You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In Canada, the donut is often thought of as the unofficial national food. Donuts are sold at every intersection and rest stop, celebrated in song and story as symbols of Canadian identity, and one chain in particular, Tim Horton's, has become a veritable icon with over 2500 shops across the country. But there is more to the donut than these and other expressions of 'snackfood patriotism' would suggest. In this study, Steve Penfold puts the humble donut in its historical context, examining how one deep-fried confectionary became, not only a mass commodity, but an edible symbol of Canadianness. Penfold examines the history of the donut in light of broader social, economic, and cultural issues,...
The 1965 Canada-United States Automotive Trade agreement fundamentally reshaped relations between the automotive business and the state in both countries and represented a significant step toward the creation of an integrated North American economy. Breaking from previous conceptions of the agreement as solely a product of intergovernmental negotiation, Dimitry Anastakis's Auto Pact argues that the 'big three' auto companies played a pivotal role - and benefited immensely - in the creation and implementation of this new automotive regime. With the border effectively erased by the agreement, the pact transformed these giant enterprises into truly global corporations. Drawing from newly releas...
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...
Before the Golden Age of comic books, there was Mr. Block: a bumbling, boss-loving, anti-union blockhead, brought to life over a hundred years ago by subversive cartoonist Ernest Riebe. A dedicated labour activist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World, Riebe dreamed up his iconic, union-hating anti-hero to satirize conservative workers’ faith in the capitalist system that exploits them. This wickedly funny anthology of Riebe’s writings and comics is a treasure trove of radical 20th-century art and an essential addition to the bookshelves of comics lovers, historians, and labour activists alike. As income inequality skyrockets and the collective power of the working class is undermined, the lessons from Mr. Block’s misadventures and misbeliefs are as relevant today as ever. Building the new world from the ashes of the old demands many tools—and laughter will always be one of them.
Radical Housewives is a history of Canada's Housewives Consumers Association. This association was a community-based women's organization with ties to the communist and social democratic left that, from 1937 until the early 1950s, led a broadly based popular movement for state control of prices and made other far-reaching demands on the state. As radical consumer activists, the Housewives engaged in gender-transgressive political activism that challenged the government to protect consumers' interests rather than just those of business while popularizing socialist solutions to the economic crises of the Great Depression and the immediate postwar years. Julie Guard's exhaustive research, including archival research and interviews with twelve former Housewives, recovers a history of women's social justice activism in an era often considered dormant and adds a Canadian dimension to the history of politicized consumerism and of politicized materialism. Radical Housewives reinterprets the view of postwar Canada as economically prosperous and reveals the left's role in the origins of the food security movement.
Combining innovative political analysis with a compelling social history of those caught up in Minnesota's welfare system, Fixing the Poor is a powerful reinterpretation of eugenic sterilization.
Thousands of children attended summer camps in twentieth-century Ontario. Did parents simply want a break, or were broader developments at play? The Nurture of Nature explores how competing cultural tendencies � antimodern nostalgia and modern sensibilities about the landscape, child rearing, and identity � shaped the development of summer camps and, consequently, modern social life in North America. A valuable resource for those interested in the connections between the history of childhood, the natural environment, and recreation, The Nature of Nurture will also appeal to anyone who has been packed off to camp and wants to explore why.
"The history of the United States is a history of oppression and inequality, as well as raucous opposition to the status quo. It is a history of slavery and child labor, but also the protest movements that helped end those institutions ... In this ... book, Dawson Barrett calls our attention to the post-1960s period, in which [he posits that] US economic, cultural, and political elites turned the tide against the protest movement gains of the previous forty years and reshaped the ability of activists to influence the political process"--Amazon.com.
The Overworked Consumer examines how the growing use of self-service technology in the U.S. economy has contributed to Americans’ feelings of busyness and overwork by asking them to perform a variety of tasks in work-like settings for free. Focusing on the adoption of self-checkout lanes in the retail food industry, the book describes how self-service technology is changing the meaning of service in an economy where the boundaries between work and leisure are becoming increasingly blurred. Are big businesses simply being cheap and lazy, preferring to automate and outsource work to unpaid consumers instead of raising wages, or is self-service and its do-it-yourself ethos a response to consu...
Consuming with a conscience is one of the fastest growing forms of political participation worldwide. Every day we make decisions about how to spend our money and, for the socially conscious, these decisions matter. Political consumers "buy green" for the environment or they "buy pink" to combat breast cancer. They boycott Taco Bell to support migrant workers or Burger King to save the rainforest. But can we overcome the limitations of consumer identity, the conservative pull of consumer choice, co-optation by corporate marketers, and other pitfalls of consumer activism in order to marshal the possibilities of consumer power? Can we, quite literally, shop for change? Shopping for Change brin...