You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
As rates of illegal drug use increase, the debates over drug policy heat up. While some believe penalties should be harsher, others advocate complete decriminalisation. Certainly, debate over the 'war on drugs' is not new. In the early 1920s, as the drive for Chinese Exclusion gathered steam, Canadians blamed the Chinese for the growing use of opium and other drugs, and parliamentarians passed extremely harsh drug laws to counter this use. These laws remained in place until the 1960s. In Jailed for Possession, Catherine Carstairs examines the impact of these drug laws on users' health, work lives, and relationships. In the middle of the century, drug users regularly went to jail for up to tw...
Positioning consumer culture in Canada within a wider international context, Consuming Modernity explores the roots of modern Western mass culture between 1919 and 1945, when the female worker, student, and homemaker relied on new products to raise their standards of living and separate themselves from oppressive traditional attitudes. Mass-produced consumer products promised to free up women to pursue other interests shaped by marketing campaigns, advertisements, films, and radio shows. Concerns over fashion, personal hygiene, body image, and health reflected these new expectations. This volume is a fascinating look at how the forces of consumerism defined and redefined a generation.
Booze, dope, smokes, and weed. Mind-altering, mood-changing substances have been part of human society for millennia. And the history of drugs and alcohol is infused with what we understand as their proper and improper use. Pleasure and Panic reveals how cultural fears and social, political, and economic disparities have always been deeply embedded in attitudes about drugs and alcohol. Long before John Lennon testified at Canada’s Le Dain Commission in favour of marijuana decriminalization, social movements existed to challenge the view that consumption of mind-altering substances, especially by young people, posed a danger to society. The contributors to this collection explore how drugs and alcohol intersect with diverse histories, including gender, medicine, popular culture, and business. Pleasure and Panic brings a dispassionate voice to current debates about liberalizing drug and alcohol laws and challenges existing ideas about how to deal with the so-called problems of drug and alcohol use.
The prohibition era of gangsters and bootleggers has captured our imagination. But what happened when the government turned the taps back on? Dan Malleck shows that, contrary to popular belief, post-prohibition Ontario was an age when the government struggled to please both the “wets” and the “dries.” Rather than pandering to temperance groups, officials sought to define and promote manageable drinking spaces in which citizens would follow the rules of proper drinking and foster self-control. Post-prohibition liquor control was not a restrictive regulatory force but rather something more pragmatic – a bureaucratic attempt to balance temperance with recognition that prohibition was unsustainable.
Cultural pastime, profitable industry, or harmful influence on the nation? Liquor was a tricky issue for municipal, provincial, and federal governments after Confederation. Liquor and the Liberal State traces how the Ontario provincial government’s takeover of liquor regulation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved both discrete local politics and expansive constitutional questions. Dan Malleck explores how notions of individual freedom, equality, and property rights were debated, challenged, and modified in response to a vocal prohibitionist movement and equally vocal liquor industry. While the liquor licensing regime helped build a vast patronage base for the governing Liberal Party, some believed it exceeded the constitutional authority of the province. The drink question became as political as it was moral – a key issue in the establishment of judicial definitions of provincial and federal rights and, ultimately, in the crafting of the modern state. This lively and meticulous work demonstrates the challenges governments faced when dealing with the seemingly simple, but tremendously complicated, alcoholic beverage.
The World of Niagara Wine is a transdisciplinary exploration of the Niagara wine industry. In the first section, contributors explore the history and regulation of wine production as well as its contemporary economic significance. The second section focuses on the entrepreneurship behind and the promotion and marketing of Niagara wines. The third introduces readers to the science of grape growing, wine tasting, and wine production, and the final section examines the social and cultural ramifications of Niagara’s increasing reliance on grapes and wine as an economic motor for the region. The original research in this book celebrates and critiques the local wine industry and situates it in a complex web of Old World traditions and New World reliance on technology, science, and taste as well as global processes and local sociocultural reactions. Preface by Konrad Ejbich.
Cultural pastime, profitable industry, or harmful influence on the nation? Liquor and the Liberal State explores government approaches to drink and drinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This collection captures key themes and issues in the broad history of addiction and vice in the Anglo-American world. Focusing on the long nineteenth-century, the volumes consider how scientific, social, and cultural experiences with drugs, alcohol, addiction, gambling, and prostitution varied around the world. What might be considered vice, or addiction could be interpreted in various ways, through various lenses, and such activities were interpreted differently depending upon the observer: the medical practitioner; the evangelical missionary; the thrill seeking bon-vivant, and the concerned government commissioner, to name but a few. For example, opium addiction in middle class households resulting from medical treatment was judged much differently than Chinese opium smoking by those in poverty or poor living conditions in North American work camps on the west coast, or on the streets of Soho. This collection will assemble key documents representing both the official and general view of these various activities, providing readers with a cross section of interpretations and a solid grounding in the material that shaped policy change, cultural interpretation, and social action.
Covering Niagara: Studies in Local Popular Culture closely examines some of the myriad forms of popular culture in the Niagara region of Canada. Essays consider common assumptions and definitions of what popular culture is and seek to determine whether broad theories of popular culture can explain or make sense of localized instances of popular culture and the cultural experiences of people in their daily lives. Among the many topics covered are local bicycle parades and war memorials, cooking and wine culture, radio and movie-going, music stores and music scenes, tourist sites, and blackface minstrel shows. The authors approach their subjects from a variety of critical and historical perspectives and employ a range of methodologies that includes cultural studies, textual analysis, archival research, and participant interviews. Altogether, Covering Niagara provides a richly diverse mapping of the popular culture of a particular area of Canada and demonstrates the complexities of everyday culture.
In this volume the borders of North America serve as central locations for examining the consequences of globalization as it intersects with hegemonic spaces and ideas, national territorialism, and opportunities for—or restrictions on—mobility. The authors of the essays in this collection warn against falling victim to the myth of nation-states engaging in a valiant struggle against transnational flows of crime and vice. They take a long historical perspective, from Mesoamerican counterfeits of cacao beans used as currency to cattle rustling to human trafficking; from Canada’s and Mexico’s different approaches to the illegality of liquor in the United States during Prohibition to con...