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.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We’re a bit late with the June edition, largely due to the month of May being such a busy month with the CHA Reads series followed immediately by both Andrea and I attending CHA & Congress in Regina. I’ve made it up to you by searching the internet for anything I could have possibly missed in the first quarter of 2018, and will even publish a 2nd “Upcoming Publications” post in a few weeks for July! That’s two in one month!
***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.
June 1
Bettina Liverant, Buying Happiness: The Emergence of Consumer Consciousness in English Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018)
The idea of Canada as a consumer society was largely absent before 1890 but familiar by the mid-1960s. This change required more than rising incomes and greater impulses to buy; it involved the creation of new concepts. Buying Happiness explores the ways that key public thinkers represented, conceptualized, and institutionalized new ideas about consumption and consumer behaviours.
Breaking new ground, Bettina Liverant connects changes in consciousness to changes in the economy and in behaviour. The emphasis is on concepts and categories rather than on the buying and selling of goods. The rise of consumer society, she shows, was not simply the result of economic changes in productivity and affluence; it involved and required changes to how people think. Topics include the creation of Canada’s first cost-of-living index in 1914–15, the development of consumer consciousness during the Great Depression, and the ways in which popular magazines encouraged an ethic of cautious consumerism in the postwar period.
As the figure of “the consumer” moved from the margins to the centre of social, cultural, and political analysis, the values and concepts associated with consumerism were woven into the Canadian social imagination. Consumer society developed as a contested, yet increasingly pervasive, way of thinking about ourselves, our relationships with others, and our relationships with things.
This book will serve scholars of consumer society, history, sociology, political economy, and economics. It will appeal to a wide array of readers interested in modern Canadian history, debates about the rise of consumer society, Canadian thought and culture, and intellectual history.
Available Formats: Hardcover, ePub, PDF
Publisher’s Link: https://www.ubcpress.ca/buying-happiness
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Buying-Happiness-Emergence-Consumer-Consciousness/dp/0774835133/ref=sr_1_20?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1528385528&sr=1-20
June 6
Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire: State, Church, and Society, 1604-1830 (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018)
Spanning from the West African coast to the Canadian prairies and south to Louisiana, the Caribbean, and Guiana, France’s Atlantic empire was one of the largest political entities in the Western Hemisphere. Yet despite France’s status as a nation at the forefront of architecture and the structures and designs from this period that still remain, its colonial building program has never been considered on a hemispheric scale.
Drawing from hundreds of plans, drawings, photographic field surveys, and extensive archival sources, Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire focuses on the French state’s and the Catholic Church’s ideals and motivations for their urban and architectural projects in the Americas. In vibrant detail, Gauvin Alexander Bailey recreates a world that has been largely destroyed by wars, natural disasters, and fires – from Cap-François (now Cap-Haïtien), which once boasted palaces in the styles of Louis XV and formal gardens patterned after Versailles, to failed utopian cities like Kourou in Guiana. Vividly illustrated with examples of grand buildings, churches, and gardens, as well as simple houses and cottages, this volume also brings to life the architects who built these structures, not only French military engineers and white civilian builders, but also the free people of colour and slaves who contributed so much to the tropical colonies.
Taking readers on a historical tour through the striking landmarks of the French colonial landscape, Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire presents a sweeping panorama of an entire hemisphere of architecture and its legacy.
Available Formats: Hardcover, ePub
Publisher’s Link: http://www.mqup.ca/architecture-and-urbanism-in-the-french-atlantic-empire-products-9780773553149.php?page_id=73&#!prettyPhoto
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Architecture-Urbanism-French-Atlantic-Empire/dp/0773553142/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1528387122&sr=1-1&keywords=architecture+and+urbanism
June 13
Damien-Claude Bélanger, Thomas Chapais, historien (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2018)
Thomas Chapais is one of the great French-Canadian political and intellectual figures of the beginning of the 20th century. Appointed to the Legislative Council of Quebec in 1892, then to the Senate of Canada in 1919, he played a leading role in the debates on educational reform in Quebec as well as in the Manitoba and Ontario school crises.
Notwithstanding, he is mainly remembered today as a historian and not as a politician. Biographer of Jean Talon and of the Marquis de Montcalm, and author of a remarkable overview of the history of Canada, Thomas Chapais weaved a coherent historical narrative, contributing to the advancement of knowledge and to important historiographical debates. Chapais occupies a leading place within the history of intellectual culture in French-Canada. Chapais the historian was indeed the last great representative of French-Canadian loyalism, a doctrine notably based on a particular interpretation of the 1760 Conquest.
In this seminal work on Chapais, D.C. Bélanger probes the historian’s writings to better understand its emergence, its socio-cultural context, the main tenets of this thought, its influence and its critical legacy.
Available Formats: Paperback
Publisher’s Link: https://press.uottawa.ca/thomas-chapais-historien.html
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Thomas-Chapais-historien-Damien-Claude-B%C3%A9langer/dp/276032656X/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1528387371&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=thomas+chapais%2C+historian
June 14
Taylor Hollander, Power, Politics, and Principles: Mackenzie King and Labour, 1935-1948 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018)
Set against the backdrop of the U.S. experience, Power, Politics, and Principles uses a transnational perspective to understand the passage and long term implications of a pivotal labour law in Canada. Utilizing a wide array of primary materials and secondary sources, Hollander gets to the root of the policy-making process, revealing how the making of P.C. 1003 in 1944, a wartime order that forced employers to the collective bargaining table, involved real people with conflicting personalities and competing agendas.
Each chapter of Power, Politics, and Principles begins with a quasi-fictional vignette to help the reader visualize historical context. Hollander pays particular attention to the central role that Mackenzie King played in the creation of P.C. 1003. Although most scholars describe the Prime Minister’s approach to policy decisions as calculating and opportunistic, Power, Politics, and Principles argues that Mackenzie King’s adherence to moderate principles resulted in a less hostile legal environment in Canada for workers and their unions in the long run, than a more far-reaching collective bargaining law in the United States.
Available Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, ePub
Publisher’s Link: https://utorontopress.com/ca/power-politics-and-principles-2#
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Power-Politics-Principles-Mackenzie-1935-1948/dp/1487502346/ref=sr_1_16?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1528385233&sr=1-16
Better Late than Never
Michel S. Beaulieu, David K. Ratz, & Ronald N. Harpelle, eds. Hard Work Conquers All: Building the Finnish Community in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018)
Above the entrance to the Finnish Labour Temple, in what was once Port Arthur in northern Ontario, is the motto labor omnia vincit – “hard work conquers all.” Since 1910, these words have reflected the dedication of the Finnish community in Canada.
Hard Work Conquers All is a social history of Finnish immigration and community building in Canada during the twentieth century. The first Finns to arrive ranged from conservative churchgoers to radical socialists, reflecting the ideologies that divided their homeland. After the First World War, left-wing Finns fled persecution; following the Second World War, Finns sought the economic security that Canada offered. Each new wave of immigration imbued the relationship between people, homeland, and host country with the politics, ideologies, and cultural expressions of its time.
The story of Finns in Canada dovetails with the larger literature on immigration and enriches the history of socialism and ethnic repression in this country. The insightful essays in Hard Work Conquers All explore the nuanced cultural identities of Finnish Canadians, their continued ties to Finland, intergenerational cultural transfer, and the community’s connections with socialism and labour movements. This is a fresh interpretation of the successive waves of Finnish immigration and their influence on Canadian politics and society.
Hard Work Conquers All will appeal to scholars and students of the history of immigration to Canada and of Finnish history, and, within that context, particularly to those interested in the history of workers, youth, and women, military history, and sport history. Anyone wanting to understand the Finnish experience in Canada will find this study illuminating.
Available Formats: Paperback, Hardcover, PDF
Publisher’s Link: https://www.ubcpress.ca/hard-work-conquers-all
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Hard-Work-Conquers-All-Community/dp/0774834692/ref=sr_1_21?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1528385528&sr=1-21
Camil Girard & Carl Brisson, Reconnaissance et exclusion des peuples autochtones au Québec. Du Traité d’alliance de 1603 à nos jours. (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2018)
De l’alliance de 1603 à la Proclamation royale de 1763, les peuples autochtones sont reconnus comme des alliés, partenaires du commerce, ou pour leur participation aux guerres de l’Empire. Avec la création du Canada en 1867 s’amorce la mise en place d’une politique canadienne qui, au-delà des grands principes de reconnaissance, s’enferme dans une série de lois discriminatoires qui aboutissent, en 1876, à la Loi sur les Indiens du Canada… Cette loi, comme une camisole de force, en vient à qualifier pour disqualifier les autochtones sur le plan de la reconnaissance tant politique que juridique. Il faudra attendre les années 1970 pour que s’amorce une difficile déconstruction de l’histoire d’un système de discrimination systémique.
Propos du premier ministre René Lévesque lors des discours en appui à la motion de l’Assemblée nationale du Québec qui reconnaît les nations autochtones du Québec (20 mars 1985) : « En terminant, on me permettra, M. le Président, de proposer, conformément à plusieurs recommandations qu’on a reçues depuis le dépôt de la présente motion, que le mot bande qui est très courant, mais pas partout chez nos concitoyens amérindiens, soit remplacé par le mot communauté, au cinquième paragraphe de la motion. Ce nouveau terme, qui est tout simplement plus englobant que le précédent, est également plus respectueux de la diversité des nations autochtones et convient mieux, en particulier, lorsqu’on s’adresse aux Inuits. Il pourrait aussi permettre, le cas échéant, de conclure des ententes avec une communauté autochtone composée d’un groupe d’Indiens important, mais qui seraient sans statut ou hors réserve, et on sait qu’il y en a plusieurs milliers chez nous. » (Assemblée nationale du Québec, 19 mars 1985)
Available Formats: Paperback, PDF
Publisher’s Link: https://www.pulaval.com/produit/reconnaissance-et-exclusion-des-peuples-autochtones-au-quebec-du-traite-d-alliance-de-1603-a-nos-jours
Fiona Polack, ed. Tracing Ochre: Changing Perspectives on the Beothuk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018)
The supposed extinction of the Indigenous Beothuk people of Newfoundland in the early nineteenth century is a foundational moment in Canadian history. Increasingly under scrutiny, non-Indigenous perceptions of the Beothuk have had especially dire and far-reaching ramifications for contemporary Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Tracing Ochre reassesses popular beliefs about the Beothuk. Placing the group in global context, Fiona Polack and a diverse collection of contributors juxtapose the history of the Beothuk with the experiences of other Indigenous peoples outside of Canada, including those living in former British colonies as diverse as Tasmania, South Africa, and the islands of the Caribbean. Featuring contributions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous thinkers from a wide range of scholarly and community backgrounds, Tracing Ochre aims to definitively shift established perceptions of a people who were among the first to confront European colonialism in North America.
Available Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, ePub
Publisher’s Link: https://utorontopress.com/ca/tracing-ochre-2
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Tracing-Ochre-Changing-Perspectives-Beothuk/dp/1442628421/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1528387766&sr=8-1&keywords=tracing+ochre
Ted Rutland, Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018)
Modern urban planning has long promised to improve the quality of human life. But how is human life defined? Displacing Blackness develops a unique critique of urban planning by focusing, not on its subservience to economic or political elites, but on its efforts to improve people’s lives.
While focused on twentieth-century Halifax, Displacing Blackness develops broad insights about the possibilities and limitations of modern planning. Drawing connections between the history of planning and emerging scholarship in Black Studies, Ted Rutland positions anti-blackness at the heart of contemporary city-making. Moving through a series of important planning initiatives, from a social housing project concerned with the moral and physical health of working-class residents to a sustainability-focused regional plan, Displacing Blackness shows how race – specifically blackness – has defined the boundaries of the human being and guided urban planning, with grave consequences for the city’s Black residents.
Available Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, ePub
Publisher’s Link: https://utorontopress.com/ca/displacing-blackness-2
Buy it from Amazon.ca: https://www.amazon.ca/Displacing-Blackness-Planning-Twentieth-Century-Halifax/dp/148752272X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1528388029&sr=1-1&keywords=displacing+blackness+halifax
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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