Books – Ethnic Studies
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Rewriting the Break Event
Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature
A thoughtful and engaging argument that re-situates the discourse of migrant writing in Canada.
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Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity
Japanese, Ukrainians, and Scots, 1919–1971
An intriguing study of the roles of ethnic community leaders in shaping Canada’s multiculturalism policy.
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Storied Landscapes
Ethno-Religious Identity and the Canadian Prairies
Storied Landscapes is a beautifully written, sweeping examination of the evolving identity of major ethno-religious immigrant groups in the Canadian West. Viewed through the lens of attachment to the soil and specific place, and through the eyes of both the immigrant generation and its descendants, the book compares the settlement experiences of Ukrainians, Mennonites, Icelanders, Doukhobors, Germans, Poles, Romanians, Jews, Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes.
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Families, Lovers, and their Letters
Italian Postwar Migration to Canada
Families, Lovers, and their Letters takes us into the passionate hearts and minds of ordinary people caught in the heartbreak of transatlantic migration. It examines the experiences of Italian migrants to Canada and their loved ones left behind in Italy following the Second World War, when the largest migration of Italians to Canada took place.
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Mennonite Women in Canada
A History
Mennonite Women in Canada traces the complex social history and multiple identities of Canadian Mennonite women over 200 years. Marlene Epp explores women’s roles, as prescribed and as lived, within the contexts of immigration and settlement, household and family, church and organizational life, work and education, and in response to social trends and events.
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Imagined Homes
Soviet German Immigrants in Two Cities
Imagined Homes: Soviet German Immigrants in Two Cities is a study of the social and cultural integration of two migrations of German speakers from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Winnipeg, Canada in the late 1940s, and Bielefeld, Germany in the 1970s. Employing a cross-national comparative framework, Hans Werner reveals that the imagined trajectory of immigrant lives influenced the process of integration into a new urban environment.
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Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood
Europe - Russia - Canada, 1525 to 1980
Mennonites and their forebears are usually thought to be a people with little interest or involvement in politics. Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood reveals that since their early history, Mennonites have, in fact, been active participants in worldly politics.
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Providence Watching
Journeys from Wartorn Poland to the Canadian Prairies
At the start of the Second World War, Poland was invaded by both the German and the Soviet armies. After the war, Canada accepted over 4000 Polish immigrant soldiers and their families who did not want to return to a communist regime in their country. This book is a moving oral history of the experiences of forty-five individuals during that transition period between the outbreak of war and their eventual relocation in Canada.
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Icelanders in North America
The First Settlers
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands of Icelanders emigrated to both North and South America. Although the best known Icelandic settlements were in southern Manitoba, in the area that became known as “New Iceland,” Icelanders also established important settlements in Brazil, Minnesota, Utah, Wisconsin, Washington, Saskatchewan, and Nova Scotia. Earlier accounts of this immigration have tended to concentrate on the history of New Iceland. Using letters, Icelandic and English periodicals and newspapers, census reports, and archival repositories, Jonas Thor expands this view by looking at Icelandic immigration from a continent-wide perspective.
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Hidden Worlds
Revisiting the Mennonite Migrants of the 1870s
In the 1870s, approximately 18,000 Mennonites migrated from the southern steppes of Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine) to the North American grasslands. Their adaptation to the New World required new concepts of social boundary and community, new strategies of land ownership and legacy, new associations, and new ways of interacting with markets. In Hidden Worlds, historian Royden Loewen illuminates some of these adaptations, which have been largely overshadowed by an emphasis on institutional history, or whose sources have only recently been revealed.
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