Books – Social History
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For All We Have and Are
Regina and the Experience of the Great War
The First World War profoundly affected every community in Canada. In Regina, the politics of national identity, the rural myth, and the social gospel all lent a distinctive flavour to the city’s experience of the Great War. Skillfully combining vivid detail with the larger social context, For All We Have and Are provides a nuanced picture of how one Canadian community rebuilt both its realities and myths in response to the cataclysm of the “war to end all wars.”
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Perspectives of Saskatchewan
In Perspectives of Saskatchewan, twenty-one noted scholars present an in-depth look at some of the major developments in the province’s history, including subjects such as art, literature, demographics, politics, northern development, and religion.
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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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The North End
Photographs by John Paskievich
Winnipeg’s North End has informed the Canadian mythology and influenced the national psyche. The North End also divides and defines the city of Winnipeg, shaping its politics and sense of identity. In these photographs, taken between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, John Paskievich set out to explore the North End he knew in his youth.
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Laws of Early Iceland, Gragas I
The laws of Mediaeval Iceland provide detailed and fascinating insight into the society that produced the Icelandic sagas. Known collectively as Gragas (Greygoose), this great legal code offers a wealth of information about early European legal systems and the society of the Middles Ages. This first translation of Gragas is in two volumes.
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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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Rural Life
Portraits of the Prairie Town, 1946
In the 1940s, the Manitoba Royal Commission on Adult Education investigated directions for the modernization of the province in the post-war era of change. The commission engaged Jim Giffen, then a young sociologist from the University of Toronto, to undertake a detailed field study of three rural Manitoba towns — Carman, Elgin, and Rossburn — in this context. Giffen looks at characteristics such as leadership in the community, ethnic differences, hierarchy of roles, participation in organizations, and aims and activities of young people. Friesen’s postscript provides a wider context to this study, and an assessment of what these differences and commonalities meant to the province.
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A Thousand Miles of Prairie
The Manitoba Historical Society and the History of Western Canada
A Thousand Miles of Prairie is a fascinating look at Manitoba’s early boom years (1880-1910) through the eyes and words of some of the most interesting personalities of early Winnipeg. This collection brings together fourteen pieces from the first decades of the Manitoba Historical Society, when its lectures were attended by the province’s political and cultural elite.
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Toward Defining the Prairies
Region, Culture, and History
New ways of thinking about literature and history have radically changed how we think about or even “define” a region like the Prairie West. Toward Defining the Prairies highlights recent approaches to thinking about the Prairie West. Bounded by pieces from well-known historian Gerald Friesen and Governor-General’s Award-winning writer Robert Kroetsch, these 13 essays are as diverse as the region itself.
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Thomas Scott’s Body
And Other Essays on Early Manitoba History
What did happen to the body of Thomas Scott? The disposal of the body of Canadian history’s most famous political victim is the starting point for historian J.M. Bumsted’s new look at some of the most fascinating events and personalities of Manitoba’s Red River Settlement. By looking at well-known figures from a new perspective, and by examining some of the more obscure corners of the settlement’s history, Bumsted challenges many of the widely held assumptions about Red River.
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