Pubs, Pulpits and Prairie Fires

Elroy Deimert

History professor Paul Wessner hangs out at BJ’s Bar and Cue Club on Tuesday nights sharing his accounts of the On-to-Ottawa Trek and the Regina Riot in 1935. Due to local interest in his research, he invites Doc Savage and Matt Shaw, real-life leaders on the Trek, to deliver first-hand accounts of the Trek and the Riot. He encourages listeners to contribute when no guests are scheduled to tell their stories. The narratives broaden to the evolution of the Social Credit and CCF prairie fires… (more information)

Black Canadians

History, Experience, Social Conditions

Joseph Mensah

This timely and overdue book brings into perspective the history, experience and social conditions of Black Canadians. It looks not just at recent Black immigrants to Canada but delves into their history. The first Black people came as slaves of the early European settlers. They were followed by Black loyalists and refugees from the civil war in the United States. But their numbers were small. It is only since the introduction of the “point system” in 1967 that Black people began to… (more information)

Blowback

A Canadian History of Agent Orange and the War at Home

Chris Arsenault

The village of Enniskillen, a sleepy cluster of a few dozen houses in New Brunswick’s Queens County, has never been invaded by a foreign power. But during the 1950s to 1970s, the village was ground zero for a different kind of offensive, this one launched by the American and Canadian military against its own people with the deadly dioxin Agent Orange. Between 1956 and 1984 the Canadian military and its private subcontractors sprayed more than 1 million litres of rainbow herbicides around New… (more information)

Calculated Kindness

Global Restructuring, Immigration and Settlement in Canada

Edited by Rose Baaba Folson

It has often been the perception that Northern states admit immigrants out of generosity, offering security and shelter to people forced from their own countries because of political and economic circumstances. This collection—based on case studies with immigrants—quickly dispels this myth. Immigrants are admitted to serve economic or demographic interests. They also serve to pay back the receiving countries’ own historical and political indebtedness. It is the North that both… (more information)

Challenges and Perils

Social Democracy in Neoliberal Times

Edited by William K. Carroll, R.S. Ratner

This book explores the problems and prospects for social democratic governance in the contemporary Canadian context. It provides an indepth case study of social democratic governance at the provincial level in Canada during the 1990s and the early part of the 21st century. The authors deal with the constraints that neoliberal globalization has imposed upon social democratic governance in Canada and elsewhere. Case studies of regimes in five Canadian provinces bring out nuances and examine differences… (more information)

Down But Not Out

Community and the Upper Streets in Halifax, 1890

David Hood

An examination of poverty and homelessness in Halifax at the turn of the twentieth century, this book challenges the notion that the poor are deviants who are responsible for their own misfortune. Historians have too often accepted this characterization of poverty without question and, in so doing, have allowed for its perpetuation into current discourse. Through an exploration of public records and the stories of real people, David Hood breathes life into Halifax’s sordid past — and… (more information)

Out of the Depths (New Extended Edition)

The Experiences of Mi’kmaw Childrn at the Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia

Isabelle Knockwood

“The Residential School experience had serious negative consequences for many of our people who have suffered in silence for too long. It is time to take the first step and let others know they are not alone in their suffering. No matter how painful, the stories of our people must be told and heard. Through sharing our past, we can begin to heal ourselves, our communities, our people as we look to a better tomorrow.” —Phil Fontaine, Grand Chief, Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, former… (more information)

Playing Left Wing

From Rink Rat to Student Radical

Yves Engler

What makes a student radical? Can students in the 21st century play a part in changing the world? What were those troublemakers thinking when they blocked former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking at Concordia University in Montreal? Playing Left Wing answers these and other questions by telling the story of how a former junior hockey player became media spokesperson for the “most radical” university students in Canada. An entertaining read, Playing Left Wing is… (more information)

Race and Well-Being

The Lives, Hopes and Activism of African Canadians

Akua Benjamin, David Este, Carl E. James, Bethan Lloyd, Wanda Thomas Bernard, Tana Turner

Through in-depth qualitative research with African Canadians in three Canadian cities — Calgary, Toronto and Halifax — this book explores how experiences of racism, combined with other social and economic factors, affect the health and well-being of African Canadians. With a special interest in how racial stereotyping impacts Black men and boys, this book shares stories of racism and violence and explores how experiences and interpretations of, and reactions to, racism differ across… (more information)

Social Torment

Atlantic Canada in the New World Order

Thom Workman

For Atlantic Canadians the much vaunted “New World Order,” with its free-trade/privitazion mantra, has been anything but good. In fact by all accounts to date, it has brought nothing but social torment for all but the very rich and very powerful. In this revealing new book, Thom Workman traces the impact that the new order has had on working people, the working poor, people on social assistance and the elderly. The impact of the new order on health care, education, the environment and… (more information)

The Dirt

Industrial Disease and Conflict at St. Lawrence, Newfoundland

Rick Rennie

In the cemeteries of St. Lawrence and several neighbouring towns on the south coast of Newfoundland lie the remains of some 200 workers, killed by the dust and radiation that permeated the area’s fluorspar mines. The Dirt chronicles the many forces that created this disaster and shaped the response to it, including the classic ‘jobs or health’ dilemma, the contentious process of determining the nature and extent of industrial disease and the desire of employers to ‘externalize… (more information)

Voices of Nova Scotia Community

A Written Democracy

Scott Milsom

From Birchtown and Harbourville, Kennetcook and Oxford, Lincolnville and Orangedale, these stories explore why the people of small communities across Nova Scotia value the quality of life they enjoy. The author ensures that it is the voices of the people who live in these communities that ring truest, allowing both neighbours and those visiting for the first time a better understanding of life in rural and small-town Nova Scotia. “The plain-spoken, visionary journalist Scott Milsom reminds… (more information)