New ways of thinking about literature and history have radically changed how we think about or even "define" a region like the Prairie West. In fact, the very concept of "defining" has come into question by new theoretical approaches and it may now seem a hopeless endeavour. But the process of defining can be just as important as the actual production of a definition.Toward Defining the Prairies highlights recent approaches to thinking about the Prairie West. Bounded by pieces from well-known historian Gerald Friesen and Governor-General's Award-winning writer Robert Kroetsch, these 13 essays are as diverse as the region itself. In their examination of different aspects of Prairie history, literature, climate, society, culture, and identity, they help to provide a new understanding of this place and of the complexities of its definition.
Canadian Geography: A Scholarly Bibliography is a compendium of published works on geographical studies of Canada and its various provinces. It includes works on geographical studies of Canada as a whole, on multiple provinces, and on individual provinces. Works covered include books, monographs, atlases, book chapters, scholarly articles, dissertations, and theses. The contents are organized first by region into main chapters, and then each chapter is divided into sections: General Studies, Cultural and Social Geography, Economic Geography, Historical Geography, Physical Geography, Political Geography, and Urban Geography. Each section is further sub-divided into specific topics within each main subject. All known publications on the geographical studies of Canada—in English, French, and other languages—covering all types of geography are included in this bibliography. It is an essential resource for all researchers, students, teachers, and government officials needing information and references on the varied aspects of the environments and human geographies of Canada.
This fourth volume of the History of the Prairie West Series contains fifteen articles examining the rich history of business and early industry in Canada's Prairie Provinces prior to the Great Depression. Without denying the central importance of agriculture in the development and growth of the early Prairie West, the essays in Business and Inudstry explore the lesser known history of some of the earliest businesses in the region. As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, a time when the three Prairie Provinces comprise the fastest-growing, and perhaps the most dynamic, economic regions in Canada, it may be worthwhile to cast our gaze back to an earlier and simpler era. In these essays, we can glimpse the origins of the entrepreneurial spirit and business ehtos that have come to define the business culture of the Prairie West.
Nations are made and unmade at their borders, and the forty-ninth parallel separating Montana and Alberta in the late nineteenth century was a pivotal Western site for both the United States and Canada. Blackfoot country was a key site of Canadian and American efforts to shape their nations and national identities. The region?s landscape, aboriginal people, newcomers, railroads, and ongoing cross-border ties all challenged the governments? efforts to create, colonize, and nationalize the Alberta-Montana borderlands. The Line Which Separates makes an important and useful comparison between American and Canadian government policies and attitudes regarding race, gender, and homesteading.øFederal visions of the West in general and the borderlands in particular rested on overlapping sets of assumptions about space, race, and gender; those same assumptions would be used to craft the policies that were supposed to turn national visions into local realities. The growth of a white female population in the region, which should have ?whitened? and ?easternized? the region, merely served to complicate emerging categories. Both governments worked hard to enforce the lines that were supposed to separate "good" land from "bad," whites from aboriginals, different groups of newcomers from each other, and women's roles from men's roles. The lines and categories they depended on were used to distinguish each West, and thus each nation, from the other. Drawing on a range of sources, from government maps and reports to oral testimony and personal papers, The Line Which Separates explores the uneven way in which the borderlands were superimposed on Blackfoot country in order to divide a previously cohesive region in the late nineteenth century.
In ten original studies, former students and colleagues of Maurice Careless, one of Canada's most distinguished historians, explore both traditional and hitherto neglected topics in the development of nineteenth-century Ontario. Their papers incorporate the three themes that characterize their mentor's scholarly efforts: metropolitan-hinterland relations; urban development; and the impact of 'limited identities' — gender, class, ethnicity and regionalism — that shaped the lives of Old Ontarians. Traditional topics — colonial-imperial tension and the growth of Canadian autonomy in the Union period, the making of a 'compact' in early York, politics in pre-Rebellion Toronto, and the social vision of the late Upper Canadian elites — are re-examined with fresh sensitivity and new sources. Maters about which little has been written — urban perspectives on rural and Northern Ontario, Protestant revivals, an Ontario style in church architecture, the late-nineteenth-century ready-made clothing industry, Native-Newcomer conflict to the 1860s, and the separate and unequal experiences of women and men student teachers at the Provincial Normal school — receive equally insightful treatment. An appreciative biography of Careless, an analysis of the relativism underpinning his approach to national and Ontario history, and a listing of Careless's publications, complete this stimulating collection.
Combining statistical analysis and ethnographic study, Harry Hiller uncovers two waves of in-migration to Alberta. His innovative approach begins with the individual migrant and analyzes the relocation experience from origin to destination. Through interviews with hundreds of migrants, Hiller shows that migration is complex and dynamic, shaped not just by what Alberta offers but also prompted by a process that begins in the region of origin which makes migration possible, and helps determine whether migrants stay or return home. By combining a social psychological approach with structural factors such as Alberta’s transition from a regional hinterland province to its emerging role the global system, discussions of gender, the internet, and folk culture, Second Promised Land provides a multi-dimensional and deeply human account of a contemporary Canadian phenomenon.
This collection of essays offers a comprehensive examination of the working class experience in British Columbia and contains essential background knowledge for an understanding of contemporary relations between government, labour, and employees. It treats workers' relationship to the province's resource base, the economic role of the state, the structure of capitalism, the labour market and the influence of ethnicity and race on class relations.
Elizabeth Thompson develops the idea of the pioneer woman as an archetypal character firmly entrenched in Canadian fiction and the Canadian consciousness. Thompson's broad definition of the concept of pioneer can be seen to reflect the history of Canadian women, starting with the pioneers of settlement and continuing through the pioneers of spiritual perfection and psychological liberation. Various versions of the pioneer woman have appeared in English-Canadian fiction since Traill's development of the character type. Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Imperialist and Ralph Connor's The Man From Glengarry and Glengarry School Days feature pioneer women who cope not only with physical frontiers but also with those grounded in social and personal concerns. More recently, Margaret Laurence used this character type in The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, and The Diviners, with characters who inhabit internal, personal frontiers. Thompson argues that the longevity of this character type in English-Canadian fiction reveals an affinity between the pioneer woman and a common conception of the role of women in Canadian society. She suggests that the role for women proposed by the early immigrants was an appropriate choice for the Canadian frontier, regardless of the location and nature of that frontier.
The New Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy is a handy reference to the vast range of research and writing that political economists in Canada have completed to the date of publication. The book is divided into twenty-five subject bibliographies, each one compiled and introduced by an expert in the field. The overall range of subjects includes economic development in Canada, Canada's external economic relations, regional disparities and regional development, social and economic classes, women, Native peoples, politics and the Canadian state, nationalism, culture and political thought. The book is indexed by author, and includes a helpful shortlist of the "staples" in Canadian political economy. Published in 1985, The New Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy remains a useful reference to some of the classic literature of the discipline.