Argentina has been one the most important destinations for international labor migrants in the modern world. But while it was long imagined as a nation of immigrants, a closer look at its history and policies reveals that the country’s doors were only open to certain people. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, officials developed a long list of grounds for exclusion that deterred many people from ever boarding a ship to the country. Travelers who did go to Argentina were ...

Recasting the Nation in Twentieth-Century Argentina tackles the meaning of "the nation" by looking to the geographical, ideological, and political peripheries of society.What it means to be Argentine has long consumed writers, political leaders, and many others. For almost two centuries prominent figures have defined national values while looking out from the urban centers of the country and above all Buenos Aires. They have described the nation in terms of urban ...

National borders and transnational forces have been central in defining the meaning of race in the Americas. Race and Transnationalism in the Americas examines the ways that race and its categorization have functioned as organizing frameworks for cultural, political, and social inclusion—and exclusion—in the Americas. Because racial categories are invariably generated through reference to the “other,” the national community has been a point of departure for understanding race as a...

The decision to commit a loved one for carceral treatment and care in a mental asylum was never an uncomplicated one. However, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century families who had a loved one suffering from a mental illness caused by maternity faced additional logistical and social issues because of the societal and geographical realities of living in British Columbia. Using records from the British Columbia Provincial Insane Asylum, this article explores how settler-colonial fami...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a massive wave of immigration transformed the cultural landscape of Argentina. Alongside other immigrants to Buenos Aires, German speakers strove to carve out a place for themselves as Argentines without fully relinquishing their German language and identity. Their story sheds light on how pluralistic societies take shape and how immigrants negotiate the terms of citizenship and belonging.Focusing on social welfare, education, r...

Steven High’s presidential address, delivered at York University in May 2023, grapples with many of the issues facing our discipline and what it means to be a historian in the present. Despite the extreme political polarization of our time, he expressed admiration at the courage of so many historians who continue to speak truth to power, even at considerable risk to themselves. He also addresses the structural violence of precarity within our discipline and what we as a professional associ...

The first article in this issue, Harold Bérubé’s “Selling the Suburbs to Montrealers: Advertising Discourse and Strategies, 1950–1970” is a revised translation of his 2017 article that appeared in the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française. This is the beginning of a collaboration between the JCHA and the RHAF to try to bridge the historiographic divide that linguistic boundaries produce in Canada.

Sometime in 1866, a Spaniard named Josep Soler (1840–1906) arrived in Whanganui, Aotearoa New Zealand. Born in Constantí in the Camp de Tarragona winemaking region south of Barcelona, Soler came from a winemaking family and was a winemaker himself before leaving Spain. He planted his first New Zealand vineyard shortly after arriving in Whanganui, and his business life was one of uninterrupted success. In 1880, the New Zealand Herald proclaimed him its “New Zealander of the Year” for “his f...

What can be said about one hundred years of historical writing in the journals of the Canadian Historical Association, as they have evolved from the Report of the Annual Meeting|Rapport de l’assemblée annuelle (1922-1965, the journal only took on a bilingual name in 1951) to Historical Papers|Communications historiques (1966-1989) and then to the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association|Revue de la Société historique du Canada (1990-present)?

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European settlers from diverse backgrounds transformed Ontario. By 1881, German speakers made up almost ten per cent of the province’s population and the German language was spoken in businesses, public schools, churches, and homes. German speakers in Ontario – children, parents, teachers, and religious groups – used their everyday practices and community institutions to claim a space for bilingualism and religious diversity within Cana...

This past year has been a long one. While my corporal presence has remained, as an uninvited interloper, on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ, Esquimalt, and Lkwungen peoples, my intellectual wanderings feel much less grounded even if they are equally trespasses. We have spent too long in the same places. We have spent too long living with grief and anxiety and uncertainty. We have spent too long barred from the places we love (with a small “l”) — our classes, and libraries and arc...

The Journal of the Canadian Historical Association has long been a venue for the dissemination of papers presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association. Until recently, in fact, the JCHA was restricted to publishing only articles that arose from presentations at the CHA conference. The journal’s mandate was changed in 2019 so that its call for papers could be opened more widely to any submissions by members of the CHA. As it turns out, this change was timely: the An...