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In his 1963 debut essay for the militant Quebec journal, Parti pris, André Brochu invoked the figure of the sixteenth-century skeptic Michel de Montaigne in the name of what Ralph Waldo Emerson, responding to the same over a century earlier, had called, «an original relation to the universe». «Écrire», wrote Brochu, «c'est redéfinir la relation originelle de l'homme à l'univers, c'est, comme écrit magnifiquement Montaigne, 'faire l'homme'...» By tracing the idealism of nineteenth-century American and twentieth-century Quebec writers back to Montaigne and his rejection of Aristotelian and Scholastic reason, The Renaissance of Impasse offers an alternate history to that found in much (post)Romantic criticism, wherein modern skepticism tends to be identified with, and so in a sense confined to, the project of Enlightenment reason. Key works from Thomas Carlyle, Emerson and Herman Melville to Hubert Aquin, Réjean Ducharme and Victory-Lévy Beaulieu serve to define and to refine the sense of an impasse - personal, social, spiritual, historical, and political - that accompanies the «modern» drive to renaissance.
This volume addresses the political traditions that flourished in regions traditionally neglected by Atlantic history, but which are nevertheless indispensable for a comprehensive interpretation of political modernity. The history of political liberty simply cannot be reconstructed without taking into account the role of the Atlantic as a space for the circulation of ideas. The different chapters trace the origins of the Atlantic notions of liberty in the crisis of the colonial world, in the diverse processes that led to independence from the metropolis, and in the subsequent efforts to build a constitutional order. The book takes an innovative approach by putting together experiences of the English, Portuguese, and Spanish Atlantic and by dealing with political ideas as discursive and socially embedded practices.
The Oxford Handbook of the Canadian Constitution provides an ideal first stop for Canadians and non-Canadians seeking a clear, concise, and authoritative account of Canadian constitutional law. The Handbook is divided into six parts: Constitutional History, Institutions and Constitutional Change, Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian Constitution, Federalism, Rights and Freedoms, and Constitutional Theory. Readers of this Handbook will discover some of the distinctive features of the Canadian constitution: for example, the importance of Indigenous peoples and legal systems, the long-standing presence of a French-speaking population, French civil law and Quebec, the British constitutional herit...
This striking reinterpretation of the history of Quebec in the revolutionary era - demonstrated through a micro-historical analysis of 20,000 court records as well as official and unofficial political discourses - shows that a central aim of British Imperial rule was the assimilation and subjugation of the French Canadian majority in the colony.
Adding to a dynamic new wave of scholarship in Atlantic history, The Loyal Atlantic offers fresh interpretations of the key role played by Loyalism in shaping the early modern British Empire. This cohesive collection investigates how Loyalism and the empire were mutually constituted and reconstituted from the eighteenth century onward. Featuring contributions by authors from across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, The Loyal Atlantic brings Loyalism into a genuinely international focus. Through cutting-edge archival research, The Loyal Atlantic contextualizes Loyalism within the larger history of the British Empire. It also details how, far from being a passive allegiance, Loyalism changed in unexpected and fascinating ways — especially in times of crisis. Most importantly, The Loyal Atlantic demonstrates that neither the conquest of Canada nor the American Revolution can be properly understood without assessing the meanings of Loyalism in the wider Atlantic world.
In 1846, a group of women came together to form what would become one of Hamilton's most important social welfare institutions. Through the Ladies Benevolent Society and Hamilton Orphan Asylum, they managed and administered a charitable visiting society, orphan asylum, and aged women's home. In Private Women and the Public Good, Carmen J. Nielson explores the tension inherent in nineteenth-century women's charitable work, nominally private because it was voluntary and female, but also sustained by public monies, legitimated by law, and serving the so-called public good.
In 1837, a small group of rebels proclaimed the short-lived Republic of Canada. Between then and the Act of Confederation of 1867, colonial Canadians tried to imagine the future of their communities in North America. The choice between monarchy and republicanism shaped both colonial self-images and images of the United States; it also drove the political deliberations that eventually united the colonies of British North America into a self-governing Dominion under the British Crown. Between Empire and Republic is a thematic exploration of the political discourse embedded in the literary output of the period. Colonial authors Susanna Moodie, Th. Ch. Haliburton, and John Richardson enjoyed tra...
From award-winning biographer Philip Girard, Lawyers and Legal Culture in British North America is the first history of the legal profession in Canada to emphasize its cross-provincial similarities and its deep roots in the colonial period. Girard details how nineteenth-century British North American lawyers created a distinctive Canadian template for the profession by combining the strong collective governance of the English tradition with the high degree of creativity and client responsiveness characteristic of U.S. lawyers a mix that forms the basis of the legal profession in Canada today. Girard provides a unique window on the interconnections between lawyers' roles as community leaders and as legal professionals. Centred on one pre-Confederation lawyer whose career epitomizes the trends of his day, Beamish Murdoch (1800-1876), Lawyers and Legal Culture in British North America makes an important and compelling contribution to Canadian legal history.
Canada was a small country in 1867, but within twenty years its claims to sovereignty spanned the continent. With Confederation came the vaunting ambition to create an empire from sea to sea. How did Canada lay claim to so much land so quickly? Land and the Liberal Project examines the tactics deployed by Canadian officialdom from the first articulation of expansionism in 1857 to the consolidation of authority following the 1885 North-West Resistance. Éléna Choquette contends that although the dominion purported to absorb Indigenous lands through constitutionalism, administration, and law, it often resorted to force in the face of Indigenous resistance. She investigates the liberal concept that underpinned land appropriation and legitimized violence: Indigenous territory and people were to be “improved,” the former by agrarian capitalism, the latter by enforced schooling. By rethinking this tainted approach to nation making, Choquette’s clear-eyed exposé of the Canadian expansionist project offers new ways to understand colonization.