Books – Ethnic Studies
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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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Winnipeg 1912
At the beginning of the last century, no city on the continent was growing faster or was more aggressive than Winnipeg. No year in the city’s history epitomized this energy more that 1912, when Winnipeg was on the crest of a period of unprecedented prosperity. From the excited crowds at the summer Exhibition to the turbulent floor of the Grain Exchange, Blanchard gives us a vivid picture of daily life in this fast-paced city of new millionaires and newly arrived immigrants. Richly illustrated with more than seventy period photographs, Winnipeg 1912 captures a time and place that left a lasting impression on Canadian history and culture.
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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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From the Inside Out
The Rural Worlds of Mennonite Diarists
Historian Royden Loewen has brought together selections from diaries kept by 21 Mennonites in Canada between 1863 and 1929, some translated from German for the first time. By skillfully comparing and contrasting a wide cross-section of lives, Loewen shows how these diaries often turn the hidden contours of household and community “inside out.”
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In Her Own Voice
Childbirth Stories from Mennonite Women
Winnipeg writer Katherine Martens interviewed 26 women from the Mennonite community in southern Manitoba, ranging in age from 22 to 88 years old. In the privacy of their kitchens and parlours, over sociable cups of tea, they share with Martens their private fears and joys about what was often seen as a rite of passage into responsible adulthood, and they recalled that childbirth could be a difficult and, at times, traumatic event, but it could also be a radiant and spiritual experience.
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Writings by Western Icelandic Women
This collection of short stories and poems spans 75 years of writings. It includes translated work by little-known authors such as Undina, “a modest poet,” as well as works in English by prominent writers such as Laura Goodman Salverson, twice a winner of the Governor-General’s Award. From the hopefulness of the early immigration in the 1870s to the conflict of assimilation in the 1950s, the pieces reflect a range of experiences common to immigrant women from many cultures.
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Western Icelandic Short Stories
This selection of Western Icelandic writings, the first of its kind in English, represents a wide collection of first and second generation Icelandic-Canadian authors. The stories, first published between 1895 and 1930, are set mainly in North America (especially Manitoba). They reflect a weath of literary activity, from the numerous Western Icelandic newspapers and journals, to the reading circles and cultural and literary societies that supported them.
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