The Dawn of Canada’s Century: Hidden Histories ed. by Gordon Dorroch (review)

Gordon Darroch’s edited volume The Dawn of Canada’s Century: Hidden Histories is the first study to be produced by the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure (CCRI), an interuniversity project providing researchers with national historical microdata sampled from the Canadian Censuses. Principally authored by members of the CCRI, The Dawn of Canada’s Century is a compendium which the editor states are “concerned with connecting the circumstances and experiences of ordinary individuals with larger structural changes,” but also “reconstituting these experiences in their own terms” (p. 3). In other words, these studies seek to connect the stories of Canadians to larger regional or national themes, with an emphasis on framing these connections in the context of individual perspectives. The articles in this volume incorporate a variety of analytical approaches, each utilizing individual-level census manuscript data, predominantly from the 1911 Canada Census. Topics in the volume vary widely and include language, identity, communities, class, gender, and ethnicity. The volume is broken into five parts: introductions; Canadian diversities: debates and dimensions; social spaces, historical places; locales in transition; and markets and mobility: class, ethnicity, gender.

Byron Moldofsky’s introductory chapter, “The CCRI Geographical Files”, discusses the efforts of the CCRI’s geography team to create a methodological framework for researchers to effectively use geographical information systems (GIS) in historical scholarship. This methodology is an example of the types of work done by the CCRI. He demonstrates that such a framework will allow researchers to “link to published aggregate data, sample data, and provide a consistent geographical basis for cross-census comparison” (p. 20). The project, according to Moldofsky, allows researchers to use a GIS map to isolate the data as they wish. Furthermore, he explains that the CCRI will continue to integrate new Canada Census data as it becomes available.

The essay by Evelyn Ruppert makes use of the CCRI contextual database which is comprised of newspaper articles and Hansard records. Her essay, “Infrastructures of Census Taking,” argues that “the working of the administrative infrastructure made it possible to know a population” through the “standardization and normalization of categories, enumeration, training and tabulations, as well as investments in an ongoing administration involv[ing] many relations between people and things” (p. 66). She explains that the census microdata has been manipulated at each stage of the process, beginning with its collection, review and publication in advance of the 1911 Census. Rather than simply critiquing the manipulation of this information, Ruppert identifies how this microdata provides insight into the lives of the collectors, organizers and respondents themselves.

Gordon Darroch incorporates Canada Census microdata in his chapter, “Household Experiences in Canada’s Early Twentieth-Century Transformation,” and asserts that it was in the household where most people and families rationalized their position within their respective socio-economic and political formations. In particular, he argues that “the household is the central historical site of the mediation between individual experience and structural change” (p. 149). Darroch concludes with the suggestion that while gender and age shaped one’s domestic experiences in Canada during the early twentieth century, “foreign or native birth or timing of arrival among immigrants to Canada had more variable and more modest effects” (p. 177).

In his chapter “The Worth of Children and Women: Life Insurance in Early Twentieth-Century Canada,” Peter Baskerville argues that cultural and economic factors of working-class families influenced decisions to purchase industrial insurance. Specifically, Baskerville contends that “these purchases contributed to and were markers of changing gendered behaviour in the public sphere” (p. 454). Baskerville explains that the marketing of insurance to women and children must be considered within the context of a change for women in the Canadian and British North American economy.

Editor Gordon Darroch outlines in the introduction the long-term benefits that the CCRI project will have on the study of Canada. He maintains that while the chapters in this volume address a diverse range of subjects “they also...