John Sewell saw him as an unknown quantity on policing. However, immediately and throughout his tenure as Commission chair, Givens became a staunch, loud, socially conservative defender of the police on the most sensitive of issues. What changed from 1963-1966, when Givens served as a liberal mayor of Toronto, to 1977 when he took over as Commission chair? How did Givens, a well-known Toronto progressive and a civil rights standard bearer in the 1960s, become the most eloquent defender of the indefensible -- police brutality and discrimination against minority communities? 

Only half-joking, John Sewell suggested that Givens wasn’t the only Torontonian whose politics shifted right on ascending to the Commission chair; people seemed to assume police positions once they joined the Commission. But Givens’ transformation represented more than a shift from a popular liberal (and Liberal Party member) as Toronto mayor in the mid-1960s, to a more conservative tough-on-crime Police Commission chair in the late 1970s.  His views did not change suddenly or radically. He continued to self-identify as a Liberal. But there’s more to it. Givens’ experience offers insights into the shifting character of what it meant to be progressive in Toronto, the changing face of the Liberal Party of Canada, the nature of municipal politics in Toronto, and how Givens’ longstanding understanding of civil rights and support for Israel may have influenced his thinking on policing.

Pour la Société d’agriculture du comté de Brome (2018).

"Le développement des expositions (ou foires) agricoles est lié au souci d'améliorer la production agricole en Europe au cours du dix-huitième siècle. La commercialisation croissante de l'agri-culture, la consolidation de grands domaines ruraux ainsi que les débuts de la révolution industrielle permettent alors d'entrevoir une efficacité et un rendement qui n'étaient possibles dans une éco-nomie de subsistance. L'expérimentation associée aux Lumières permet d'introduire de nouvelles méthodes et connaissances (en chimie et en génétique, par exemple) dans la culture, l'usage du sol et l'élevage. Ce virage scientifique, d'abord réservé aux élites, marque les débuts de l'agronomie. [...]"

This fifth volume of the History of the Prairie West Series contains a broad range of articles spanning the1870s to the present and examines the mostly unexplored place of women in the history of Canada’s Prairie Provinces. From “Spinsters Need Not Apply” to “Negotiating Sex: Gender in the Ukrainian Bloc Settlement, “women’s roles in politics, law, agriculture, labour, and journalism are explored to reveal a complex portrait of women struggling to find safety, have careers, raise children, and be themselves in an often harsh environment. Launched in 2008, the History of the Prairie West Series is comprised of the very best historical articles previously published in the scholarly journal Prairie Forum.