New Books in Canadian Studies

Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nicole Wegner is not a book about peacekeeping practices. This is a book about storytelling, fantasies and the ways that people connect emotionally to myths about peacekeeping. The celebration of peacekeeping as a legitimate and desirable use of military force is expressed through the unproble...

Myra Tawfik's book For the Encouragement of Learning: The Origins of Canadian Copyright Law (U Toronto Press, 2023) addresses the contested history of copyright law in Canada, where the economic and reputational interests of authors and the commercial interests of publishers often conflict with the public interest in access to knowledge. It chronicles Canada’s earliest copyright law to explain how...

Child abandonment, theft, kidnapping, prostitution, bigamy, and murder! Bad Bridget is a must-read examination of crime and Irish emigrant women in the U.S. and Canada, written by Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, and out now with Sandycove. Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not a very good place to be a woman. Among the wave of emigrants from Ireland to North America...

Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770-1842 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Elizabeth Elbourne traces the history of three linked imperial families in Britain and across contested colonial borderlands from 1770 to 1842. Dr. Elbourne tracks the Haudenosaunee Brants of northeastern North America from the American Revolu...

Carla Cevasco, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, discusses her recent article, "This is My Body: Communion and Cannibalism in Colonial New England and New France." Her article was published in the December 2016 issue of The New England Quarterly. Abstract: Analyzing the material culture of English, French, and Native communion ceremonies, and d...

The socialist activist E. T. Kingsley occupies an odd place in the history of labor and the left. Often mentioned due to his prolific life of speaking, writing, traveling and organizing, he has still generally remained wrapped in obscurity, leaving little in the way of a paper trail for us to understand who he actually is. Fortunately, Benjamin Isitt and Ravi Malhotra have been working to correct...

Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West (U California Press, 2022) deepens the analysis of settler colonialism's endurance in the North American West and how infrastructures that ground sexual modernity are both reproduced and challenged by publics who have inherited them. E Cram redefines sexual modernity through extractivism, wherein sexuality functions...

In the past thirty years, polygamy has become a flashpoint of conflict as Western governments attempt to regulate certain cultural and religious practices that challenge seemingly central principles of family and justice. In Forbidden Intimacies: Polygamies at the Limits of Western Tolerance (Stanford UP, 2023), Melanie Heath comparatively investigates the regulation of polygamy in the United Stat...

Today I talked to Ellin Bessner about her book Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military, and World War II (New Jewish Press, 2018). "He died so Jewry should suffer no more." These words on a Canadian Jewish soldier's tombstone in Normandy inspired the author to explore the role of Canadian Jews in the war effort. As PM Mackenzie King wrote in 1947, Jewish servicemen faced a "double threat" - the...

Born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817–c. 1869) escaped enslavement and would become a leading figure in the struggle for Black freedom, citizenship, and equality. He was extolled by his contemporary Frederick Douglass for his “depth of thought, fluency of speech, readiness of wit, logical exactness.” Until now, his story has been largely untold. Ward, a newspaper editor...

From 1968 to 1975 one high-rise was the heart of Canada’s counterculture. Rochdale College in Toronto was jammed full with leftist organizers, hippies, draft dodgers, students, artists, and others just looking for a good time. Rochdale wasn’t really a “college”, it was something much bigger: a political, educational, communal, artistic, and psychedelic experiment. During its time, it was endlessly...

In Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Damian Alan Pargas introduces a new conceptualization of 'spaces of freedom' for fugitive slaves in North America between 1800 and 1860, and answers the questions: How and why did enslaved people flee to – and navigate – different destinations throughout the continent, and to what extent did they succeed in evadi...

The idea of moving to Canada figures prominently in the imagination of many disaffected Americans. Most recently, it was comedian Marc Maron who said he’s on his way to Vancouver, BC. Usually, they don’t come. However, between the mid-60s and early-70s they really did–and in the 10s of thousands. Yet, when these Americans made their way, they did not always find the Canada they expected. How did t...

Greg Marchildon interviews J. Andrew Ross about his book Joining the Clubs: The Business of the National Hockey League, 1917-1945 (University of Syracuse Press). This podcast was produced Hugh Bakhurst in the Allan Slaight Radio Institute at Ryerson University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Greg Marchildon interviews David Wright of McGill University on his book SickKids: The History of The Hospital for Sick Children (University of Toronto Press) which won the Champlain Society’s Chalmers Award in 2016. This podcast was produced Hugh Bakhurst in the Allan Slaight Radio Institute at Ryerson University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Greg Marchildon talks about the evolution of Canada after the Second World War with Dimitry Anastakis, L.R. Wilson/R.J. Currie Chair in Canadian Business History at the Rotman School of Management and the Department of History at the University of Toronto, and the author of "Re-Creation, Fragmentation and Resilience: A Brief History of Canada since 1945" (Oxford University Press). This podcast was...

Greg Marchildon interviews Donald Wright on his history of Canada, the only book on Canada included in Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series which boasts 650 books. Wright describes the reasoning behind his thematic organization of his book into six short and highly thematic chapters. The six themes – beginnings, dispossessions, nationalisms, rights, borders and norths – reflect...

In this podcast episode, Greg Marchildon interviews Indigenous rights litigator Jean Teillet on her book The Northwest is our Mother: The story of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation published by Harper Collins in 2019. Covering the evolution of the Métis as a people and nation since the 1790s, Teillet presents us with an highly crafted epic narrative. The great-grandniece of Louis Riel, the aut...

In this episode, Greg Marchildon interviews Sarah Carter on her book Ours by Every Law of Right and Justice: Women and the Vote in the Prairie Provinces published by the University of British Columbia Press in 2020. She examines the reasons why Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta were the first provinces to extend the vote to women in 1916 and why this same franchise was not extended to First Natio...

For many, the COVID-19 pandemic has awakened them to the dangers attendant to a lot of the working conditions in society today—for others, it has made what they already knew to be the dangers of their workplaces and of a tattered social safety net all the more perilous. In Canadian Labour Policy and Politics (UBC Press, 2022) co-editors John Peters and Don Wells bring together a number of field-le...

In this podcast episode, Greg Marchildon interviews Steve Schwinghamer, the co-author along with Jan Raska of Pier 21: A History published by the University of Ottawa Press as part of its Mercury series in 2020. Between 1928 and 1971, Pier 21 was the main gateway for immigrants arriving in Canada and was transformed as the site for the Canadian Museum of Immigration. Th author is an historian in t...

In this podcast episode, Greg Marchildon interviews Mairi Cowan, the author of The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada, a microhistory of bewitchment and demonic possession in New France. This account of the possession of Barbe Hallay serves as an example of the social and religious history in and around 17th-century Quebec. With these stories, Cowan illustra...

In this podcast episode, Greg Marchildon interviews Stacey Barker and Krista Cooke on the lives of Canadian women and their involvement in the two world wars of the 20th century. They along with co-author Molly McCullough wrote Material Traces of War: Stories of Canadian Women and Conflict, 1914-1945 published by the University of Ottawa Press in 2021 as part of the Canadian Museum of History’s Me...

In this podcast episode, Greg Marchildon interviews Mark Celinscak, the author of Kingdom of Night: Witnesses to the Holocaust published by the University of Toronto Press in 2022. Although liberated by British troops, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was observed by a large number of Canadians who left a sizeable written and photographic record. In addition, war artists such Alex Colville who wou...

A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada–United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford UP, 2021), is the recipient of the AHA’s Albert Corey Prize in the history of Canadian–American relations. In A Line of Blood and Dirt, Benjamin Hoy shows how the US-Canadian border was built across Indigenous lands. He explores the experiences of various indigenous groups, European settlers, African...