Canadian Social History Series

Smelter Wars examines a radical BC trade union’s struggle to survive from the 1930s to the 1950s.

All Things in Common explores the history of a Canadian utopian community, highlighting the roles of family, faith, and business pragmatism in its cohesion and longevity.

An Exceptional Law showcases how the emergency law used to repress labour activism during the First World War became normalized with the creation of Section 98 of the Criminal Code, following the Winnipeg General Strike.

Rough Work is an accessibly written yet rigorous study of the galvanization of a major segment of Canada’s labour force over four decades of social and economic transformation.

Complemented with interviews with workers, managers, and business owners, Manufacturing Mennonites pioneers two important new trajectories for scholarship - how religion can affect business history, and how class relations have influenced religious history.

Dominion of Capital offers a new account of relations between government and business in Canada during a period of transition between the established expectations of the National Policy and the uncertain future of the twentieth century.

“The Dignity of Every Human Being” studies the vibrant New Brunswick artistic community which challenged “the tyranny of the Group of Seven” with socially-engaged realism in the 1930s and 40s.

Riding to the Rescue is a provocative and incisive look behind one of Canada's most enduring icons at the cusp of the modern era.

Craft Capitalism focuses on Hamilton, Ontario, and demonstrates how the preservation of traditional work arrangements, craft mobility networks, and other aspects of craft culture ensured that craftsworkers in that city enjoyed an essentially positive introduction to industrial capitalism.

In A Fatherly Eye, historian Robin Brownlie examines how paternalism and assimilation during the interwar period were made manifest in the 'field', far from the bureaucrats in Ottawa, but never free of their oppressive supervision.

The security and cultural policy measures examined here, from the RCMP investigations at the National Film Board that led to numerous firings, to the harassment of the extraordinary African-American singer and Soviet sympathizer Paul Robeson, 'attest to the fragility and the enduring power of art to effect social change'.

The book is simultaneously a history of law, aspects of the state, trade unions and labouring people, and their interaction within the broad and shifting terrain of political economy. The authors are attentive to regional differences and sectoral divergences, and they attempt to address the fragmentation of class experience.

In Dreams of Equality, Joan Sangster chronicles in fascinating detail the first tentative stages of a politically aware women's movement in Canada, from the time of women's suffrage to the 1950's when the CPC went into decline and the CCF began to experience the changes that would evolve into the New Democratic Party a decade later.

Touching on the decade’s biggest issues, from changing cultural norms to the role of the state, Debating Dissent critically examines ideas of generational change and the sixties.

Make the Night Hideous explores mysterious transformation of the charivari using four detailed case studies from different time periods and locations across English Canada, as well as first-person accounts of more recent charivari participants.

Reaume remembers previously forgotten psychiatric patients by examining in rich detail their daily life at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane (now called the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health – CAMH) from 1870-1940.