By the middle of the nineteenth century, the most common method of photography was the daguerreotype—Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s miraculous invention that captured in a camera visual images on a highly polished silver surface through exposure to light. In this book are presented nearly eighty masterpieces—many never previously published—from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s extensive daguerreotype collection.
In a fascinating and comprehensive intellectual history of modern communication in America, Daniel Czitrom examines the continuing contradictions between the progressive possibilities that new communications technologies offer and their use as instruments
"Duncan Phyfe (1770-1854), known during his lifetime as the "United States Rage," to this day remains America's best-known cabinetmaker. Establishing his reputation as a purveyor of luxury by designing high-quality furniture for New York's moneyed elite, Phyfe would come to count among his clients some of the nation's wealthiest and most storied families. This richly illustrated volume covers the full chronological sweep of the craftsman's distinguished career, from his earliest furniture-- which bears the influence of his 18th-century British predecessors Thomas Sheraton and Thomas Hope--to his late simplified designs in the Grecian Plain. More than sixty works by Phyfe and his workshop are highlighted, including rarely seen pieces from private collections and several newly discovered documented works. Additionally, essays by leading scholars bring to light new information on Phyfe's life, his workshop production, and his roster of illustrious patrons. What unfolds is the story of Phyfe's remarkable transformation from a young immigrant craftsman to an accomplished master cabinetmaker and an American icon."--Publisher's website.
In the late Victorian era, smoking was a male habit and tobacco was consumed mostly in pipes and cigars. By the mid-twentieth century, advertising and movies had not only made it acceptable for women to smoke but smoking had become a potent symbol of their emancipation. From mass cigarette production in 1888 to the first studies linking cigarettes to lung cancer in 1950, The Freedom to Smoke explores gender and other key issues related to smoking in Montreal, including the arrival of "big tobacco," first attempts to ban the cigarette, wartime tobacco funds, French Canadian smoking habits, rituals of manliness, and the growing respectability of women smokers - none of which have been examined by historians. Jarrett Rudy argues that while people smoked for highly personal reasons, their smoking rituals were embedded in social relations and shaped by dominant norms of taste and etiquette. The Freedom to Smoke examines the role of the tobacco industry, health experts, churches, farmers, newspapers, the military, the state, and smokers themselves. A pioneering city-based study, it weaves Western understandings of respectable smoking through Montreal's diverse social and cultural fabric. Rudy argues that etiquette gave smoking a political role, reflecting and serving to legitimize beliefs about inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy that were at the core of a transforming liberal order.
This is the Final Report of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its six-year investigation of the residential school system for Aboriginal youth and the legacy of these schools. This report, the summary volume, includes the history of residential schools, the legacy of that school system, and the full text of the Commission's 94 recommendations for action to address that legacy. This report lays bare a part of Canada's history that until recently was little-known to most non-Aboriginal Canadians. The Commission discusses the logic of the colonization of Canada's territories, and why and how policy and practice developed to end the existence of distinct societies of Aboriginal peoples. Using brief excerpts from the powerful testimony heard from Survivors, this report documents the residential school system which forced children into institutions where they were forbidden to speak their language, required to discard their clothing in favour of institutional wear, given inadequate food, housed in inferior and fire-prone buildings, required to work when they should have been studying, and subjected to emotional, psychological and often physical abuse. In this setting, cruel punishments were all too common, as was sexual abuse. More than 30,000 Survivors have been compensated financially by the Government of Canada for their experiences in residential schools, but the legacy of this experience is ongoing today. This report explains the links to high rates of Aboriginal children being taken from their families, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and high rates of suicide. The report documents the drastic decline in the presence of Aboriginal languages, even as Survivors and others work to maintain their distinctive cultures, traditions, and governance. The report offers 94 calls to action on the part of governments, churches, public institutions and non-Aboriginal Canadians as a path to meaningful reconciliation of Canada today with Aboriginal citizens. Even though the historical experience of residential schools constituted an act of cultural genocide by Canadian government authorities, the United Nation's declaration of the rights of aboriginal peoples and the specific recommendations of the Commission offer a path to move from apology for these events to true reconciliation that can be embraced by all Canadians.