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Surrounded by water and located at the heart of a fertile plain, the Island of Montreal has been a crossroads for Indigenous peoples, European settlers, and today's citizens, and an inland port city for the movement of people and goods into and out of North America. Commemorating the city's 375th anniversary, Montreal: The History of a North American City is the definitive, two-volume account of this fascinating metropolis and its storied hinterland. This comprehensive collection of essays, filled with hundreds of illustrations, photographs, and maps, draws on human geography and environmental history to show that while certain distinctive features remain unchanged – Mount Royal, the Lachi...
One of the oldest metropolitan areas in North America, Montreal has evolved from a remote fur-trading post in New France into an international center for services and technology. A city and an island located at the confluence of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers, it is uniquely situated to serve as an international port while also providing rail access to the Canadian interior. The historic capital of the Province of Canada, once Canada's foremost metropolis, Montreal has a multifaceted cultural heritage drawn from European and North American influences. Thanks to its rich past, the city offers an ideal setting for the study of an evolving urban environment. Metropolitan Natures presents or...
From Labrador to Lake Ontario, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to French Acadia, and Huronia-Wendaki to Tadoussac, and from one chapter to the next, this scholarly collection of archaeological findings focuses on 16th century European goods found in Native contexts and within greater networks, forming a conceptual interplay of place and mobility. The four initial chapters are set around the Gulf of Saint Lawrence where Euro-Native contact was direct and the historical record is strongest. Contact networks radiated northward into Inuit settings where European iron nails, roofing tile fragments and ceramics are found. Glass beads are scarce on Inuit sites as well as on Basque sites on the Gulf’s ...
Was Canada's Dominion experiment of 1867 an experiment in political domination? Looking to taxes provides the answer: they are a privileged measure of both political agency and political domination. To pay one's taxes was the sine qua non of entry into political life, but taxes are also the point of politics, which is always about the control of wealth. Modern states have everywhere been born of tax revolts, and Canada was no exception. Heaman shows that the competing claims of the propertied versus the people are hardwired constituents of Canadian political history. Tax debates in early Canada were philosophically charged, politically consequential dialogues about the relationship between w...
Point Saint-Charles, a historically white working-class neighbourhood with a strong Irish and French presence, and Little Burgundy, a multiracial neighbourhood that is home to the city’s English-speaking Black community, face each other across Montreal’s Lachine Canal, once an artery around which work and industry in Montreal were clustered and by which these two communities were formed and divided. Deindustrializing Montreal challenges the deepening divergence of class and race analysis by recognizing the intimate relationship between capitalism, class struggles, and racial inequality. Fundamentally, deindustrialization is a process of physical and social ruination as well as part of a ...
Après avoir cofondé la première revue homosexuelle canadienne, la poète Elsa Gidlow, 21 ans, décide de quitter Montréal en 1920, déçue par le manque de possibilités amoureuses que lui offre alors la ville. Le réseau d'amis masculins homosexuels qu'elle a intégré au cours des années précédentes ne manque toutefois pas d'occasions de trouver des partenaires. En effet, même si l'homosexualité est considérée comme un crime depuis l'époque coloniale, une culture gaie masculine, qui était pratiquement inexistante avant 1880, s'est largement épanouie depuis le début du siècle. Grossières indécences retrace les origines de cette culture clandestine complexe et fascinante. D...
Quebec’s most recent attempts to assert its distinctiveness within Canada have relied on unilateral constitutional means to strengthen its French and secular character, suggesting that an important change of political culture has taken place in Quebec. With its diverse team of researchers, Contemporary Federalist Thought in Quebec considers the recent history of the debate that once threatened Canada with disjunction, exploring the federalist thought that continues to shape constitutional debate in Quebec. Examining historical perspectives from 1950 to the present day, the volume draws portraits of the key actors in the federalist movement – including political leaders, intellectuals, ac...
Built within an exceptional watershed, Montreal is intertwined with the waterways that ring its island and flow beneath it in underground networks. Even as the city has pushed its suburbs deeper into the interior of the island and onto the mainland, the daily lives and leisure activities of its inhabitants remain closely bound to water. Montreal, City of Water focuses on water not only as a physical element of the landscape – both shaping and shaped by urban development – but also as a sociocultural component of the life of the city. In exploring the dynamics governing the relationship between Montrealers and their environment, this unique study considers the role of water in the production and transformation of urban space over two centuries. It traces the history of urbanization and shines a light on current concerns about water pollution, river rehabilitation, and renewed public access to the riverfront – and the power relations involved in addressing those concerns.
Based on extensive research in judicial and official sources, Donald Fyson offers the first comprehensive study of the everyday workings of criminal justice in Quebec and Lower Canada. Focusing on the justices of the peace and their police, Fyson examines both the criminal justice system itself, and the system in operation as experienced by those who participated in it. Fyson contends that, although the system was fundamentally biased, its flexibility provided a source of power for ordinary citizens. At the same time, the system offered the colonial state and its elites a powerful, though often faulty, means of imposing their will on Quebec society. This study will challenge many received historical interpretations, providing new insight into criminal justice in early Quebec.
Focused on struggles and debates in France, Martinique and Canada, Urban Revolutions shows how research on the (neo-)colonial dimensions of capitalist urbanization deepens the relationship between Marxist and anti-colonial traditions, including those represented by Henri Lefebvre and Frantz Fanon.