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A Short History of Vice since 1500
To invest in vice can be a sound financial decision, but despite the lure of healthy profits, individuals and mutual funds have been reluctant to invest in this type of stock. After all, who would take pride in supporting the tobacco industry, knowing it sells a deadly product? And what social responsibilities do investors bear with respect to compulsive gamblers who have lost so much money that suicide becomes an attractive option?
Canada the Good considers more than five hundred years of debates and regulation that have conditioned Canadians’ attitudes towards certain vices. Early European settlers implemented a Christian moral order that regulated sexual behaviour, gambling, and drinking. Later, some transgressions were diagnosed as health issues that required treatment. Those who refused the label of illness argued that behaviours formerly deemed as vices were within the range of normal human behaviour.
This historical synthesis demonstrates how moral regulation has changed over time, how it has shaped Canadians’ lives, why some debates have almost disappeared and others persist, and why some individuals and groups have felt empowered to tackle collective social issues. Against the background of the evolution of the state, the enlargement of the body politic, and mounting forays into court activism, the author illustrates the complexity over time of various forms of social regulation and the control of vice.
First Governor of New France
In The Chevalier de Montmagny, Jean-Claude Dubé documents the extraordinary career of Charles Huault de Montmagny, first governor of the colony of New France. Born in Paris in 1601, and educated by the Jesuits, Montmagny studied law at the Université d'Orléans, joined the Order of Malta, and enjoyed a colourful career as a Hospitalier privateer in the Mediterranean, before arriving in New France in the spring of 1636.
While Montmagny wasted little time in applying the experience he gained fighting the Ottoman Turks to New France's disputes with the Iroquois, he has also been credited with playing a key role in both ensuring the survival of the colony and the entrenchment of a religious elite. His exploits caught the imagination of Cyrano de Bergerac, who later cast Montmagny as a character in his novel L'autre monde.
This well-documented study - which in its original French edition was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award in 1999 - adds an important dimension to our understanding of the social, religious, and political history of New France.
Control and Order in French Colonial Louisbourg, 1713-1758 is the culmination of nearly a quarter century of research and writing on 18th-century Louisbourg by A. J. B. Johnston. The author uses a multitude of primary archival sources-official correspondence, court records, parish registries, military records, and hundreds of maps and plans-to put together a detailed analysis of a distinctive colonial society. Located on Cape Breton Island (then known as Île Royale), the seaport and stronghold of Louisbourg emerged as one of the most populous and important settlements in all of New France. Its economy was based on fishing and trade, and the society that developed there had little or nothing to do with the fur trade, or the seigneurial regime that characterized the Canadian interior. Johnston traces the evolution of a broad range of controlling measures that were introduced and adapted to achieve an ordered civil and military society at Louisbourg. Town planning, public celebrations, diversity in the population, use of punishments, excessive alcohol consumption, the criminal justice system, and sexual abuse are some of the windows that reveal attempts to control and regulate society. A. J. B. Johnston's Control and Order in French Colonial Louisbourg offers both a broad overview of the colony's evolution across its half-century of existence, and insightful analyses of the ways in which control was integrated into the mechanisms of everyday life.
Société fondatrice et société nouvelle
The Promise, the Glory, and the Despair of Louisbourg's Last Decade
A Novel by Susanna Moodie
Flora Lyndsay is Susanna Moodie’s prequel to Roughing it in the Bush and Life in the Clearings. It completes her trilogy on her emigration from Suffolk to Upper Canada that began in 1832. Though Moodie chose to fictionalize herself in the context of this novel, this work remains a close personalized record of her family’s experiences in planning their emigration and crossing the Atlantic.
Although surprisingly little critical attention has been paid to it, this novel offers its readers the opportunity to appreciate Moodie’s style, her sense of form and her distinctive approach to writing female autobiography. This edition, complete with a wide corpus of endnotes, an extensive list of emendations and a critical introduction, should help address this absence and give readers a closer look at the iconic phenomenon that is Susanna Moodie.
Indigenous Archery and European Firearms in the Northern Plains and Central Subarctic, 1670-1870
Gifts from the Thunder Beings examines North American Aboriginal peoples’ use of Indigenous and European distance weapons in big-game hunting and combat. Beyond the capabilities of European weapons, Aboriginal peoples’ ways of adapting and using this technology in combination with Indigenous weaponry contributed greatly to the impact these weapons had on Aboriginal cultures. This gradual transition took place from the beginning of the fur trade in the Hudson’s Bay Company trading territory to the treaty and reserve period that began in Canada in the 1870s.
Technological change and the effects of European contact were not uniform throughout North America, as Roland Bohr illustrates by comparing the northern Great Plains and the Central Subarctic—two adjacent but environmentally different regions of North America—and their respective Indigenous cultures. Beginning with a brief survey of the subarctic and Northern Plains environments and the most common subsistence strategies in these regions around the time of contact, Bohr provides the context for a detailed examination of social, spiritual, and cultural aspects of bows, arrows, quivers, and firearms. His detailed analysis of the shifting usage of bows and arrows and firearms in the northern Great Plains and the Central Subarctic makes Gifts from the Thunder Beings an important addition to the canon of North American ethnology.
officer, gentleman, entrepreneur
The documentary biography of Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, an officer in the Troupes de la Marine, who served throughout New France, sheds new light on the business activity of French colonial officers stationed in the West. Many of the eighty previously untranslated documents in Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre demonstrate the extent and profitability of Saint-Pierre's pursuit of business activities while performing official duties in eighteenth- century French North America. The quest for profit permeated Saint- Pierre's career, particularly his command of the Western Sea Post after he succeeded the fabled Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de la Vérendrye. Saint-Pierre and his secret partner General Jacques- Pierre de Taffanel de La Jonquière, Intendant François Bigot, and Meret, secretary to La Jonquière, used their positions to engage in extensive trade, especially brandy, with the Cree and Assiniboine northwest of Lake Superior. Saint-Pierre's activities provide fresh insights into the North American fur trade
Le récit d’Emmanuel Crespel sur les côtes d’Anticosti en novembre 1736, écrit sous forme de lettres, constitue l’un des plus spectaculaires récits de naufrage de la Nouvelle-France. D’abord publié en français en Allemagne en 1742, il a rapidement connu un large succès d’édition européen. Paru à Québec en 1808, il n’avait pas bénéficié d’une nouvelle introduction depuis 1884. Avec ce récit, le lecteur pénètre dans la mythologie de l’île d’Anticosti, immense obstacle au milieu du Saint-Laurent que les auteurs n’ont cessé de qualifier tour à tour, au cours des siècles, de « cimetière du Golfe » tellement les navires s’y sont l’un après l’autre échoués à leur arrivée en Amérique. Chez Crespel, ce sont contre le froid, la faim, le vent, le gel, le manque de nourriture et la maladie que les marins luttent héroïquement et souvent, tragiquement. Avec une introduction, des notes et une chronologie de Pierre Rouxel, enseignant au Cégep de Sept-Îles.
The Diaries of Mary Armstrong, 1859 and 1869
Offers an intriguing glimpse into the daily life of an average Toronto woman in the mid-nineteenth century.
Mary Armstrong’s diaries are a window into the daily life of a middle-class woman in a new and changing land, and a revealing account of life in early Toronto just before and after confederation. Her journals are one of very few published by Canadian women, especially women outside the upper classes, in the decades surrounding the mid-nineteenth century.
Mary Armstrong was the wife of a butcher / farmer who lived in what is now the Yorkville and Deer Park area of Toronto from the 1830s to the 1880s. She had immigrated with her parents and siblings from England in 1834. Her diaries, which cover five months in 1859 and eight months in 1869, reflect her multiplicity of interests and concerns including family, women’s work, faith, status and class, occupation and trade, community networks, and local and national identity.
Jackson W. Armstrong’s introduction examines who Mary was, what her world was like, and how she saw her own place in it; it also explains the origin and history of the diaries. His extensive primary research supports the well-annotated diaries, and gives contextual information on the events, people, and places that Mary mentions.
Seven Eggs Today offers new information and a new perspective on mid-Victorian English Canada, and will be welcomed by general readers and scholars interested in colonial life, biography, immigrant experiences, family or local history, or women’s studies.
