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Short stories by an author who offers “shrewd, bitingly funny commentary on his own privileged class” (Time). In nine stories that move between nouveau riche Los Angeles and the working class East Coast, and strike a balance between comedy and catastrophe, Kevin Morris explores the vicissitudes of modern life. Whether looking for creative ways to let off steam after a day in court or enduring chaperone duties on a school field trip to the nation’s capital, the heroes of White Man’s Problems struggle to navigate the challenges that accompany marriage, family, success, failure, growing up, and getting older. “Kevin Morris is that rare writer who bridges the class divide, illuminating...
The Chinese have become a vibrant part of Toronto’s multiculturalism, with no less than seven Chinatowns created since 1984. Short-listed for the 2013 Speaker’s Book Award and for the 2012 Heritage Toronto Award The modest beginnings of the Chinese in Toronto and the development of Chinatown is largely due to the completion of the CPR in 1885. No longer requiring the services of the Chinese labourers, a hostile British Columbia sent them eastward in search of employment and a more welcoming place. In 1894 Toronto’s Chinese population numbered fifty. Today, no less than seven Chinatowns serve what has become the second-largest visible minority in the city, with a population of half a million. In these pages, you will find their stories told through historical accounts, archival and present-day photographs, newspaper clippings, and narratives from old-timers and newcomers. With achievements spanning all walks of life, the Chinese in Toronto are no longer looking in from outside society’s circle. Their lives are a vibrant part of the diverse mosaic that makes Toronto one of the most multicultural cities in the world.
This book follows the life and intellectual journey of Joseph Baruch Salsberg, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who became a major figure of the Ontario Left, a leading voice for human rights in the Ontario legislature, and an important journalist in the Jewish community. His life trajectory mirrored many of the most significant transformations in Canadian political and social life in the twentieth century. Award-winning historian Gerald Tulchinsky traces Salsberg’s personal and professional journey – from his entrance into Toronto’s oppressive garment industry at age 14, which led to his becoming active in emerging trade unions, to his rise through the ranks of the Communist Party of Canada ...
With a landmass of approximately 7000 square kilometres and a population of roughly five million, the Greater Toronto Area is Canada's largest metropolitan centre. How did a small nineteenth-century colonial capital become this sprawling urban giant, and how did government policies shape the contours of its landscape? In Toronto Sprawls, Lawrence Solomon examines the great migration from farms to the city that occurred in the last half of the nineteenth century. During this period, a disproportionate number of single women came to Toronto while, at the same time, immigration from abroad was swelling the city's urban boundaries. Labour unions were increasingly successful in recruiting urban w...
Since it was first published in 1991, few books have come close to capturing the depth and breadth of Alexander Wilson’s innovative ecocultural compendium The Culture of Nature. His work was one of the first of its kind to investigate the ideology of the environment, to critique the future according to Disney, and illustrate that the ways we think, teach, talk about, and construct the natural world are as important a terrain as the land itself. Extensively illustrated and meticulously researched, this edition is exquisitely revised and reissued for the Anthropocene.
Annotation Examining culture as social identity, this collection explores issues such as gender, technology, cultural ethnicity, and regionalism in four general areas: the media, individual and national identity, languages, and cultural dissent.
Spirited young Eunice will not settle for a woman’s lot in 1800s Canada. She sees the inequitable use of power everywhere, from her abusive father to the elite-ruled government, and she cannot help but challenge it. This historical fiction follows her escape from trouble into more and more trouble, through which her ignorance gives way to a more sophisticated understanding of her society. Impatient to claim a place in it, Eunice dresses as a boy in order to join a rebellion against the government. She lands in jail for stealing a rich man’s horse, and there, the stories of her socially marginalized female cellmates – in particular a young black prisoner – forces her to confront anew the startling injustices of race and social class and the institutionalized cruelty of prison. Readers will fall in love with Eunice for her integrity and tenacity against all odds.
"The great purpose of landscape art is to make us at home in our own country" was the nationalist maxim motivating the Group of Seven's artistic project. The empty landscape paintings of the Group played a significant role in the nationalization of nature in Canada, particularly in the development of ideas about northernness, wilderness, and identity. In this book, John O'Brian and Peter White pick up where the Group of Seven left off. They demonstrate that since the 1960s a growing body of both art and critical writing has looked "beyond wilderness" to re-imagine landscape in a world of vastly altered political, technological, and environmental circumstances. By emphasizing social relations...
Finalist: Raymond Klibansky Book Prize Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada (2008) Making a connection between photography and memory is almost automatic. Should it be? In Scissors, Paper, Stone Martha Langford explores the nature of memory and art. She challenges the conventional emphasis on the camera as a tool of perception by arguing that photographic works are products of the mind - picturing memory is, first and foremost, the expression of a mental process. Langford organizes the book around the conceit of the child's game scissors, paper, stone, using it to ground her discussion of the tensions between remembering and forgetting, the intersection of memory and imagination, and the relationship between memory and history. Scissors, Paper, Stone explores the great variety of photographic art produced by Canadian artists as expressions of memory. Their work, including images by Carl Beam, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Donigan Cumming, Stan Denniston, Robert Houle, Robert Minden, Michael Snow, Diana Thorneycroft, Jeff Wall, and Jin-me Yoon, is presented as part of a rich interdisciplinary study of contemporary photography and how it has shaped modern memory.
Agitator, educator, organizer, J.B. McLachlan led the coal miners of Nova Scotia in their struggles for union recognition, united them around ideas of industrial democracy and social reconstruction, and defended their cause in the labour wars of the 1920s. This authoritative biography tells the story of legendary labour leader James Bryson McLachlan, champion of the Cape Breton Coal Miners in the early decades of the twentieth century. Charged with sedition in 1923, McLachlan's case was one of the most notorious political trials ever held in Nova Scotia. By the 1920s and 1930s, McLachlan was known across the country as a spokesman for the radical left in Canada. He helped change the balance of power in industrial society and advanced the struggle for social and economic justice. J.B. McLachlan: A Biography is a rich portrait of a brilliant early twentieth-century Canadian rebel who helped change the balance of power in industrial society and advance the struggle for social and economic justice.