Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Dodd, Diane

more inclusive Canadian history is now intellectually bankrupt (Dummitt) or is a
promise yet to be achieved (Perry), such a debate will not cause most historians
many sleepless nights.
Having just retired after forty years of teaching Canadian history/histo-
riography, I am, perhaps, just an old grump and I would be churlish not to admit
that I actually like this book and would use it as a text if I were forced under
pain of death to return to the classroom. The articles are accessibly written,
they raise useful questions for our current generation of graduate students, and
several – in particular, Magda Fahrni’s exploration of the place of Quebec in
Canadian historical writing, Stephen High’s use of oral history as a vehicle for
interrogating authority in historical practice, and Michael Dawson and Catherine
Gidney’s questioning of periodization in English Canada’s twentieth century –
are genuine contributions to the Canadian historiographical canon. What I most
miss here (and it suggests that I have lived too long) are the progressive politics
that inspired me and many of the other authors who contributed to Berger’s
anthology (E.R. Forbes, Gerald Friesen, Bryan Palmer, Roberto Perin, for exam-
ple). No doubt, it is timely to question an inclusive approach to the study of
Canada, to lay claim to the positive legacy of British and other imperialisms, or
to situate the study of Canada in a transnational post-colonial framework, but I
am reluctant to relinquish truth claims to past oppressions of empires, near or
far, or to bow to a research agenda that dilutes the focus on the specific nation-
state, which still has the capacity to exert influence for good or ill. So, I will
keep my black arm band – Andrew Smith’s reference to Geoffrey Blainey’s com-
ment on critical approaches to Australia’s past (75) – indeed, I will double its
width in the current political climate.
The editors suggest that Ian MacKay’s article on the “The Liberal
Order Framework” is the kind of scholarship that might generate worthy aca-
demic discussion and it is to be hoped that another conference will be held in
which historians, new and old, can move beyond intergenerational devourings to
further explorations of the daunting historiographical challenges that face us in
the twenty-first century.
Margaret Conrad
University of New Brunswick
Place and Practice in Canadian Nursing History, eds. Jayne Elliott, Meryn
Stuart and Cynthia Toman (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).
The first Hannah Conference on Canadian Nursing History held in Ottawa in
June 2005 occurred amidst many ‘firsts’ in nursing history. These included the
launch of the Nursing History Research Unit at the School of Nursing
(University of Ottawa), with funding from Associated Medical Services, Inc., and
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the opening of the first national exhibit on the history of nursing at the
Canadian Museum of Civilization. Thus it is fitting that three years later, a new
collection of scholarly essays on nursing history, Place & Practice in Canadian
Nursing History, should emerge from this gathering. This collection of essays
makes a major contribution to the growing literature on nursing history in
Canada. It will be of interest to anyone teaching or researching in the fields of
nursing, health care and women’s studies in Canada.
The contributors, who include a diverse range of scholars, historians of
women and nurse-historians, have produced an engaging and readable book that
will also help to move this developing field forward. No longer is nursing histo-
ry focused on the hospital, on developing professional identities and the
enhancement of educational standards as it once was. As the book’s title indi-
cates, the idea of ‘place’ is explored throughout the collection, looking at the
work nurses in a wide variety of settings: in outposts, during wartime, in the
homes of the city’s poor, and as nurse/missionaries. Indeed only one of the
essays deals with nurses in a hospital-educational setting. In it Anne-Marie
Arsenault fills a gap in the English Canadian literature by enlightening the reader
on the education of Francophone nurses in New Brunswick.
Place and Practice also challenges the notion, prevalent until well into the
twentieth century that only professionally trained, elite white women could call
themselves nurses. Kirstin Burnett, for example, provides us with a fascinating
glimpse at the much forgotten and marginalized role played by Aboriginal healers
and midwives in ensuring the survival of early White settlers. Still, while their
skills were called upon, they were seldom recognized and quickly forgotten once
professional (White) health care practitioners became available.
Throughout the collection, the authors remind the reader that nurses
were part of a relatively privileged race and class, allowing them to rise above
some of the typical gender restriction most women faced, and to take positions
of limited authority in Canadian society. This is particularly true of Canadian
Nursing Sisters, the first women to hold military rank among the allied forces, in
the First World War. Cynthia Toman explores the experience of military nurses
at Lemnos and Salonika from 1915-17 in the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign,
where wartime conditions were appalling even by wartime standards. Still the
nurses seldom complained, serving as willing symbols of the British Empire.
Patriotic and devoted to the soldiers under their care — indeed many saw them-
selves as soldiers. Although most Canadians sought to protect women from the
horrors of war, these nursing sisters faced the same dangers that the soldier
faced. As well, Meryn Stuart provides an engaging portrait of one nursing sister,
Helen Fowlds, showing us a lively, adventurous young woman whose devotion to
her country did not preclude enthusiastic tourist excursions, socializing with men
and women, and numerous shopping expeditions.
Nurses were also granted a certain authority in missionary work as
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Myra Rutherford shows in relation to nurses working in the Canadian Arctic.
Their health care work was delivered in the context of missionary work and
Rutherford presents a range of approaches by nurses to their relations with their
Inuit clients. Some were “cleansers,” and anxiously encouraged Inuit patients to
adopt a Euro-Canadian lifestyle; while “cautious caregivers” were a little more
flexible; and finally, some were “optimistic adventurers” who were more willing
to accept some aspects of Inuit culture. Still, in the end all were missionaries for
the dominant Euro-Canadian culture and religion. In Marion McKay’s article on
Winnipeg’s visiting nurse agencies from 1897-1926, she focuses on nurses’ role
in Canadianizing newly arrived immigrants in the ‘slums’ of this large city, which
served as a kind of gateway to the fast developing western provinces.
Place and Practice also enhances our understanding of pioneer nurses
who worked in isolated regions of the country. Called outpost nurses, they have
often fascinated nurse historians and popularizers alike because they combined
the virtues of the stalwart pioneer, who helped settle new lands with the ‘new
woman’ who broke down gender barriers. Practical and self reliant, they com-
bined some bedside nursing with public health work, and, because they were iso-
lated from physicians and hospitals, enjoyed greater autonomy than hospital or
private duty nurses. Like missionaries and public health nurses, they traded on
their relatively privileged class position and White identities, to play a role in
‘educating’ their clients, often poor and disadvantaged. Linda Quiney looks at
Red Cross nursing work in Manitoba and Johanne Daigle examines a govern-
ment-funded program of outpost nursing in Quebec from 1932 to 1972.
One of the many strengths of this collection is its effort to look more
closely into identities developed by individual nurses. In addition to Stuart’s
analysis of Nursing Sister Helen Fowlds, Jayne Elliott provides a biographical
sketch of Ontario Red Cross nurse, Louise de Kiriline. In examining how this
one nurse managed her many roles, Elliott went so far as to teach herself
Swedish so that she could read her subjects’ correspondence. De Kirline was a
European immigrant from a privileged family and like many outpost nurses, had
served during the war. After she came to Canada to do outpost nursing and
carved her identity as a nurse, daughter, member of the northern Ontario com-
munity and dog sled driver. She even gained a small amount of fame when she
was assigned to care for the Dionne quintuplets. Still, the mysterious poisoning
of two of her dogs in two separate incidents reminds us that not everyone
admired independent women. In this and other essays in the collection, Place and
Practice explores new themes in nursing history and expands the boundaries of
the historiography in this field.
Dianne Dodd
Parks Canada
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Place and Practice in Canadian Nursing History, eds. Jayne Elliott, Meryn Stuart and Cynthia Toman (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).

McDonald, Robert A.J.

Andrew Parnaby, Citizen Docker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

Pierce, Clayton

than rural crimes. However, they connected female crime with peasant crime.
In this way, according to Kowalsky, “social class and gender became markers of
urban and rural, and thus of progress and backwardness.” (118)  Her case study
of infanticide underscores this point. Soviet criminologists tended to accept pre-
revolutionary views about infanticide, believing it to be a sign of cultural back-
wardness. It was thought the crime was committed by single women out of
shame or fear. Bolshevik social and legal policies that allowed abortions and
provide financial support for single mothers were supposed to eliminate the rea-
sons behind infanticide. So when infanticide rates continued to rise in the 1920s,
criminologists scrambled to explain the situation. For instance, a sudden
upsurge in the number of urban infanticide cases was linked to the migration of
peasant women to the cities, because it was assumed they brought their “back-
wardness” with them. “By incorporating physiological factors into their explana-
tions of infanticide,” Kowalsky writes, “criminologists highlighted both the ‘nat-
uralness’ of the crime and the fundamental ‘primitiveness’ of women.” She goes
on to argue that, “In so doing, they unconsciously cast doubt on the ability of
the socialist project to eliminate conditions that contributed to criminal activity,
implying that women’s crime was natural, rooted in biology, and thus
immutable.” (165-66)
In sum, this well-written and convincingly argued book will appeal to a
number of audiences. By stressing Russia’s connection to intellectual trends in
Europe, Deviant Women, offers new insights to any Europeanist interested in
criminology as well as intellectual and cultural history more generally. For
Russian specialists, the book provides further evidence of the deep continuities
that existed between the late imperial and early Soviet eras. It also raises disturb-
ing questions about Soviet policies vis-à-vis women and sheds new light on
Bolshevik efforts to transform society in the 1920s.
Alison Rowley
Concordia University
Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis,
Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
Since Martin Jay, Rolf Wiggershaus, and Douglas Kellner’s classic accounts, there
have been few full-length historical accounts of the famed German-Jewish émi-
grés known collectively as the Frankfurt School. Given such a strong pedigree,
the first thing that comes to mind as one sets out to read Thomas Wheatland’s
new book The Frankfurt School in Exile is what is left to say? Wheatland quickly
takes up this concern in his introduction where he makes the claim that many of
the traditional accounts of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social
Research) and their period of exile in the United States fail to adequately explore
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the cross pollination that took place between the “Horkheimer Circle” and North
American intellectuals. It is precisely this history that the first section of
Wheatland’s book, “Critical Theory and Morningside Heights”, sets its sights on.
Much of the history of the “Horkheimer Circle” unearthed by Wheatland
in the first section focuses on the Institute for Social Research and their uneasy
relationship with Columbia University as well as their falling out with one of its
original members, Eric Fromm. Perhaps one of the most insightful themes devel-
oped here was Wheatland’s discussion on how the Institute (largely through the
quasi liaison efforts of Julian Gumperz and Eric Fromm) made their cutting edge
social psychological research on fascism in Europe attractive to the empirical
research agenda that was beginning to take shape in the fledgling department of
sociology at Columbia. What is also brought to light in the first section of
Wheatland’s book is an emphasis on how the Institute suffered from the affects of
institutional anti-Semitism at Columbia. In discussing the anti-Semitic sentiments
that threatened the Frankfurt School’s tenuous situation at Columbia, Wheatland
points out to his readers that the émigrés were stuck between two serious obstacles:
“The first was the pervasive anti-Semitism on Morningside Heights. An undis-
closed quota system limited the amount of Jewish faculty members” (89). The sec-
ond barrier to establishing a more permanent status for the Institute at Columbia
Wheatland identifies was a civil war that was taking place amongst the faculty in
Columbia’s sociology department between advocates of empirical approaches to
social scientific research and proponents of theoretical inquiry. Within this con-
tentious and sometimes hostile context, Wheatland’s ability to carefully weave the
history of the Institute’s ambiguous positionality while at Columbia within a larger
philosophical and political environment is indeed one of the strongest aspects of
his history of the early years of the “Horkheimer Circle” on Morningside Heights.
In what may be the best chapter of Wheatland’s book, “John Dewey’s Pit
Bull: Sidney Hook and the Confrontation between Pragmatism and Critical
Theory” (Ch. 3), a fascinating and previously neglected facet of Frankfurt School
history is brought to light. While the sour relationship between American
Pragmatism and Critical Theory is well known, as both Herbert Marcuse and Max
Horkheimer wrote highly polemical critiques that focused on pragmatism’s episte-
mology and theory of valuation (as did Dewey and Hook on Critical Theory’s
dialectical method) what has not been widely discussed are the interactions between
Frankfurt School members and pragmatists while the group was in exile in New
York. Part of the reason that Wheatland’s research on the relationship between
Critical Theory and Pragmatism is unique comes from the thrust of his thesis
which suggests that the differences between the schools of thought suffered greatly
from the effects of exaggeration. What was overshadowed in the meetings and
debates between the two philosophical camps, Wheatland rightly notes, were larger
shared concerns such as the rehabilitation of science for human emancipation, dis-
dain for industrial society, and the loss of community in an increasingly standard-
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ized context for example. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, Marcuse’s critique of
pragmatism largely ignores how Dewey’s political epistemology which looks to
modern science as a methodological guide, is also situated within his theory of par-
ticipatory democracy. This aspect of Dewey’s work is never taken up in any of the
attacks levelled by Frankfurt School Theorists. What Wheatland’s analysis of the
history of relations and writings between Sidney Hook and Critical Theorists thus
accurately depicts is a larger pattern of speaking past each other that resulted in
missing shared articulations that might have helped develop both group’s evolving
theories of late industrial society and culture as well as modes of political praxis.
Wheatland indeed hits the mark when he says “at the very core of the debate
between Sidney Hook and the Frankfurt School were two competing epistemologi-
cal methodologies—scientific reason and critical reason. Ironically, each side made
the same claim about the other—that the methodology formulated by the oppo-
nent represented a revival of metaphysics—and it was this accusation of metaphys-
ical thinking that fed the bitterness and led to the circularity of the discussions”
(135).
Where Wheatland’s book falls short, however, is in his attempt to reinter-
pret the legacy of Herbert Marcuse from the recycle bin of history. In the final
two chapters of Wheatland’s book he spends a considerable amount of time mak-
ing the argument that Marcuse’s legacy as “guru” of the New Left was largely a
result of media concoctions and the romanticizing of Marcuse by intellectuals
working in the critical theory tradition after his death. While Wheatland is surely
correct in pointing out that Marcuse “recognized the significance of the Movement
and the events he was witnessing, and he sought to counsel the New Left as it grew
and tried to articulate a new agenda for the late 1960’s” he is not accurate in saying
that “the New Left meant more to him than he meant to the New Left” (334). In
attempting to reverse the polarity of power between the New Left and Marcuse,
Wheatland in effect has repeated precisely what he claims the over exaggerated
influence Marcuse had on the New Left has done to his legacy: imprisonment in
the nostalgia of the 60’s. If Wheatland’s revised history of Marcuse’s effect on the
New Left emphasizes the true relation to be that of a student instead of a teacher,
then what is lost is the deeper picture of Marcuse who was at once a teacher and
student, a dialectician who absorbed as well as negated impulses of change and
counterrevolt.
Despite the missteps associated with his analysis of Marcuse, Wheatland’s
history of the Frankfurt School in exile is, in final analysis, a valuable contribution
to the literature. Those familiar with or new to the Critical Theory tradition and its
origins should find something here to stimulate fresh perspectives and more devel-
oped understandings. In this regard, Wheatland’s book has found something that
was left to say.
Clayton Pierce
University of Utah
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Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

-, -

EDITORIAL NOTE
This journal, as with active/activist history, can only survive with the continuing
dedication, insight, and hard work of a group of people committed to engaging
with critical thinking. The editors would like to take the time to thank some par-
ticular groups and individuals who have committed themselves to Left History.
First, we would like to thank our outgoing editor, Dan Horner, for his years of
service to the journal. While we will miss his presence here, we wish him good
luck with his future endeavors.
Secondly, we would like to thank all of those who have contributed financially
and intellectually to the maintenance of this journal. Left History is of course
not immune to the changes in fiscal policy targeted at higher education and
learning across the globe, and therefore we are grateful for the contributions that
we receive. The York University History Department continues to provide us
with a home and financial support to run the journal. The department’s com-
mitment to learning and debate continues to keep the journal solvent and rele-
vant.
We also want to thank the York University Graduate History Department for
providing us with both financial and intellectual support. Their support and
contributions to all of their graduate students’ endeavors are invaluable.
Finally, we would also like to thank the Graduate History Students’ Association
for their bursary to Left History this year. Recognizing our invaluable relation-
ship with our fellow graduate students here at York, we are pleased that the jour-
nal and the student’s association can work together on continuing the drive for
excellence in historical study and debate.
This theme issue grows out of another York University project, ActiveHistory.ca,
which grew out of the September 2008 Active History: History for the Future
conference. The conference brought together historians, activists, and journal-
ists, among others, to discuss the concept of Active History. It was a fruitful
gathering, and from it came the idea that there should be a public forum through
which to discuss, disseminate, and further explore many of the great ideas that
were raised at the Glendon conference. One avenue of this was
ActiveHistory.ca, which continues to publish papers and a lively academic blog.
In November 2010, ActiveHistory.ca saw 4,752 distinct individual visitors to the
website.
Yet the editors of ActiveHistory.ca believe that there is a role for print publish-
ing, bringing engaged peer-reviewed scholarship to a diverse readership base. We
are thus very happy to present this special theme issue of Left History on Active
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History.
But what is Active History?  We decided to ask the original organizers of the
Active History conference what they thought, and three of them (Jim Clifford,
Victoria Freeman, and Tom Peace) shared their diverse views on the subject.
Further reflections on what it means to be an Active Historian came from Stuart
Henderson, Craig Heron, Karen Dearlove, and a Historical Plaques project.
Peer-reviewed articles make up the lions’ share of this issue. Nick Witham, Ian
Hesketh, the authors of the People’s Guide to Los Angeles (Wendy Cheng,
Laura Barraclough, and Laura Pulido), Joel Helfridge, and Geoffrey Reaume all
demonstrate that engaged scholarship and the scholarly article complement each
other expertly. While their topics of inquiry and periods are diverse, their shared
belief in the continued relevancy of historians and history is hopefully inspiring
and certainly engaging. As with all issues, we also have review essays – one by
Bryan Palmer addressing recent scholarship making the case for Lenin, and
another by Michelle Hamilton reviewing the Canadians and their Pasts project.
Book reviews round out this issue.
CORRECTIONS
A copy-editors note accidentally appeared in Kathy McKay’s review of Belshaw’s
Becoming BC in our last issue of Left History (Vol. 14, No. 2). Our sincere apolo-
gies.
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Editorial Note

Zimmer, Kenyon

Left History 15.1216
Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and
Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2010).
This book is destined to change the way historians think about Italian American
working-class women. The existing literature, Guglielmo observes, “has often
emphasized the conservative and repressive nature of Latin patriarchal culture and
ignored or underestimated the ways in which women carved out spaces to express
their own power” (23), and studies of Italian American radicalism almost always
focus on male leaders. But utilizing an extensive range of sources — including
oral histories, radical publications, and government surveillance files — Living the
Revolution presents a groundbreaking, compelling, and inspiring narrative that
reveals a rich history of female resistance and radicalism. This radicalism mani-
fested outside of political parties and mainstream unions, and instead took the
form of acts of “everyday resistance” and participation in the anarchist and syn-
dicalist movements.
Employing the theories of James Scott, Guglielmo unearths the “hidden
transcript” of Italian women’s resistance, bringing to light “the complex ways they
challenged or thwarted communal and patriarchal control over their lives.” (124)
Storytelling, spiritual practices, and the creation of informal “networks of mutual
support and reciprocity” (118) all empowered women in their homes and commu-
nities. Moreover, they regularly engaged in labour demonstrations, wildcat strikes,
and joined anarchist groups and the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World.
Italians eventually did join the mainstream garment workers’ unions, but only after
these organisations had proven themselves effective in the strike wave of 1909-19
and the Italians’ own anarchist groups and IWW locals had been repressed.
Despite the book’s subtitle, the geographic heart of Living the Revolution is
actually Paterson, New Jersey. As Guglielmo relates, it was there that, in 1897,
female Italian anarchists fo rmed the Gruppo Emancipazione della Donna
(Women’s Emancipation Group), the first organisation of its kind in America.
Their model spread among Italian radicals in New York, Boston, Philadelphia,
Illinois, and beyond. As anarchist feminists, these groups’ members “sought rev-
olutionary change to end all systems of oppression and hierarchical authority,
whether in the form of industrial capitalism, the government, the church, or the
men in their families and communities” (164). They promoted free love and rev-
olutionary childrearing, and took part in labour organisation and anti-clerical activ-
ities. These women, Guglielmo persuasively argues, “were in ways more complete
in their critique of power than later generations” (8), and their “diasporic femi-
nism” was distinct in that it “did not seek [women’s] inclusion or authority within
the modern nation-state” (4), but rather aimed to abolish the state as an institution
of authority and privilege. Their story promises to reshape the historiography of
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Book Reviews 217
anarchism, feminism, and Italian Americans.
Guglielmo traces the transnational connections that shaped her subjects’
lives, and her chapter on “Women’s Cultures of Resistance in Southern Italy” is
one of the best overviews of its kind in English. The absence of a similar discus-
sion of northern Italian women, however, is striking, as the Paterson anarchists
who are so central to the book were “composed mostly of northern Italian textile
workers.” (145)  In fact, most of the female radicals profiled by Guglielmo hailed
from northern Italy, and she notes that many of Paterson’s anarchists “had come
to know one another through labor struggles and mutual aid organizations in their
homelands” (148), but provides no detailed description of these activities. It is
true that most Italian anarchists in New York City and in the United States at large
were of southern extraction (as were around three quarters of all Italian immi-
grants), but a section dealing with the background of their northern counterparts
would have been welcome.
Specialists in anarchist history will find a few minor points of contention.
Guglielmo’s description of Errico Malatesta as an “anarcho-syndicalist” (144)
obscures Malatesta’s more complicated relationship to syndicalism, which he con-
sidered insufficient in itself. She also incorrectly places Malatesta as a cofounder
of Paterson’s newspaper, La Questione Sociale, (149) and describes an incident in
which he was assaulted by “a follower of [Luigi] Galleani” (301 n. 40), when in
fact the assailant was a partisan of Giuseppe Ciancabilla —  who preceded
Galleani as the leading proponent of anti-organisationist anarchism. Ciancabilla
supporter and regicide Gaetano Bresci is also called a “Galleanisti” (148). Of less
consequence, Osvaldo Maraviglia is referred to as the editor of New York’s anar-
chist L’Adunata dei Refrattari, (224) when in fact he was the newspaper’s adminis-
trator (196). These are, however, small quibbles, that in no way detract from
Guglielmo’s immensely important contribution.
Almost everything that follows the Paterson section of the book repre-
sents a kind of anticlimax, chronicling the drift of Italian women away from their
radical roots and into increasingly conservative labour unions, white privilege, and
in some cases even fascism. “By the 1940s,” Guglielmo concludes, “Italian
Americans had learned to demand change not through revolutionary, internation-
alist, working-class solidarity but with the terms of interest-group liberalism —
relying on a sense of white citizenship to justify their claims upon the state.” (264)
Living the Revolution therefore offers a cautionary tale for social movements and
activists as well as a usable past. For both reasons, it is essential reading for any-
one interested in the history of feminism, radicalism, immigration, and working-
class life.
Kenyon Zimmer
University of Texas, Arlington
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Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution: Italian Women's Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010)

Duffy, Sean

Book Reviews 219
-as a leftwing political philosophy that is not only against the state and government,
but for the freedom of individuals who in turn respect the freedom of others; not
only against hierarchy and capitalism, but for a society of free producers- there
would have been no need to include such questionable figures and tendencies. It
might have made more sense for Marshall to write two books — one on anarchism
proper, and another on libertarianism, in all its left- and right-wing permutations
and combinations.
A second problem with Demanding the Impossible, and this is a problem of
most general histories of anarchism, is its focus on Europe and the United States.
In a book of over 700 pages of text, there are roughly thirty pages dedicated to
regions outside of Europe and America, those being Latin America and Asia. Part
of this problem is due to a lack of English-language sources on the anarchists and
their movements in China, Korea, Argentina, and Brazil. In light of the ever
increasing number of studies on anarchism and its importance in these typically
ignored regions, Marshall could have struck a better balance between Europe and
the United States on the one hand and the rest of the world on the other.
As a history of anarchism, Demanding the Impossible is, in many ways, a
great improvement over previous works by James Joll and George Woodcock
because it treats anarchism as much more than an old millenarian movement that
died in Spain in 1939. However, Marshall’s broad definition of anarchism, which
leads to the inclusion of many individuals who were not anarchists, and his nar-
row focus on Europe and the United States, will leave many readers scratching
their heads — and waiting a far more coherent and international history of the
movement.
Travis Tomchuk
Queen’s University
Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, Opium: Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Despite almost 100 years of US-led opium prohibitionist policies, the poppy plant
and its drug derivatives have witnessed an explosion of growth. The political and
economic factors that led to this increase is the subject of Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy’s
Opium: Uncovering the Politics of Poppy. He answers important questions about the
efficacy of the last 40 years of the War on Drugs. He provides compelling evi-
dence on the failings of policies that are implemented on drug-producing nations.
His most convincing arguments detail why programs currently in place (primarily
poppy eradication and crop substitution) have proven counter-effective.
Chouvy presents a coherent and detailed narrative on the evolution of
Papaver somniferum, the poppy. Before discovery of its soporific effects became
apparent, its flower attracted early agriculturalists. The plant thrived for thousands
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Left History 15.1220
of years with Europeans, Africans (particular Egypt), and Asians who encouraged
its production and trade. Opium production in Asia soared once the Europeans,
primarily the British, begun their quest for overseas empires as the trade developed
“in the context of colonialism and globalization.”
With poppy cultivation mostly confined in India and China, however,
the West remained unconcerned about  other opium-producing regions. In 1898,
that would change once the US took possession of the Philippine Islands and its
licensed and legal opium economy. American leaders began a global campaign to
eradicate non-medicinal opium. Eventually, the US would lead a War on Drugs, a
tragically failed policy that continues to the present.
In addition to his informative descriptions of current drug trafficking
networks, Chouvy impressively details the failures of the various strategies,
whether draconian or not, to end drug production globally. Wilfully ignorant of
its complex relationships with drug traffickers in the pursuit of national security
goals, the US backed destroying opium supplies at their source. This policy came
in two forms. The first, decades of attempts at opium bans notes Chouvy, “have
demonstrated that drug supply reduction is very rarely effective and...is most often
counterproductive.” (156)  The second form proved even more futile: forced erad-
ication, whether done manually, chemically (herbicides like glyphosate), or biolog-
ically (including the use of fungi). Although results are generated to make splashy
headlines, Chouvy demonstrates its ineffectiveness and counterproductive nature,
with drug traffickers being “the first to benefit from eradication since it raises
opium prices and their profit margins.” (160)  Even more unfortunate for the dis-
advantaged and marginalized opium farmers, eradication led to “poverty and
inequality.” (165)
Although the punitive approach still reigns supreme in the current anti-
drug strategy, more humane policies to end drug production, such as crop substi-
tution, gained traction as a longer-term solution to illicit opium harvests. Chouvy
critically notes that attempting to replace opium with legal agricultural products
did not succeed because the underlying reasons behind poppy production were
ignored. Newer adaptations of the crop substitution model, integrated r ural
development, alternative development, and alternative approach had more of a
holistic philosophy, but in the end the results were mixed. Although limited reduc-
tion of drug use has been noted in some areas, the author demonstrates that all of
the previous methods had “failed to significantly decrease the illicit cultivation of
plant-based drugs in the world.” (182)
Even with this pessimistic analysis, Chouvy held out hope for the alter-
native development model. Unlike the repressive forced eradication method
which gets the predominate amount of funding for counter-narcotics policies, he
notes that alternative development programs lacked a serious commitment for
resources from the big donor nations. Indeed, the fixation on prohibition policies
was due to entrenched anti-drug warriors, who refuse to re-examine clearly failed
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Book Reviews 221
policies. Even more ominous than the “militarization of the war on drugs,” is the
p r ivat i z ation of the wa r. Chouvy details the re c ruitment of D y n C o rp
International to spray coca fields in Columbia and engage in forced eradication in
Afghanistan where its operatives frequently “has to fight its way out of...[these]
operations without achieving much by way of its suppression objectives.” (115)
The role of private companies does not bode well for a future reassessment of
repressive drug policies. Self-interested companies like DynCorp can employ lob-
byists or otherwise impact any retrenchment in this decades-old struggle; the
California state prison guard union’s currents attempts to stymie marijuana legal-
ization is but one example.
Despite an overall level of excellence, Chouvy’s research does have mis-
steps, primarily concerning Afghanistan. Although these are mostly minor in
nature (such as claiming the Badakhshan province was not a traditional opium-
producing region), the most disappointing conclusion was his dismissal of allow-
ing Afghanistan to be a legally certified opium producer. Although he presents
compelling economic data to back his argument, historical precedence is ignored.
During the Second World War, the US and Afghanistan entered into a short-lived
but fruitful opium alliance. For the duration of the war, Washington became
Kabul’s number one customer. Symbolically, the significance of the tons of
opium purchased was demonstrated in its location during the war: the US Treasury
Vaults.
Sean Duffy
San Antonio College
Elisa Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and
Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2009).
Immigration and national identity have been salient and volatile issues in French
politics and society for at least the last quarter century. Certainly the rise of the
far-right National Front and the emergence of myriad ethnic identity movements
among immigrant communities testify to the centrality of the debate over nation-
al belonging and the rights of citizens in contemporary France. In Reproducing the
French Race Elisa Camiscioli charts the early manifestations of these debates in the
context of the Third Republic in France and colonial rule overseas from the 1890s
to the 1930s. She studies the place of immigrants from Europe and France’s
colonies in the metropole in the interwar period in order to interrogate how the
concepts of Frenchness and citizenship were articulated amid worries over depop-
ulation and industrial decline. Camiscioli’s central argument is that the issues of
“race and reproduction were critical to the construction of French national iden-
tity” and “gender intervened in fabricating racial hierarchies which cast white
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Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, Opium: Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)

Lord, Kathleen

Then in successive chapters we meet Bishop Wilberforce, the leader of
the high church faction of the Anglican establishment, Thomas Henry Huxley,
by the time of the Origin a man who was already making himself a force in
Victorian science and education and a strong opponent of Owen, and Joseph
Hooker, the botanist and great friend of Darwin and enthusiastic supporter of
evolution through selection. The author writes clearly and people new to the
field will find that the pocket pictures are helpful and nicely drawn.
We move on to the details of the debate itself, followed by an analysis
showing that a lot of exaggeration was to come in later years as the various par-
ticipants played up their own roles and successes, sometimes at the expense of
total veracity. This is not new territory, because already others (who, to be fair,
are referenced) have shown that the encounter was certainly not as one-sided as
the evolutionists loved to tell in later years – a distortion which certainly had
long legs because, when I did Victorian history at school back in the 1950s, I was
treated to a wonderful account of professors slaying bishops in the name of rea-
son and evidence.
Finally, there is a brief reference to the ongoing debates about science
and religion, especially as we find today in the attacks being made on Christian
belief by the so-called “new atheists.” My own feeling is that it is a pity that
these two or three pages had not been expanded and made the raison d’être of the
book. It could have been really interesting and informative to compare the
clashes back in the 1860s with the clashes today. Are we just seeing in Richard
Dawkins a replay of Thomas Henry Huxley, or is there something new going on
now?  I guess the author just didn’t want to put history to this kind of use.
Historians of science are terrified of making mention of the present, fearing
that they will be accused of the dreadful sin of “Whiggishness,” that is of writ-
ing history in order to put a gloss on the present. I am not sure that looking at
the present through the lens of the past is in fact always trying to privilege the
present. Whether it is or not, I am still left with my initial question. Since there
is nothing new, why bother to write the book?
Michael Ruse
Florida State University
Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2009).
This biography of Trotsky by a Professor of Russian History at Oxford
University joins his other publications on Communism. Illustrated with maps
and photographs, Trotsky: A Biography draws from an autobiography, letters, party
and military correspondence, confidential speeches, and medical records. This
book is a substantial contribution to an intriguing historical figure committed to
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collective farming, ousted by Stalin, and assassinated by Soviet intelligence agents
in 1940.
The account is intended to “dig up the buried life” (4) of Trotsky in
labourious detail. Service’s critical approach examines his exceptional qualities as
an orator and administrator and investigates his personal self-absorption.
Service does not foster Stalin’s depiction of Trotsky as a traitor to the October
Revolution and provides comprehensive coverage of his overthrow of the
Provisional Government in October 1917, deportation in 1929, and political asy-
lum in Turkey, France, Norway and Mexico.
The autobiography forms the basis of the early years from 1879 to
1913. Faced with Jewish discrimination, Leiba Bronstein adopted the pseudo-
nym Trotsky at twenty-three. The fifth of eight children, he was an intelligent
and active son of a well-established peasant family in Kherson province who had
moved to a nearby town for Christian schooling. His Marxist politicization
began at the age of sixteen and led to his imprisonment in Nokolaev and
Moscow. In 1902, he abandoned his first wife Alexandra and his two children
after serving a prison term in Siberia.
Meanwhile, the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party established itself at
the Second Party Congress and the battle heightened between the Mensheviks
and Bolsheviks. During exile in London and Paris, Trotsky emerged as a
spokesperson for Marxism within the party and met and married his second wife
Natalya. He faced a trial and fifteen months gaol after challenging the revolution
in St. Petersburg. The author offers a cautious view of his role in the October
Revolution of 1904-05 by stating that in “a faction-ridden Marxist movement his
openness to all sides in every dispute made him many enemies” (113).
Trotsky persisted in his struggle for a working-class revolution serving
labour. Hostile to Plekhanov and Lenin, his Bolshevism began annoying the rest
of the party. He joined other anti-war socialists during the First World War, was
deported from France, stayed in New York, and was briefly detained in Amherst,
Nova Scotia before intervention for his return to Moscow. Thirty-eight years of
age in 1917, he faced temporary arrest before his attempt to take over the
Petrograd Soviet. Allied with Lenin, his overthrow of the Provisional
Government in October directly challenged the Mensheviks and Socialist-
Revolutionaries.
The 1920s were instrumental to the decline of Lenin and Trotsky and
to the ascendancy of Stalin. Trotsky was faithful to the Bolsheviks and to the
Red Army during the Civil War. His efforts concentrated on the Third
International and spreading revolution in Europe. The factional rivalry between
Stalin and Trotsky came to a head in 1926 when Stalin promoted administrators
loyal to him to the upper party echelons. By the time of the first five-year plan
in 1928, Trotsky was no longer a leader.
The Politburo ousted him from the Kremlin, and he and his family lost
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their living quarters and other party privileges. His private papers demonstrate
his desire for Soviet Russia’s industrial competitiveness in a world economy and
administrative efficiency. Like Stalin, Trotsky supported state economic plan-
ning, but through the use of less violent and more democratic methods.
Plagued by periodic bouts of illness, Trotsky remained a revolutionary writer
rather than a politician.
He was expelled from the USSR and sent to Turkey in 1929 for form-
ing an anti-Soviet party and inciting counter-revolution. There he observed dra-
matic transformations in the Russian and international economies. The USSR
had doubled its industrial output by 1932 and the stock market crash heightened
his hopes for a socialist order. Stalin viewed Trotsky’s political aim to restore
Leninism as a conspiracy and wanted him dead. He and his family lived as run-
aways abroad and eventually settled in Mexico, ensconced in a villa that acted as
a fortress. There his devotion to his wife Natalya survived an extra-marital liai-
son with Frida Kahlo, which caused considerable tensions between him and
Diego Rivera. Alarms and Mexican police protection did not deter Roman
Mercador from infiltrating Avenida Vienna and assassinating him in 1940.
Service has written a factual biography, but his goal for a dispassionate
analysis mitigates his incisive political and personal interpretation. His conclud-
ing statements argue that Trotsky’s contradictory ideas endured and that he was a
complex human being. Surely such a complicated figure merits more profound
observations.
Kathleen Lord
Mount Allison University
Sharon A. Kowalsky, Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in
Revolutionary Russia, 1880-1920 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2009).
Deviant Women is one of a growing number of studies to situate intellectual and
cultural developments in Russia within a larger European context. Kowalsky’s
discussion of the impact of Cesare Lombroso’s theories of criminal types,
among other things, demonstrates how Russian criminology was in direct dia-
logue with the rest of the field in Europe. She also charts the rise of other
schools of thought less interested in identifying inborn criminal traits than in
emphasizing the role of socioeconomic conditions in causing crime. With the
establishment of the Soviet state, criminology became a state-supported scientif-
ic discipline, although one that never became dominated by a single approach.
The 1920s saw increasing state concern over crime rates, driven by the assump-
tion that crime was supposed to disappear the closer the country came to achiev-
ing socialism. Hence, crime statistics were used to chart the country’s progress
Book Reviews138
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Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).

Reaume, Geoffrey

Psychiatric Patient Built Wall Tours at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Toronto, 2000 - 2010

Schrank, Sarah

Left History 15.1204
than in the effort to end school segregation. Foley’s third chapter chronicles rela-
tions, or lack thereof, between Mexican American and African American attorneys
and civil rights advocates between the landmark legal cases of Mendez v. Westminster
(1947) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In the Mendez case, Mexican
American civil rights leaders fought for equal rights afforded by white racial status,
s p e c i f i c a l ly the right not to be segregated in so-called Mexican sch o o l s.
Correspondence between Mexican American civil rights leadership and African
American attorneys, including later US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall,
indicates that Mexican Americans narrowly cleaved to a legal challenge to segrega-
tion that endorsed the separate but equal doctrine for Black Americans, but not
Mexican Americans. Middle-class Mexican American leadership according to
Foley lacked the race consciousness to join African Americans in a full-frontal
assault on the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of separate but equal. Mexican Americans
felt superior toward both recent Mexican immigrants and African Americans.
Association with either group risked a loss of personal, economic and social sta-
tus gained by claiming a white racial identity.
This book is timely given the contemporary debate on illegal Mexican
immigration and its implications on Latinos and African Americans. Racial soli-
darity is critical to challenge the rising tide of racial legislation reinforcing
America’s white racial democracy, so well eluded to in Foley’s book. Future stud-
ies on historical relations between Mexican Americans and African Americans no
doubt will more fully contextualize relations between the two racial groups beyond
the war years. Scholars will grapple though with Foley’s contention that whiteness
has determined the boundaries and permeability of American racial solidarity.
Oliver A. Rosales
University of California, Santa Barbara
Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los
Ange l e s (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).
For contemporary scholars of post World War II United States history, the narra-
tive of struggles for social equality follows a now familiar trajectory. Racially mar-
ginalized groups, galvanized by the economic and social opportunities of the post-
war era, mobilized politically to overtly challenge centuries of American racism;
first, by demanding equal inclusion within the system of liberal democracy; and
later, once frustrated by the deliberately slow pace of change, grew more radical-
ized and pushed for a new politics of self-determination. The liberating promise
of these social movements was cut short in the 1970s for numerous reasons, not
the least of which was the vitriolic backlash against civil rights, the murder of
prominent leaders of color, and the commercial appropriation of the era’s cultur-
al symbols, which turned signs of committed social activism into fashion state-
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Book Reviews 205
ments. Subsequently, historians have focused their attention on this period of
roughly 1945 to 1980 to locate newfound possibilities for social justice, from sites
of cross-cultural alliances to collective action and political radicalism.
In Black Arts West, a richly detailed and provocative study of African
American arts communities in postwar Los Angeles, Daniel Widener joins this
conversation and challenges some of the assumptions of this narrative arc by
applying it to the production of expressive arts, from the 1940s wartime struggles
to integrate Hollywood to the emergence of an art of self-determination that
articulated the more radical goals of the black liberation movement. Indeed,
Widener argues that identity-based black arts activity in Los Angeles cannot be
understood simply as cultural fallout from the upheavals of the 1960s; rather, this
activism was the product of an earlier “search for civic equality amid the plenty of
postwar abundance.” (52)  By pushing back the story of the black arts movement
to the 1940s, Widener sets up a history in which the seeds of radical protest art
were planted in the creative efforts of the wartime cultural front. Writer Chester
Himes, jazz great Duke Ellington, actor Paul Robeson, and impresario Frances
Williams, among others, politicized black art during the war by insisting on greater
inclusion of African Americans in the culture industries and, once included,
demanded that cultural representations of blacks move well beyond subservient
roles and degrading minstrelesque performances.
Between the integration strategies of the 1940s and the liberation move-
ments of the 1970s, Widener situates cultural liberalism, a community-based inter-
racial cultural politics whose proponents “saw the arts as a key element of urban
reform, insisting that writing, music, and other creative endeavors could provide
opportunities for blacks and heal the divisions reflected in events like the Watts
riot.” (94)  The Watts Writers Workshop, led by Academy Award-winning screen-
writer Budd Schulberg, is one example of this type of project in which white lib-
erals and black artists worked collectively to challenge damaging notions of the
“culture of poverty” that reverberated in the wake of the riot through administra-
tive channels like the McCone Commission. Primarily using creative writing and
theatre performance as tools of a nonviolent strategy for racially integrated cultur-
al production, groups like the Watts Writers Workshop and the Inner City Cultural
Center acted “as a kind of ‘cultural front’ in the broader war on poverty.” (109)
By the later 1960s, cultural liberalism was supplanted by the opposition-
al politics of black power. Widener especially heralds the talents of free jazz musi-
cian Horace Tapscott, whose work in collectives like the Underground Musicians
Association and the Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra offered an affirmation of black
identity rooted in “a kind of emancipatory epistemology based upon the possibil-
ity of defining freedom in multifaceted, open-ended, and comprehensive terms.”
(118)  Critical to Widener’s broader argument is his point that the Underground
Musicians Association, and other related groups, formed several years prior to the
uprising of 1965. Rather than late 1960s arts activism expressing a reaction to
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Left History 15.1206
failed earlier struggles, Widener argues that the emergence of the “Watts
Renaissance” was indigenous to Los Angeles and suggests “the need to see the
ideas of self-determination associated with black power as arising alongside, rather
than in response to, he more familiar struggle for civil rights.” (120, emphasis mine)
Widener effectively concludes his study in the early 1990s with the municipal gov-
ernment’s flawed efforts under Mayor Tom Bradley to build a multicultural arts
program that resulted in systematic displays of token diversity while harnessing
elite patronage to civic renewal projects that all but excluded Los Angeles’ work-
ing class and minority communities. This failure on the cultural landscape reflect-
ed the socio-economic catastrophes provoking the Los Angeles’ drug wars and, of
course, the 1992 Rodney King riots.
Widener draws on a rich theoretical legacy but much of his work builds
on Michael Denning’s concept of the labouring of American culture in the
1930s and the formation of a cultural front allying the creative labour of the cul-
ture industries with the organized Left; in fact, some of the best moments in
Black Arts West come when he focuses our attention on class. Widener points
out that after World War II, the preserve of the visual arts shifted from a middle
class preoccupation to that of a working class bohemia empowered through GI
Bill education subsidies and labour activism. This is a fascinating narrative
thread that could have been further developed, as could the connections between
the black cultural politics of the 1930s and those that followed the war. That
said, by complicating our understanding of the black arts movement, Black Arts
West makes a significant contribution to the history of art and activism in Los
Angeles and highlights the city as a landscape of possibility upon which deeply
meaningful cultural battles can be fought.
Sarah Schrank
California State University, Long Beach
Graham Russell Gao Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist
and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
In 1942, Dorothy Porter [Wesley] read a paper at the Annual Meeting of the
Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in which she said of David
Ruggles: “Through a queer arbitrary ordering of things or through unfortunate
oversight of the historians, his memory has been almost wholly neglected, and his
activities as a tireless fighter n the cause of abolition virtually forgotten.”1 Porter,
the much-esteemed bibliophile, archivist, and librarian at the Moorland Spingarn
Research Center, argued that “no keener, nor more articulate advocate of human
rights ever lived,” though she acknowledged that “the life and deeds” of Ruggles
would have to be “recovered with great difficulty from dark obscurity.”2
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Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010)

Joudrey, Susan L.

longer christened a “have not” province. The New Brunswick government
agrees that one of the most important components of self-sufficiency is the
province’s relationship and position within the federal nation-state.
This book provides some thoughtful and important insights into New
Brunswick’s new policy direction to achieve self-sufficiency. Two areas that were
not discussed were New Brunswick’s past provincial policies that were designed
to stimulate growth, and an analysis of the impact of federal policies and institu-
tions on the province (there is a well developed body of literature in this area).
Including an analysis of why provincial development policy failed in the past and
an examination of the province’s underdevelopment in relation to its position
within the federation, would have made his volume stronger. While this is an
area that could have been explored further, this work is an excellent and thor-
ough compilation that will be widely appreciated among the academic communi-
ty and will hopefully find its way to provincial policy analysts and decision mak-
ers.
Adrian Egbers
Dalhousie University
Max Foran, Ed. Icon, Brand, Myth: The Calgary Stampede (Edmonton:
AU Press, 2008).
The Calgary Stampede is one of western Canada’s most popular cultural festi-
vals, and a book like Icon, Brand, Myth: The Calgary Stampede has been much antici-
pated. Icon, Brand, Myth is a compilation of essays that explore the cultural sig-
nificance of one of the longest-running western entertainments in North
America from its founding as an agricultural exhibition in the 1880s until the
present. While the literature on American rodeos and frontier day festivals is rel-
atively rich, a consideration of Canada’s grand celebration of western culture has
been neglected. Recently, the Calgary Stampede has received more academic
attention and, as divulged in the introduction, this book is the product of a
course on the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede formerly offered by University
of Calgary’s Faculty of Communication and Culture. Each of the books’ con-
tributors were either lecturers or “the subject of reference” in Stampede courses
offered from 2004-2006 (ix).
The collection opens with an overview of Stampede history and Max
Foran, the book’s editor, provides the historical context for its origin and evolu-
tion. As one might expect, chapters include topics such as the establishment of
the agricultural exhibition, the rodeo, cowboys, and the famous chuckwagon
race. The book, however, moves beyond what might be considered traditional
Stampede fare and other chapters explore the midway, parading culture, Calgary’s
public monuments, the Stampede’s relationship with the city, the Stampede’s role
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in promoting western art, and Hugh Dempsey provides the first comprehensive
overview of First Nations peoples’ contribution to the Stampede.
While each chapter considers a specific aspect of the Calgary Stampede
and Exhibition, analyses reach beyond the history of the rodeo and explore the
place of the Stampede in shaping identity based on a collective memory of “the
West”. Drawing on theoretical frameworks popularized by Eric Hobsbawm,
Stuart Hall, and Benedict Anderson, authors connect the Stampede to the cre-
ation of local, regional, and national identities, as well as the articulation of a
“modern” identity while drawing on shared attitudes about western heritage. For
example, Glen Mikkelsen’s assessment of the rodeo concludes that it “...has
played, and continues to play, a pivotal role in preserving and propagating what
the West is perceived to be.” (206)  Similarly, Aritha van Herk’s claims that the
chuckwagon races are Calgary’s own, part history and part technology, “born and
bred in the West.” (237)  Calgary Stampede’s Chief Executive Officer, Vern
Kimball, reflects that “[p]eople want to protect Calgary’s unique spirit and identi-
ty,” and they see the Calgary Stampede as a representative of their community
values and character (334). These chapters link the Stampede rodeo events to
the creation and maintenance of a local and regional identity.
More broadly defined national and “modern” identities are explored in
Lorry W Felske’s chapter on Calgary’s parading traditions that highlight the ten-
sions between modernity and heritage, and between expressions of the
American and Canadian West. Tamara Palmer Seiler continues to explore these
tensions in her examination of the cowboy in the Calgary Stampede and in her
joint chapter with Robert M Seiler that considers the Stampede posters as sites
of struggle over the meaning of the Western Canadian experience (314). She
reflects that there is an inherent tension “...in a Canadian city and region using
what is arguably an American cultural icon as its defining symbol.” (176)  Both
national and “modern” identities were reaffirmed and subverted through the use
of icons such as the cowboy.
Analysis throughout the book would have been enhanced if the authors
had further problematized the construction of local, regional, national, and
“modern” identities by considering class, race, and gender. Max Foran’s reflec-
tion on the Stampede’s relationship with the city leaves the reader with some
interesting questions that address race and class, but very few of the articles
explicitly tackle what these important categories mean to the construction of
identity.
The weakest aspect of the book, however, is its nature as a compilation
of essays. There are noticeable gaps in parallels that could have been drawn
between chapters. For example, Fiona Agnus explains that the midway never
really reflected the “myth of the Wild West, combined with contemporary
notions of what constitutes social and technological progress.” (112-13)  Instead,
she focuses on the midway’s evolution based on social constructions of
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respectability without connecting it to changes rodeo faced that were dictated by
similar ideals briefly outlined by Donald G Wetherell (24-27). This is not a
problem unique to this edited collection but this popular format could be
strengthened if authors were encouraged to work in concert with one another,
especially when contributors have already participated in implementing the same
focused course.
Icon, Brand, Myth would be of interest to professors and students of cul-
tural studies or Canadian Studies. This book is a great beginning for a more
thoughtful consideration of the Calgary Stampede and its place in Western
Canadian culture.
Susan L. Joudrey
Carleton University
Andrew Parnaby, Citizen Docker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2008).
Citizen Docker is framed chronologically by the Vancouver waterfront strikes of
1923 and 1935. While the story of the strikes has been told before, Andrew
Parnaby’s analysis of the context from which the strikes emerged is anything but
familiar. Drawing from a variety of sources, the most important of which are
the extensive papers of the Shipping Federation of British Columbia, Parnaby
explores the aggressive efforts of waterfront employers to end the system of
casual work on Vancouver’s waterfront. Following the trauma of the 1923 strike,
shippers developed a system of welfare capitalism that aimed to change the
social makeup of the longshoring workforce and alter the culture of work on the
docks. In Parnaby’s words, “the Shipping Federation hoped that by weeding out
the foreign-born and the radical, recruiting white married men, and promoting
middle-class values of discipline, sobriety, and thrift, it could shape a new, more
compliant working-class identity.” (12)  The Shipping Federation sought in par-
ticular to bolster the workingmen’s role as breadwinners, and thus as “citizens.”
In important ways the Federation succeeded. By the early 1930s, 70 percent of
Vancouver’s dock workers were married men. “Welfare capitalism and labour
market reform called into being new workplace habits, disciplines, and incen-
tives,” Parnaby concludes; in the end these changes “remade the everyday texture
of working life on the waterfront.” (163)
Yet the creation of a shared understanding of citizenship was never
complete, nor did longshoremen embrace their role as breadwinners simply
because of the coercive power of employers, and it is primarily in Parnaby’s dis-
cussion of the diverse routes through which capital and labour embraced the
idea of citizenship that this book’s contribution to Canadian working class histo-
riography is to be found. The story of one longshoreman, Ivan Emery, illus-
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