In a compelling and comprehensive treatment of the nineteenth-century voluntary association movement, Darren Ferry situates these organizations within the much larger framework of the construction of collective liberal identities. He shows that by attempting to transcend the political, religious, class, and ethnic divisions of their constituencies, voluntary societies acted as cultural mediators in the reproduction, transmission, and contestation of liberal values throughout central Canadian society.
Through an international comparison, Cheryl Warsh introduces the major themes in both historical and anthropological studies of beverage alcohol use. In a separate essay she describes the stigma attached to female alcoholism, particularly its association with prostitution and child neglect. James Sturgis presents the collective biography of the Rennie brothers, who fell victim to alcoholism while attempting to make their fortunes in the late nineteenth-century boom-bust economies of Canada and the United States. Jim Baumohl recounts attempts to establish institutions for alcoholics on the model of insane asylums. Jan Noel describes the revivals organized by Father Chiniguy, a Catholic evangelist, which swept Lower Canada in the 1840s, unifying a French-Canadian populace threatened by the rapid influx of anglophone settlers. Glenn Lockwood pursues a similar theme in his essay, concluding that Ottawa Valley temperance lodges solidified loyalist American opposition to immigrant competitors for regional dominance. Jacques Paul Couturier analyses the regulation of prohibition in a mixed anglophone/Acadian community. Ernest Forbes demonstrates that Canadian and American prohibition provided vital economic opportunities during the prolonged Maritime depression. Finally, Robert Campbell surveys the post-prohibition experience of state monopoly as a means of liquor control. Each author brings new sources and new research techniques to the discussion of alcohol, posing methodological and public policy challenges for the future as well as a solid survey of the past.
"A Cyclopædia of Canadian Biography" is a collection of brief biographies of persons distinguished in the Professional, Military and Political Life, and the commerce and industry of Canada, in the Twentieth Century. The author explains, "Generally speaking, in comparing the biographies of the Canadians of to-day with those of 1886 and 1888, the reader gains a sense of this country's continuous expansion. The present century has witnessed a marvellous development in the Canadian West, so that in these pages we find numerous records showing not merely the commercial, but the intellectual, progress of the Provinces West of the Great Lakes—stories of brilliant careers built up by men who were mere children in the East when the first volume was published. The reader will also note in the biographies of business men which abound in these pages, the ever-increasing scale on which Canadian commerce and enterprise everywhere is conducted, so that what seemed large in 1886 is relatively small to-day. Though some of the men whose names figure in the index are of less importance than others, all play their part in our complex and vigorous social life, and the story of their progress and fortunes cannot be really tedious to any sympathetic student of humanity..."
The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, more than any other event in the 1850s, provoked a widespread, emotionally charged reaction among northern blacks. Entire communities responded to the law that threatened free blacks as well as fugitive slaves with arbitrary arrest and enslavement. This volume pays particular attention to black resistance through such community efforts as vigilance committees and the underground railroad. This five-volume documentary collection--culled from an international archival search that turned up over 14,000 letters, speeches, pamphlets, essays, and newspaper editorials--reveals how black abolitionists represented the core of the antislavery movement. While the first two volumes consider black abolitionists in the British Isles and Canada (the home of some 60,000 black Americans on the eve of the Civil War), the remaining volumes examine the activities and opinions of black abolitionists in the United States from 1830 until the end of the Civil War. In particular, these volumes focus on their reactions to African colonization and the idea of gradual emancipation, the Fugitive Slave Law, and the promise brought by emancipation during the war.
"Gendered images and symbols were of central importance to public debate about loyalty, political conflict, and religious participation in early Ontario. Drawing on a wide range of international scholarship in feminist theory, women's and gender history, and cultural studies, Cecilia Morgan analyses political and religious languages in the Upper Canadian press, both secular and religious, and other material published in the colony from the 1790s to the 1850s. She examines constructs and concepts of gender in a wide number of areas: narratives of the War of 1812, political struggles over responsible government in the 1820s and 1830s, evangelical religious discourses throughout these decades, and related discussions of manners and moral behaviour. She also considers the relations between religion and politics in the 1840s, pointing to the continuous struggles of Upper Canadians to define and fix the meanings of public and private and their use of masculinity and femininity to signify these realms. She suggests as well that scholars of gender and colonial history need to consider a more nuanced way of understanding social formation in the colony through an examination of the representation of voluntary organizations. The book also examines relations of gender, class, and race as they affected the cultural development of the middle class." "Morgan concludes that while seemingly hegemonic definitions of gender relations emerged over this period - with men and masculinity identified with politics and loyalty to the colonial state and imperial connection, and women and femininity linked to the home - the meanings of gender and gendered imagery differed according to their contexts. Colonial society's attempts to make sharp delineations between the public and the private were rarely successful and were marked by numerous tensions and contradictions."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
