Voices in the Legal Archives in the French Colonial World: "The King is Listening" offers, through the contribution of thirteen original chapters, a sustained analysis of judicial practices and litigation during the first era of French overseas expansion.The overall goal of this volume is to elaborate a more sophisticated "social history of colonialism" by focusing largely on the eighteenth century, extending roughly from 1700 until the conclusion of the Age of Revolutions...

This book explores the courtship and marriage of Gwyneth Murray, an English woman, and a Canadian, Harry Logan, who wrote in the personae of their vagina (Dardanella) and penis (Peter) during World War I. Through an analysis of their extensive daily correspondence over nearly a decade, it uncovers the couple’s changing attitudes to the intersection of sexuality and religion, to marriage and childrearing, as they navigated the transition from Victorian to modern values. By focusing on first...

In the decades following the Second World War, North America and Western Europe experienced widespread secularization and dechristianization; many scholars have pinpointed the 1960s as a pivotally important period in this decline. The Sixties and Beyond examines the scope and significance of dechristianization in the western world between 1945 and 2000.A thematically wide-ranging and interdisciplinary collection, The Sixties and Beyond uses a framework that compar...

Changing social and cultural strategies of Protestant and Catholic religious institutions have shaped the social order in Quebec and English Canada. Through a sustained comparison of Protestantism and Catholicism this volume explores the transition from pre-industrial to industrial society and challenges conventional chronologies of religious change.

Set against a background of intense religious and cultural change and tensions over the meanings of nationalism and federalism in both Quebec and Canada, Michael Gauvreau's The Hand of God traces the emergence of Claude Ryan as a public intellectual. This is the first comprehensive biography of Ryan based on his personal papers and extensive writings as a social commentator, editorialist, and director of the newspaper Le Devoir.At a time of Catholic religious fervour and n...

Religious institutions, values, and identities are fundamental to understanding the lived experiences of Canadians in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Christian Churches and Their Peoples, an inter-denominational study, considers how Christian churches influenced the social and cultural development of Canadian society across regional and linguistic lines.By shifting their focus beyond the internal dynamics of institutions, Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau ad...

By examinng education, charity, community discipline, the relationship between clergy and congregations, and working-class religion, the contributors shift the field of religious history into the realm of the socio-cultural. This novel perspective reveals that the Christian churches remained dynamic and popular in English and French Canada, as well as among immigrants, well into the twentieth century.

A critical analysis of Centuries of Childhood, in which the French historian Philippe Aries offers a fundamentally fresh interpretation of what childhood is and what the institution means for society at large. Aries's core idea is that ‘childhood,’ as we understand it today – a special time that requires special efforts and resources – is an invention of the 19th century, and that before that date children were in effect thought of as small adults. This led him to a re-evaluation ...

Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer cul...

J ill Ker Conway, one of our most admired autobiographers--author of The Road from Coorain and True North--looks astutely and with feeling into the modern memoir: the forms and styles it assumes, and the strikingly different ways in which men and women respectively tend to understand and present their lives.In a narrative rich with evocations of memoirists over the centuries--from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand to W. E. B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, Frank McCourt and Katharine ...

From tabloid exposes of child prostitution to the grisly tales of Jack the Ripper, narratives of sexual danger pulsated through Victorian London. Expertly blending social history and cultural criticism, Judith Walkowitz shows how these narratives reveal the complex dramas of power, politics, and sexuality that were being played out in late nineteenth-century Britain, and how they influenced the language of politics, journalism, and fiction.Victorian London was a world where long-st...

Winner of the UBC Medal for Biography and shortlisted for the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize.The prolific novelist and social prophet H.G. Wells had a way with words, and usually he had his way with women. That is, until he encountered the feisty Toronto spinster Florence Deeks. In 1925 Miss Deeks launched a $500,000 lawsuit against Wells, claiming that in an act of "literary piracy," Wells had somehow come to use her manuscript history of the world in the writing ...