In the 1880s, fashionable Londoners left their elegant homes and clubs in Mayfair and Belgravia and crowded into omnibuses bound for midnight tours of the slums of East London. A new word burst into popular usage to describe these descents into the precincts of poverty to see how the poor lived: slumming. In this captivating book, Seth Koven paints a vivid portrait of the practitioners of slumming and their world: who they were, why they went, what they claimed to have found, how it change...

How two extraordinary women crossed the Victorian class divide to put Christian teachings into practice in the slums of East LondonNellie Dowell was a match factory girl in Victorian London who spent her early years consigned to orphanages and hospitals. Muriel Lester, the daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder, longed to be free of the burden of money and possessions. Together, these unlikely soulmates sought to remake the world according to their own utopian vision of...

Historians of Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden and the United States provide a sweeping view of the scope of women's work and make comparisons across societies and over time.

This accessible and engaging book introduces readers to key historical events, and the women who were central to them, in the struggle for women’s equality in Canada. Four and a half decades after the report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, the feminist struggle is as necessary as ever — but thanks to the hard work of activist women, many forms of discrimination are a thing of the past.Beginning before the colonization of Canada by European settlers, Penni Mitchell e...

With an updated preface by the author.Since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, rights have become the dominant language of the public good around the globe. Indeed, rights have become the trump card in every argument. Long-standing fights for aboriginal rights, the issue of preserving the linguistic heritage of minorities, and same-sex marriage have steered our society into a full-blown rights revolution. This revolution is not o...

“No one has written with more penetrating skepticism about the history of human rights.”—Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal“Moyn breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.”—George SorosThe age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. While state violations of political rights have garnered unprecedented attention in recent decades, a commitment to material equality h...

During the 1900s eugenics gained favour as a means of controlling the birth rate among “undesirable” populations in Canada. Though many people were targeted, the coercive sterilization of one group has gone largely unnoticed. An Act of Genocide unpacks long-buried archival evidence to begin documenting the forced sterilization of Aboriginal women in Canada. Grounding this evidence within the context of colonialism, the oppression of women and the denial of Indigenous sovereignty, ...

This book develops an original theory of group and organizational behavior that cuts across disciplinary lines and illustrates the theory with empirical and historical studies of particular organizations. Applying economic analysis to the subjects of the political scientist, sociologist, and economist, Mancur Olson examines the extent to which the individuals that share a common interest find it in their individual interest to bear the costs of the organizational effort.The theory ...

Eugene Forsey's wit and wisdom are a legacy for the common good.Eugene Alfred Forsey (1904-1991) was one of Canada's foremost constitutional experts and a provocative voice for social justice and the common good. Legendary for his sharp wit and high principle, he brought encyclopedic knowledge, irascible tenacity and common sense to the causes of democracy, justice, and equality for all. Those themes resound through this book, and resonate strongly in the Canada of...

The pivotal and troubling role of progressive-era economics in the shaping of modern American liberalismIn Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. E...

Universal human rights are considered to be a fundamental, inalienable aspect of Canadian legal culture, not to mention central to our international positioning. However the reality is that Canada was surprisingly slow to adopt the rights revolution that followed the Second World War, given concerns that existing norms and liberties could conflict with these new universal rights. Moreover, even when Canada did sign up, these rights were not all automatically put into practice. Nor, interestin...

The unlikely story of how Americans canonized Adam Smith as the patron saint of free marketsOriginally published in 1776, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was lauded by America’s founders as a landmark work of Enlightenment thinking about national wealth, statecraft, and moral virtue. Today, Smith is one of the most influential icons of economic thought in America. Glory Liu traces how generations of Americans have read, reinterpreted, a...