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History of "Home children," children who were sent from child-care organizations in Britain to Canada to work on farms.
The Little Immigrants is a tale of compassion and courage and a vivid account of a deep and moving part of Canadian heritage. In the early years after Confederation, the rising nation needed workers that could take advantage of the abundant resources. Until the time of the Depression, 100,000 impoverished children from the British Isles were sent overseas by well-meaning philanthropists to solve the colony’s farm-labour shortage. They were known as the "home children," and they were lonely and frightened youngsters to whom a new life in Canada meant only hardship and abuse. This is an extraordinary but almost forgotten odyssey that the Calgary Herald has called, "One of the finest pieces of Canadian social history ever to be written." Kenneth Bagnell tells "an affecting tale of Dickensian pathos" (Vancouver Sun) that is "excellent ... well organized, logical, clearly written, [and] suspenseful" (The Edmonton Journal).
Ancient Memories, Modern Identities stands for pagan, peasant memories in a postmodern, urban North America. Second- and third-generation authors, young by adoption but old in their vision, express the phenomenon of migration as both a physical displacement and indelible memory.
Mary Janeway, born in Scotland in 1887, came to Canada as a "home child" at a very young age. Separated from her brothers and sisters, the "tiny" Mary was sent as a domestic to a farm near Innerkip, Ontario. This is Mary's story -- a recreation of her life set in Victorian rural Ontario, from the time of the tragedy that split her family to her eventual escape from a life of drudgery. Robbed of her childhood years but buoyed by an inner resolve and an indomitable spirit, Mary Janeway reveals the tragic events surrounding this period of Canadian history -- the Home Children. Mary Janeway was godmother to author Mary Pettit.
This collection of twelve essays represents an important contribution to the understanding of child welfare and social action in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They challenge many assumptions about the history of childhood and child welfare policy and cover a variety of themes including the physical and sexual abuse of children, forced child migration and role of the welfare state.
In 1949, about 123 Polish Displaced Persons orphans were brought to Canada from East Africa as part of the settlement of the postwar DP crisis. The situation became an international incident when Warsaw protested that the International Refugee Organization was kidnapping these children to use as slave labour on Canadian farms and factories.
Wolfe Island begins with the emergence of islands at the end of the last ice age and moves through the many centuries of First Nations habitation to the era of French exploration and the fur trading, the arrival of the earliest British settlers and the United Empire Loyalists, up to current time. The development and decline of industry, the evolution of facilities, land title frustrations, and the emergence of a strong sense of identity among the inhabitants are featured, along with a wealth of anecdotes based on colourful and eccentric personalities. This extensively researched history of Wolfe Island is a treasure trove for history buffs.
Canadian Content looks at Canada as an ongoing postcolonial process of not one but a series of radically different nationhoods, each with its own valued but tentative set of cultural criteria for orchestrating and implementing a Canadian national experience.
Justices of the peace, constables, and game wardens from the late 19th century are brought to vivid life interacting with a variety of accused citizens. Rare views of human lives in turmoil are revealed in several hundred trials conducted in 1890s Muskoka by Magistrate James Boyer of Bracebridge. The charges and evidence show how raw life really was in Canada’s frontier towns, with cases ranging from nostalgic and humorous to pitiable and deeply disturbing. While dispensing speedy justice, Boyer, who was also town clerk and editor of the Northern Advocate, the first newspaper in Ontario’s northern districts, kept a careful record in his handwritten "bench book" of all these cases. That bench book, recently found by his great-grandson, lawyer J. Patrick Boyer, provides the raw material for Raw Life. This first-time publication of the these cases demonstrates how, in Canadian society, some things haven’t changed much over the years – from early road rage to the plight of abused women, from environmental contamination to punitive treatment of the poor.
Poet and novelist, Antonio D'Alfonso has been writing essays and giving in-depth interviews for twenty years. This collection contains the most important of these texts which have been reworked into a coherent entity. D'Alfonso discusses the importance of ethnic awareness which he places at the antipodes of territorial nationalism for which ethnicity is too often mistaken. The themes raised in this eclectic book relate to general culture, language, literature, film, and publishing (he founded Guernica Editions in 1978). Though it is the Italian perspective (which the author prefers to call Italic) that is favored, the themes and concepts developed are applicable to other cultures and countries. In Italics is a polemical and unblushing defense for the individual's right to a collective Imaginary, no matter which country one lives in.