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More Than Words features the work of more than twenty scholars from Canada and abroad on post-related topics. Drawing on recent trends in social and cultural history, these new essays address the history and importance of the post from such perspectives as infrastructure, technology, nation-building and interpersonal communications.
Between the 1860s and the early 1900s, the western United States underwent one of the most dramatic reorganizations of people, land, capital, and resources in American history. Paper Trails tells a new history of the nation's western expansion by shining a light on the era's largest government institution: the US Post.
Aficionados of postal history will appreciate this richly illustrated study of the ingenuity and tenacity that has characterized the search for the perfect mailbox: a high quality, weather-resistant object that protects its precious postal contents. The book traces the evolution of modern urban street furniture, including early cast-iron pillar boxes, fiberglass mailboxes, and contemporary high-tech models.
In Volume 2 of Celebrating Canada, Raymond B. Blake and Matthew Hayday bring together emerging and established scholars to consider key moments in Canadian history when major anniversaries of Canada's political, social, or cultural development were celebrated.
What was it like to be a soldier's wife in Canada during the First World War? More than 80,000 Canadian women were married to men who left home to fight in the war, and its effects on their lives were transformative and often traumatic. Yet the everyday struggles of Canadian war wives, lived far from the battlefields of France, have remained in the shadows of historical memory. Anxious Days and Tearful Nights highlights how Canadian women's experiences of wartime marital separation resembled and differed from those of their European counterparts. Drawing on the letters of married couples separated by wartime service and the military service records of hundreds of Canadian soldiers, Martha Ha...
In the context of surging interests in reconciliation and decolonization, settler colonialism increasingly occupies political, public, and academic conversations. Nothing to Write Home About is a detailed study of the settler colonial significance of British family correspondence sent between the United Kingdom and British Columbia between 1858 and 1914. Drawing on thousands of letters written by dozens of correspondents, it offers insights into epistolary topics including trans-imperial family intimacy and conflict, settlers’ everyday concerns such as boredom and food, and the importance of what correspondents chose not to write about. Analyzing both the letters’ content and their conspicuous, loaded silences, Laura Ishiguro traces how Britons used the post to navigate the family separations integral to their migration and to understand British Columbia as an uncontested settler home. This book argues that these letters and their writers played a critical role in laying the foundations of a powerful, personal settler colonial order that continues to structure the province today.
This second of three volumes in theHistory of the Book in Canada demonstrates the same research and editorial standards established with Volume One by book history specialists from across the nation.
Quickly, easily, by e-mail, fax and phone — in a variety of ways — we communicate with distant friends, family and associates, and we think nothing of it. Canadians in the past knew a very different world. Over long distances, in all sorts of weather and amidst the dangers of war, pirates and myriad other hazards, the growing colony of Canada was entirely dependent upon letters to communicate news, commerce, loneliness or desire. To carry each letter to its destination, correspondents had to rely on ad hoc, unofficial and occasional opportunities, as well as upon the efforts of friends, travelers and members of the society at large. Letters were precious possessions, their arrival anxiously anticipated, often for months. Until Next Year recreates this exciting and engaging world, when writing a letter was considered an art and when creating paper itself took the patience and skill of a seasoned artisan. Using the private letters of Canadians and their correspondents, Harrison details how letters were written, how they were delivered, who wrote them and why. Beyond the letters themselves, this story is amply enriched with an abundance of maps, photographs and prints.
Home child Mary Janeway runs away from her farm placement, grows into adulthood, and ultimately comes to terms with life in Hamilton, Ontario. Sixteen-year-old Mary Janeway, a home child, is desperate to escape from her rural home child placement and flees to London, Ontario, to find a domestic position. When conditions become unbearable, she moves on, vowing never to relinquish her freedom again. After she arrives in Hamilton as a young bride, she quickly adapts to the urban conveniences and the marvels of new inventions that include electric sewing machines, sulphur matches, street stoplights, a one-horsepower Brunswick refrigerator, the advent of the zipper, and the beginning of radio. But even the latest technology can’t stop the ravages of disease and other family tragedies. Mary lives through two world wars, the Spanish Influenza, and the Great Depression. In spite of many hardships, she remains a strong, resilient woman well into her senior years and makes many contributions to Hamilton, the city she calls home.
Compared to other countries, Canada's Parliament shows a high level of party unity when it comes to legislative voting. This was not always the case, however. One hundred years ago, this sort of party discipline was not as evident, leading scholars to wonder what explains the growing influence of political parties in the Canadian Parliament. In Lost on Division, Jean-François Godbout analyses more than two million individual votes recorded in the House of Commons and the Senate since Confederation, demonstrating that the increase in partisanship is linked to changes in the content of the legislative agenda, itself a product of more restrictive parliamentary rules instituted after 1900. Thes...