Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Johnson, Marilynn S.

Frank Kusch, Battleground Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

Hesketh, Ian

Weapons of Another Kind: Henry Thomas Buckle and the Case of Thomas Pooley

Bonnell, Jennifer

generous public funding severed the traditional connection between SMO leader-
ship and a mass-base. Yet, state funding facilitated SMO interventions in a num-
ber of Canadian rights controversies including the Gastown Riots, mandatory
treatment for drug users, police abuse in Toronto, the October Crisis, the
denominational school question and the repatriation of the Canadian constitu-
tion. As Clément demonstrates, SMO success was mixed but there is little evi-
dence that any of the organizations failed to engage political authorities because
of its financial dependence on the Canadian state. As Clément argues, the con-
servative and patient approach adopted by Canada’s civil liberties and human
rights associations was more a reflection of statist conceptions of human rights
than any state funding received.
Clément’s study contributes to our understanding of several historical
subjects including: activist mobilization and the influence of a particular histori-
cal context, SMOs and social/political change, the proliferation of SMOs during
the 1960s and 1970s, Canada’s rights revolution and the power of rights dis-
course to inspire social or political change. Longitudinal historical case studies
hold much promise for further exploring activist mobilization, Canada’s rights
revolution and, more generally, the role played by SMOs in the process of politi-
cal/social change. Future studies might explore the creation of a political con-
sciousness among SMO activists. Of all the events that might trigger group for-
mation relatively few events ever do. Social movement theory suggests that
group formation only follows a period during which political consciousness is
bred among potential activists and is most successful when certain resources —
including leaders, communication networks and existing organizations — are
available to potential activists. Where and how this occurs within a particular
historical context and among particular groups deserves more attention. As
Clément so convincingly demonstrates, because activism is so strongly correlated
to historical context, the answers posited are likely to be contingent upon the
time and place studied. It falls to historians to properly situate extra-parliamen-
tary political action within its historical context. Hopefully Clément’s study and
other recent works are the first of many.
Matthew Baglole
University of New Brunswick
Christopher Armstrong, Matthew Evenden, and H.V. Nelles, The River
Returns: An Environmental History of the Bow (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009).
In The River Returns, authors Armstrong, Evenden, and Nelles decisively raise the
bar for river history. If a book can be described, like its subject, as sweeping,
majestic, turbulent and full of surprises, this is it. This comprehensive and ele-
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gantly written history of Alberta’s iconic Bow River successfully brings together
approaches from political economy, cultural and environmental history, exploring
at once the ways in which the river created opportunities and imposed limits for
different groups in different periods, and the ways that shifting perceptions and
ideologies worked alongside political and economic imperatives to transform the
river.
The book’s thirteen chapters are grouped around the diverse ways of
experiencing the river over time, as a homeland, as a source of wood and power,
as irrigator, sanitizing flow, fish habitat, parkland. Not only do chapter divisions
represent the experiences of different kinds of river users in different periods,
but also the experiences of different parts of the river. As the authors conclude,
the river is “many places simultaneously” (25). “The Fishing River,” for example,
refers to a 46 kilometre section of the river below Calgary where certain game
species have thrived, unexpectedly, in the rich aquatic environment created by
nutrient loading from Calgary’s sewage system. In other places and for other
species, the authors show, human-induced changes to the river have had deleteri-
ous effects.
Highly readable, the book achieves a rare balance in its suitability for
public and academic audiences alike. Drawing upon diaries and correspondence
from explorers, scientists, and settlers in the Bow Valley, together with govern-
ment records, photographs, and reports from various constituency groups, the
authors create a sense of immediacy with a place that many know only from the
static vistas of postcards. Here is enough detail to satisfy the local river enthusi-
ast, without sacrificing the organization and analytical acuity expected of an aca-
demic work. While it is clear that omissions were made—twentieth century
industrial activities along the river, for example, receive limited treatment, while
artistic representations of the river are relegated to a separate volume
[Armstrong and Nelles, The Painted Valley: Artists Along Alberta’s Bow River, 1845-
2000 (2007)]—the book nevertheless covers  substantial territory.
As has come to be expected of environmental histories, time does not
constrain the narrative. Moving from the geological formation of the river valley
through to present conditions and conflicts, and circling back to trace the origins
of contemporary developments, the book mimics in method and form the path
of the river. Just as the river “returns,” somewhat, moving through a period of
heavy engineering in the early twentieth century to receive increasingly stringent
protections (its recognition as urban parkland ironically contingent upon its
“tamed” state as a highly managed, deindustrialized waterway), and ultimately
delivering consequences for actions received, the narrative moves backwards and
forwards in time without losing its overall sense of direction.
In their treatment of the Bow as a conduit linking not only landscapes
but diverse themes in environmental history, from agriculture and forestry to
fisheries, sanitation, and parks development, Armstrong, Evenden and Nelles
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effectively revitalize rivers as compelling subjects for historians. They also suc-
ceed in resisting the declensionist narrative that has become so predictable in
environmental history, taking care to highlight how change brought unexpected
consequences and “environmental surprises”—and not always for the worst. At
times species diversity, for example, increased in particular places at the expense
of others. Irrigation projects resulted in the creation of beaver and muskrat
habitat—developments which brought their own challenges for prairie farmers—
while dam construction created conditions that favoured some species and deci-
mated others.
My criticisms are minor. On the whole, the three authors achieve a
remarkable consistency of tone and writing style throughout. This slips some-
what in chapters 10 through 12, which, perhaps due to the complexity of the
diverse constituencies and jurisdictional authorities that they cover, lose some of
the lyricism and elegance of construction so notable in preceding chapters.
Early in the book the authors introduce the idea of the river as an archive,
reflective of William J. Turkel’s notion of the “archive of place” forwarded in his
2007 history of British Columbia’s Chilcotin Plateau. Rivers, however, are as
much forces of erosion and erasure as catalogues of past uses and decisions.
The tensions within this analogy could have been more fully explored, and elab-
orated upon more consistently through the text. The book concludes by looking
ahead to sources of conflict in the future, mobilizing the river’s past to generate
potential insights for public policy. Chief among these concerns is the very real
threat of water scarcity as a result of global warming. The authors speculate
upon what kind of place the Bow basin will become, and how such changes will
affect the different uses and users of river discussed in the book. I found myself
wanting to know more about this largest of issues facing the Bow in the years to
come. Perhaps this was the authors’ intent.
Jennifer Bonnell
University of Toronto
Jean-Francois Constant and Michel Ducharme, eds., Liberalism and
Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2009).
Jean-Francois Constant and Michel Ducharme are to be heartily commended for
bringing together such a wide range of stimulating and highly sophisticated arti-
cles which together challenge, test and revise Ian McKay’s original liberal order
reconnaissance. Unlike the majority of collected works which usually contain
but a handful of first-rate articles, Liberalism and Hegemony contains such a critical
mass of thoughtful articles which display a great command of theoretical and
empirical perspectives, that I would recommend that it become a benchmark text
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Christopher Armstrong, Matthew Evenden, and H.V. Nelles, The River Returns: An Environmental History of the Bow (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009).

Christie, Nancy

effectively revitalize rivers as compelling subjects for historians. They also suc-
ceed in resisting the declensionist narrative that has become so predictable in
environmental history, taking care to highlight how change brought unexpected
consequences and “environmental surprises”—and not always for the worst. At
times species diversity, for example, increased in particular places at the expense
of others. Irrigation projects resulted in the creation of beaver and muskrat
habitat—developments which brought their own challenges for prairie farmers—
while dam construction created conditions that favoured some species and deci-
mated others.
My criticisms are minor. On the whole, the three authors achieve a
remarkable consistency of tone and writing style throughout. This slips some-
what in chapters 10 through 12, which, perhaps due to the complexity of the
diverse constituencies and jurisdictional authorities that they cover, lose some of
the lyricism and elegance of construction so notable in preceding chapters.
Early in the book the authors introduce the idea of the river as an archive,
reflective of William J. Turkel’s notion of the “archive of place” forwarded in his
2007 history of British Columbia’s Chilcotin Plateau. Rivers, however, are as
much forces of erosion and erasure as catalogues of past uses and decisions.
The tensions within this analogy could have been more fully explored, and elab-
orated upon more consistently through the text. The book concludes by looking
ahead to sources of conflict in the future, mobilizing the river’s past to generate
potential insights for public policy. Chief among these concerns is the very real
threat of water scarcity as a result of global warming. The authors speculate
upon what kind of place the Bow basin will become, and how such changes will
affect the different uses and users of river discussed in the book. I found myself
wanting to know more about this largest of issues facing the Bow in the years to
come. Perhaps this was the authors’ intent.
Jennifer Bonnell
University of Toronto
Jean-Francois Constant and Michel Ducharme, eds., Liberalism and
Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2009).
Jean-Francois Constant and Michel Ducharme are to be heartily commended for
bringing together such a wide range of stimulating and highly sophisticated arti-
cles which together challenge, test and revise Ian McKay’s original liberal order
reconnaissance. Unlike the majority of collected works which usually contain
but a handful of first-rate articles, Liberalism and Hegemony contains such a critical
mass of thoughtful articles which display a great command of theoretical and
empirical perspectives, that I would recommend that it become a benchmark text
Book Reviews100
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for all doctoral students and Canadian historians.
Much of the importance of this volume rests with the editors them-
selves whose introduction is balanced in showing how McKay’s initial proposi-
tion remains innovative not necessarily because it offers a particular framework,
but because it has generated a wide range of historical debate which has shifted
the preoccupations of Canadian historians beyond the social history/political
history divide. They are, however, more sceptical of McKay’s version of the lib-
eral order which posits liberalism as a “totalizing philosophy,” as well as its
overemphasis upon individual property rights as fundamental to this liberal order
which Constant and Ducharme believe weakens the innovativeness of McKay’s
reconnaissance because it replays the older political-economic paradigms (com-
bining the event history of an Arthur Lower within a neo-Marxist theoretical
frame). Given their interests, the editors are at their best when they show the
limitations of McKay’s framework, which for the most part ignores Quebec, and
in particular, it ignores the important contributions of Jean-Marie Fecteau which
has, along with the work of Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, clearly
demonstrated that religion and the institutional church was just as, if not more
important, than the state in shaping the liberal order. More particularly,
Constant and Ducharme reaffirm the 1840s as a critical juncture in the emer-
gence of the liberal order and while they later question the end point of
McKay’s periodiziation in the 1940s, I think that given the importance of Jerry
Bannister’s emphasis on the counterrevolution and its liberal tendencies (which
reverses Hartz’s thesis of liberalism with a Tory touch) that the editors might
have been prompted to also uncover the liberal-republican ideological complexi-
ty of the rebellions in order to query why 1840 should be taken as a starting
point. If the liberal order framework is in fact a means to study the theoretical
political aims of the project of rule, why limit this project to the period follow-
ing the failed rebellions of 1837-38?  As  Bannister rightly states “liberalism itself
cannot be understood as an elemental or inviolable force that suddenly emerged
ex-nihilo, in the mid-nineteenth century” (100). What Constant and Ducharme’s
introduction makes clear, is that there are in fact two liberal projects at work
within McKay’s framework: one which concerns the timing and emergence of
liberal (often with slippage to Liberal) political ideas and a Gramscian project
which concerns issues of hegemony. As they suggest, it is this Gramscian neo-
Marxist ideology that makes McKay’s reconnaissance a distinctly political project
and that in the end renders it less useful as an historical concept.
In a book full of stimulating articles, those by McNairn and Curtis were
particularly hard-hitting in exposing the theoretical limitations and distortions
inherent in McKay’s foray. McNairn is in full control of his subject when expos-
ing the selective nature of McKay’s concept of liberalism founded upon the pri-
ority given to the individual, and its relationship to property, equality and liberty.
Essentially McNairn is arguing for greater historicism, of properly situating liber-
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al ideals (and their uses) in their historical context, and, in an argument that is
similar to that articulated by Robert McDonald, McNairn shows how variegated
liberalism was and how those espousing liberal ideas could challenge other
aspects of liberalism. McNairn, McDonald, and Robin Brownlie, whose focus is
upon aboriginal peoples, all show how those nominally excluded from the liberal
order according to McKay also used the liberal order to argue for rights. In this
way women and aboriginal peoples are both excluded from, and at the same time
use, liberal ideas to construct their own rights talk and identities within the liber-
al order. Certainly the essays by Brownlie, McNairn, and McDonald prompt us
to construct more nuanced conceptual frameworks which avoid reducing the lib-
eral order to a neo-Marxist critique of “bourgeois values or market relations.”
(75). Like McNairn, Curtis, in a tour de force of theoretical exposition, main-
tains that McKay’s framework is overly economic in its focus and far too state
driven, and that his preoccupation with Gramsci’s theories creates a liberal order
which is reduced to two sides of one polarity: hegemony and resistance whose
players are the dominant and subaltern groups. With great clarity and intellectual
rigour, Curtis has set out to elaborate a framework which focuses on “a liberal
mode of government”, extrapolating from the notion of governmentality set
forth by Michel Foucault. This is of great value because it avoids the state-civil
society binary and because by seriously addressing the notion of discourse in a
way not pursued by McKay, Curtis is able to show how liberal theorists actually
set out to “colonize individual subjectivities”. Curtis’ framework has much to
recommend it: it asks historians to be specific about what liberal project they are
talking about, it shows how liberalism and its individualist ethos cannot be
divorced from the social, and it clearly demonstrates how the liberal project suc-
ceeds by acting through various sites which include the family, voluntary organi-
zations and the state to create self-governing individuals. Curtis’s theoretical
proposition also possesses the great advantage of avoiding an over-emphasis on
the “big events” of traditional political history which framed McKay’s chronolo-
gy. Whether you are an admirer of Foucault or not, Curtis’ contribution to this
volume carries great intellectual force not least because it shows why one project
of rule is far too limiting a construct and it offers an approach which is less top
down and which gives due attention to discourse and sites of power outside the
state.
Liberalism and Hegemony is an extremely important volume which should
become a staple on all comprehensive lists for emerging Canadian historians.
There are some absences in this volume: an article on the rule of law (a compo-
nent deemed pivotal in any conceptualization of the liberal order as Constant
and Ducharme note) would have been welcome, as would an article which
focused on the post 1940 period, and a consideration of the sphere of civic and
associational life. However, this is mere cavilling, as this volume packs a power-
ful intellectual punch, so much so that I think the revisions offered by all the
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contributors have now largely displaced the original enunciation of the thesis,
and that perhaps there is no one key to all mythologies as George Eliot’s Mr.
Casaubon would have it.
Nancy Christie
University of Western Ontario
Christopher Dummitt and Michael Dawson, eds., Contesting Clio’s Craft:
New Directions and Debates in Canadian History (London: Institute for
the Study of the Americas, 2009).
As one of only a few essay collections since the publication of Carl Berger’s
Contemporary Approaches to Canadian History (1987) to claim to bring together
“new” directions and debates in Canadian history, this volume marks an impor-
tant milestone in Clio’s craft. Berger concluded The Writing of Canadian History
(1986) with the warning that Clio has “an alarming habit” of devouring those
who follow her charms (320). Although young historians may well build upon
the work of their predecessors, he implies, they are reluctant to admit doing so,
preferring to emphasize their break with the tired approaches of their deluded
mentors. It is instructive, then, to reflect on what a new generation of historians
understands as cannibalism.
Unlike Berger’s volume, which reprinted review articles on “the new
history” in such sub-fields as ethnic, regional, women’s, and working class histo-
ry, this collection of essays emerged from a single conference, convened at the
University of London in 2007. Those invited to present papers were junior
scholars identified as charting new directions in theory and methodology. In
addition to the editors, the essayists published in this volume include Michel
Ducharme, Catherine Gidney, Stephen High, Adele Perry, Katie Pickles, and
Andrew Smith. Instead of offering overviews of emerging sub-fields, the arti-
cles, we are told by the editors in the introduction, are meant to encourage
debates that move beyond dated discussions about the failure of Canadians to
know their own history; the role of social history in undermining the national
narrative; and the nature of historical knowledge and claims to truth. While few
academic historians would disagree with the need for more substantive debates
on the form, content, and import of Canadian history, it is unclear from most of
these essays what needs to be debated. The trends in historical inquiry promot-
ed here — transnational, comparative, post-colonial, public/oral, narrative, and
Atlantic world  — to amend practices of earlier unworthies are timely sugges-
tions and unlikely to generate much debate. Surely, such approaches co-exist
comfortably with national and social understandings of the past, neither of
which can or should be abandoned. Although the editors suggest that there are
divisions among the authors of this volume on whether the attempt to write a
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Jean-Francois Constant and Michel Ducharme, eds., Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Michel S. Beaulieu is Assistant Professor of Northern Ontario History, Co-
Director of the Centre for Northern Studies, and Co-Director of the Lakehead
Social History Institute at Lakehead University. His current work explores issues
relating to ethnicity, socialism and labour in northern Canada. His publications
include the edited collections Essays in Northwestern Ontario Working Class
History: Thunder Bay and Its Environs (2008), Final Fantasy and Philosophy
(2009), and The Lady Lumberjack: An Annotated Collection of Dorothea
Mitchell’s Writings (2005). A co-authored short history of Northwestern Ontario
will be published by James Lorimer and Company in Spring 2010.
Geoff Read is an assistant professor of history at Huron University College in
London Ontario, and a proud former editor of Left History. He has published
articles on masculinity and the right in interwar France, and is revising a
book manuscript on gender and the political parties in France, 1918-1940. He is
also co-editing a volume on Canadian aboriginal history for Oxford University
Press.
Patrick Webber grew up in rural New Brunswick, earned his B.A. at St. Thomas
University and his M.A. at the University of New Brunswick. He is currently
applying to resume his Doctorate in the fall of 2010.
Harvey Amani Whitfield is an Associate Professor of History at the University
of Vermont. He has published several articles and a book about the black expe-
rience in Nova Scotia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries He is cur-
rently working on a book about slavery in Maritime Canada.
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About the Contributors

Baker, Bruce E.

to the rank-and-file, Adamic brilliantly reveals, with great verve and insight, why
an American worker would much prefer to be a racketeer and criminal than an
honest industrial labourer. Poverty in America, Adamic argues, drives the work-
er into the underworld, not into the radical movement. There is hope that the
American working class will some day embrace Marx and the class struggle, but
Adamic lays down the gauntlet; before that happens, Marxist intellectuals need
to truly open their eyes to the brutal underbelly of American life.
Worker run book publisher and distributor AK Press is to be com-
mended for re-publishing Dynamite, complete with a revealing “Forward” by Jon
Bekken that locates Dynamite in the context of Louis Adamic’s other works. AK
Press has looked beyond its anarchist mandate to publish a work that at times
seems to suggest that the function of labour violence has been to save capital-
ists from themselves. That said, Dynamite is a hard hitting, honest, and revealing
exposé of the brutal and unrelenting violence of American capitalism.
Desperation, Adamic quite rightly argues, breeds violence, and in terroristic acts
we see “the horror of desperate men thrown out of work with their families on
the verge of starvation” (249). Put Dynamite on your to-read list; it is a heartfelt
appeal for understanding of American workers who have been driven, and will
continue to be driven, to not-so-quiet acts of desperation.
Peter Campbell
Queen’s University
Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense
in U.S. Radical History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008).
Some historians work within tightly bounded areas: one particular event, or
institution, or place, at one particular time. Others, and Rebecca N. Hill falls in
this category, look across a broader expanse of the past and see connections
between different segments that are generally treated separately. Men, Mobs, and
Law:  Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History traces the “history of
both anti-lynching campaigns and radical defense from the era of abolitionism
until the New Left” (3). From that brief description, it should be clear that Hill
has set herself an ambitious task, and the book that results is challenging but
very worthwhile.
What the campaigns discussed here (John Brown, Haymarket, anti-
lynching, various IWW campaigns, Sacco and Vanzetti, Scottsboro, the
Rosenbergs, and George Jackson) have in common is that the state and its judi-
cial apparatus is figured as the enemy of justice, particularly for those working
for social and political change. Even the anti-lynching campaigns of Ida B.
Wells and others sought social and political change, though they wanted more
vigorous action by the legal system, not less. During the period under discus-
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sion, the power of the state expanded tremendously, notably during the Civil
War and World War I, and one theme running throughout Men, Mobs, and Law is
how radical social movements were able to build and use alternative institutions
to put pressure on the state in defense campaigns. This is seen perhaps most
clearly in the case of Haymarket, where two key figures (Albert Parsons and
August Spies) were newspaper editors. There were other institutions that
worked to maintain the status quo. By deftly moving between different episodes
stretched across a century and a half, Hill shows many manifestations of what
she sometimes describes as the “police-mob continuum” (15). In fact, the
power of this structure, which had at its disposal both the mechanisms of the
state and law enforcement and, when convenient, the defiance of law, is in con-
stant tension with the dream of many of these campaigns to see the defense of
particular individuals lead to a broader social revolution.
In some ways, the phenomenon Hill is analyzing here is what appears
to be the mere surface but is instead the deep structure. The rhetorical invoca-
tion of past heroes of the left can seem to be pro forma, not substantial, but
Hill makes a convincing case that the connections she draws are not just things
we can see in retrospect, but connections that were evident and fundamental to
those making them at the time, an important part of radical movements’ craft-
ing of their own histories and identities. By looking carefully at publicity mate-
rials, newspaper and magazine articles, courtroom statements, and so on, Hill
sketches out one of the important ways in which a movement made up of many
small struggles by the weak against the strong sought to gain a strength of its
own by finding parallels to present struggles in the past.
The writing in Men, Mobs, and Law is clear and engaging throughout,
even passionate in the epilogue that brings the historical questions into a con-
temporary setting briefly. It is nonetheless sometimes a demanding book to
read simply because of the amount of often complex material to be covered.
In order to draw the connections between the forms used in these different
events, Hill must at least lay out some basic facts and narrative about each. She
does this as effectively as it is probably possible to do, but there are points
where, for instance, the internecine struggles of the left in the 1920s that are the
background to the Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaign become hard to follow.
With so much to like about Hill’s book, it is unfortunate that Duke
University Press did not give it a bit more care. Any book will have a few lapses
of copyediting, but this one has too many and, more seriously, the footnote ref-
erences do not match up with the footnotes for part of one chapter. And, as
with too many books these days, there are notes but no bibliography. Those
caveats aside, Hill has produced a useful study that should appeal to a wide
range of scholars, not just radical and labour historians, but legal historians and
sociologists interested in movement building.
Bruce E. Baker
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Rebecca N. Hill, "Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical history" (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008)

Strong-Boag, Veronica

excellent, highlighting both the anti-capitalist critique and the text’s indebtedness
to black power politics and national liberation movements across the globe.
Hopefully these efforts will go a long way towards revitalizing a book that
Palmer rightly identifies as “arguably one of Canada’s most quintessential New
Left text[s]” (338). His discussion of Red Power is equally important, as the
experiences of N at ive peoples remain t h e most understudied aspect of the decade.
Palmer’s failure to grant the burgeoning feminist movement more
attention than he does is rather disturbing. His discussion of women’s con-
sciousness-raising efforts directed against the masculine culture of the New Left
occupies a scant ten pages, and his coverage of such important subjects as the
Voice of Women is distressingly superficial. It is characteristic of the masculine
perspective that haunts this book that the only woman discussed with any kind
of depth is Gerda Munsinger, the sexy socialite who was treated as little more
than a pretty appendage by her suitors.
The lack of attention to women’s issues is troubling, but perhaps in the
end is really a reflection of the overtly masculine character of ‘the sixties’ them-
selves, and the fact that Canadian women’s experiences during this decade
remain woefully under-represented in the literature. That said, Palmer would
have done well to include a separate chapter on the feminist movement, as he
does with the New Left, Québécois radicalism, and Red Power.
As with his other works, Palmer’s ultimate message tends at times to
become obscured by cumbersome prose and awkward analogies, and the theme
of irony is, ironically, underdeveloped throughout the text. Despite these short-
comings, however, as a synthesis of existing works on Canada’s 1960s and as an
historicisation of our obsessions with national identity, Palmer’s latest offering is
a most welcome addition to a growing canon of Canadian Sixties lit.
S.D. Jowett
Queen’s University
Sandra Rollings-Magnusson, Heavy Burdens on Small Shoulders: The
Labour of Pioneer Children on the Canadian Prairies (Edmonton:
University of Alberta Press, 2009).
This is a useful little book, accessible to undergraduates in history, sociology,
Canadian Studies, and other fields, while providing a handy addition to the
libraries of scholars of child labour and family life. Its strength lies in its
detailed confirmation of children’s work as critical to family survival in the nine-
teenth and early twentieth century period of prairie farm settlement. Using
diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies, and other first person accounts, his-
torical sociologist Sandra Rollings-Magnusson draws on the evidence of 260
children, 97 girls and 132 boys, aged from three to their late teens, living in
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Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta (12). She employs a typology to disaggre-
gate their contributions, variously defined as “productive (directed at producing
commodities for the market), entrepreneurial (directed to raising funds for the
family), subsistence (used to produce goods directly for family consumption), or
domestic (directed at family lifestyle, carrying on day-to-day household tasks,
and the conversion of subsistence items into consumable form)”(14). This
approach, which supplies the basis for core chapters, emphasizes particular val-
ues attached to different tasks. The result is some wonderfully thick description
that is hard to find elsewhere. I especially enjoyed the fulsome account of the
process of building a soddie, or sod house, in the second chapter and of young-
sters’ efforts to aid family economies, and sometimes their own dreams of pony
or rifle ownership, through entrepreneurial initiatives. C h i l d re n’s vo i c e s, d re a m s,
and pride emerge ve ry cl e a rly as a marked fe at u re of this volume and justify its publ i c at i o n .
Heavy Burdens also reveals some of shortcomings of its origins as a Phd
dissertation in sociology at the University of Alberta and its value is ultimately
fairly restricted. Canadian historians familiar with the work of John Bullen, Neil
Sutherland, Bettina Bradbury, and Robert McIntosh, not to mention other con-
tributions cited in Labour/Le Travail or this journal over the years, will not find
surprises. The centrality of child labour to family survival is now well docu-
mented. Feminist scholars in any discipline will also find the recurring compari-
son to women’s undervalued labour pretty slim pickings theoretically and other-
wise. Readers of Left History will wonder at the lack of attention to the political
economy of the region or at least acknowledgement of the different situations
of variously capitalized and situated rural operations. Despite its origins in soci-
ology, Heavy Burdens is barely theorized beyond an acknowledgement of the
effects of gender. The typology also underplays the seamlessness of much
labour and its frequent fluidity as children’s, much like adults’, contributions are
often simultaneous or shifting from one category to another as needs dictate.
Equally problematic is this volume’s tendency to ignore difference. The absence
of any treatment of race, class, and disability, as of region, is striking and unex-
pected in 2009. Dependence on a limited pool of written sources has privileged
certain memories: namely those of better off settlers and those who have been
literate in English. While last names suggest a range of European origins, no
other languages (not even French) appear in the cited texts. Equally absent is
any discussion of culture. It would be easy to conclude from this volume that
all families valued children’s labour much the same. While the burdens of farm
work might have been heavy, this account suggests that the vast majority were
cheerfully demanded by parents and cheerfully borne by offspring. Here then is
a good news story of youngsters putting their shoulder to life’s wheel and guar-
anteeing family survival, far from the video-gaming, ADD-afflicted, often obese
girls and boys of modern Canada. The fact that “children were almost literally
the property of their fathers” (144) gets acknowledged in the conclusion but
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inequalities and oppression of any kind largely go missing here. Neil Sutherland
reminded us years ago that survivors of painful childhoods often disappear
from view. That is certainly true here. The brutalization of girls and boys by
their own families and by their employers that commonly overwhelmed early
child welfare efforts on the prairies as elsewhere is nowhere to be found.
Ultimately, its reliance on a limited body of sources and inattention to differ-
ences of power and experience leaves Heavy Burdens vulnerable to romanticizing
the past, even as it re c ove rs details that may well inspire more critical inve s t i gat i o n s.
Veronica Strong-Boag
University of British Columbia
Rusty Bittermann and Margaret McCallum, Lady Landlords of Prince
Edward Island:  Imperial Dreams and the Defence of Property (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).
In Lady Landlords of Prince Edward Island, Rusty Bittermann and Margaret
McCallum show not only female landlords’ presence but also their centrality to
nineteenth-century Island developments. They argue that women’s “attempts to
ensure that Island law and policy supported their interests as landlords” made
them “significant players” in the project of empire (148). A refreshing approach
to Anglo-Canadian imperial history, the study speaks to any scholar interested in
gender, Canadian legal and political history, British social history, and experiences
of empire and colonialism, broadly speaking.
Lady Landlords aligns with recent trends in British economic history,
namely the reconfiguration of traditional economic narratives through a gendered
lens. Bittermann and McCallum join a growing contingent of scholars showing
that the very nature of economic and legal discourses often obscured female par-
ticipation. Careful research of provincial documents (detailed in a helpful
Appendix) show the extent to which British women featured in Island landhold-
ing; women, excluding those sharing property with husbands or family, owned
over one quarter of the land held by absentee owners in the 1870s and 1880s.
Bittermann and McCallum organize their work into biographic studies
of four such landowners: Anne Saunders, her sister Jane Saunders, Jane’s daugh-
ter Georgiana Fane, and acquaintance Charlotte Sulivan. Beginning with the
Saunders’ land inheritance in 1785, the authors plot a rough chronology through
the women’s lives, which aligned with “most of the history of British imperial
involvement with landlordism on Prince Edward Island” (8). This included local
anti-landlord resistance of the 1830s, legislative imperatives of the 1850s, and the
acquisition of absentee landowners’ property by the provincial government in the
1860s and 1870s. The women’s lives were so entwined with the Island’s political
developments, argue the authors, that the 1875 Supreme Court decision striking
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Sandra Rollings-Magnusson, "Heavy Burdens on Small Shoulders: The Labour of Pioneer Children on the Canadian Prairies" (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2009)

Hepburn, Allan

as Marvin and Morris Opler. Price’s assessments usually are balanced and care-
ful, and much to his scholarly credit, they can be easily distinguished from his
meticulous documentation. This provides the sound basis on which his aca-
demic readers may agree or disagree with him on individual points. In fact, one
might find a few among the author’s assessments of specific cases quite inap-
propriate. As problematic and unacceptable as US anthropologists’ “Internment
fieldwork” was, for instance, it still cannot be compared to the activities of
Joseph Mengele in Auschwitz, who directly assisted in mass murder (170).
Price does not hide his deeply rooted skepticism about anthropology’s
multi-faceted engagement with the US war effort, and he makes his readers
understand that this is based on his knowledge of where this engagement led to
after 1945, during the Cold War. Although we may not agree with him on all
analytical conclusions he draws, the scholarly community still has to be grateful
for this impressive scholarly achievement. After all, it provides for the very first
time a solid basis for a debate which has been long overdue. In all likelihood,
this volume will remain the standard reference book for the years to come. It is
an indispensable source of insights not only for anthropologists, who will gain a
thoroughly new understanding about their own field’s historical contexts of re-
emergence after 1945. Moreover, this book provides ample material for histori-
ans of science in general, who sometimes tend to neglect the relevance of the
social sciences and the humanities in armed conflict.
Andre Gingrich
Social Anthropology Research Unit, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Robert McAlmon, The Nightinghouls of Paris, ed. Sanford J. Smoller
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
Robert McAlmon, bon vivant and minor American writer, died in 1956. The
Nightinghouls of Paris, skilfully edited by Sanford J. Smoller, has, until now, lan-
guished unpublished in the Yale University archives. In a superb introduction to
Nightinghouls, Smoller summarizes McAlmon’s life and literary achievements:
Midwestern upbringing; bisexuality; founding of Contact Press in 1923; mar-
riage of convenience to Annie Winifred Ellerman, who preferred to be known
by her literary pseudonym Bryher; relocation to Paris; alcohol consumption;
repatriation to Phoenix, Arizona; posthumous reputation. Smoller’s scholarship
is impeccable and his prose style succinct. Unfortunately McAlmon does not
write as well as Smoller does.
An account of bohemian life in Montparnasse from about 1928 until
1932, this book, partly novel and partly memoir, recalls Ernest Hemingway’s The
Sun Also Rises, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, John Glassco’s Memoirs of
Montparnasse, and Morley Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris. Like these works,
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Nightinghouls recounts the drifting and dissolution of expatriates in Paris.
Smoller addresses the specific connections between Glassco’s Memoirs of
Montparnasse and McAlmon’s gossipy narrative (xxxiv). In fact, Hemingway,
Glassco, and Callaghan appear in The Nightinghouls in Paris under the pseudonyms
Forest Pemberton, Sudge Galbraith, and Shawin Flannagan. This roman-à-clef
also includes portraits of Kay Boyle, Djuna Barnes, Ford Madox Ford, and
Peggy Guggenheim. In an intertextual moment when life and fiction change
places, a character called Lady Mart, based as Duff Twysden, recognizes herself
as tough-talking, hard-loving Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises; by virtue of this
enshrinement in Hemingway’s novel, Lady Mart sets herself up as a tourist
attraction for Americans visiting Paris. The protagonist of Nightinghouls, Kit
O’Malley, is a sympathetic self-portrait of McAlmon.
Nightinghouls has vignettes, but little narrative continuity. Characters
appear and disappear as if tugged by destiny. Only Kit’s first-person presence
holds scenes together. Kit spends his time drinking and brawling. Drifting
from one bar to another, he runs into acquaintances and stands them drinks.
Immune to other people’s problems, he calls himself “a satirist” (148). Satire
inspires several witty character sketches. According to Kit, Dale Burke “was dis-
covering that the gesture of self-expressed freedom does not necessarily create
or attract the qualities and people that one desires” (37). Based on Kay Boyle,
Dale Burke trails discontent and Celtic mysticism wherever she goes. About
Forest Pemberton, Kit observes, “His success as a writer had not changed him
humanly or his apprehension of life” (27). Kit, who is “bored, bored, bored”
(52), has passing insight into the lives of others, but he never comes close to
understanding himself.
Two motifs dominate The Nightinghouls of Paris: money and sex. Most
of the characters in this novel have hidden resources of capital. The Lutyens
are millionaires who recklessly spend. Lady Mart, always broke, cadges money
from ex-lovers to keep herself supplied with booze. Kit O’Malley often picks
up the tab at bars, but he does not disclose the origins of his wealth. By con-
trast, two young Montrealers, Ross Campion and Sudge Galbraith live off $100
per month from Sudge’s father. The boys live in constant fear that Sudge’s
father will cut off this allowance. Like Sudge, the painter Gaylord Showman
suffers from an “abnormal fear of having to earn money for self-support”
(152). Showman’s father supports him, yet that support is conditional: “Each
year he told his son that he would supply him with an allowance for but one
more year; then he must shift for himself ” (122). Similarly, an American illus-
trator travelling in France with his wife and daughter worries about his supply of
cash. Speaking of himself in the third person, the illustrator foresees his return
to day labour: “‘The old man has to go back and earn some more money
soon’” (124). While imagining that writing will secure their livelihoods, shiftless
hedonists in Montparnasse live in a state of suspended dependency. They rely
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on fretting fathers to pay for drinks and pleasures.
Throughout The Nightinghouls of Paris, Kit intimates that he wants to
help Sudge and Ross financially. He offers them his studio. He thinks about
paying their hotel bill. He buys them drinks. Yet his interest in the young
men—they are approximately eighteen and 22 years old—is not entirely unmoti-
vated. In the sexual free-for-all of expatriate Paris, Kit keenly monitors Sudge
and Ross’s love affair. Almost as soon as Kit meets the young lovers, he ends
up in bed with Ross: “I don’t know how I got home, because when I left the
jazz gaiety of a Negro cabaret I forgot to remember. When I lifted my head
from the pillow in the morning, I saw Ross sleeping in rosy peace beside me.
He woke up as I wondered what we had done the night before. He sat up and
smiled winningly. ‘Sound night we had?’ he questioned with staunch cheer” (8-
9). The will to forget covers a multitude of sexual indiscretions. The “sound
night” might refer to revelries in bars and jazz clubs, but that does not explain
why Ross awakens in Kit’s bed. “Why a surreptitious fuss about a thing so
banal as sex?” Kit wonders, which is his way of not talking about his sexual pro-
clivities and activities (22).
Kit has an eye for male beauty. “Jan had a wonderful physique,” he
observes (44). Anatolio is “delicately boyish” (86). “Three exquisite boys” live
in a villa near Nice (138). Kit mystifies sexual relations by pretending that they
do not matter. Two women add to sexual and gender confusion by bearing
male names: Steve and Freddie. Kit approvingly quotes the lesbian sculptress
Colette on distinctions between men and women: “‘I don’t give a damn about
the bloody masculine or the bloody feminine’” (111).
Ross ultimately leaves Sudge and sails back to Canada. His departure
comes as no surprise to Kit, who documents the couplings and uncouplings of
expatriates with zest. As a sociology of bored, aspiring writers, Nightinghouls
rounds out knowledge of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Although this book
extols the glories of dissipation and youth, it remains alert to the irony that
“Youth is not inherently interesting” (61).
Allan Hepburn
McGill University
Tanalís Padilla. Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista
Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940-1962. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2008.
Throughout its seventy-one-year stint as Mexico’s ruling party, the Partido
Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI, faced multiple forms of resistance. To make
this point, Tanalís Padilla focuses upon the movement led by Rubén Jaramillo in
Morelos between 1940 and his assassination in 1962.
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Robert McAlmon, "The Nightinghouls of Paris," ed. Sanford J. Smoller (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007)

Gerriets, Marilyn

tion of the legalities and economy of e m p i re.
Jessica P. Clark
The Johns Hopkins University
Daniel Samson, The Spirit of Industry and Improvement:  Liberal
Government and rural-Industrial Society, Nova Scotia, 1790-1862
(Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 2008).
In this excellent work, Daniel Samson explores the conflicted emergence of lib-
eral modernism in nineteenth century Nova Scotia. The book is a fascinating
exercise in political economy, combining a firm understanding of economic
activity with the evolution of policy, institutions and attitudes towards economic
change. A sub-theme of the book is the tendency of the poor to treat
resources as common property and the conflicts that emerged as wealthier par-
ties claimed the resources as their own private property.
Samson’s focus is rural. He supports earlier arguments that Nova
Scotian rural society was economically diverse. Some prospered, some fared
poorly, occasionally very poorly indeed. The failure of the potato crop in the
1840s resulted in intense hardship among the poor, particularly in Cape Breton.
More generally, the limited quantity of good quality land and its uneven alloca-
tion among settlers played a large role in creating the hierarchy of the country-
side. The passage of time failed to diminish the inequalities apparent at the
early days of settlement.
Merchants were an essential part of the rural economy, purchasing
agricultural goods and timber from farmers while selling them imported goods.
The merchants possessed economic power; they could choose to carry families
through hard times or to sue in court for unpaid debts. Suits allowed some to
acquire large quantities of farm land.. Merchants also possessed political power,
less by securing office than by their influence on office holders. They were not
reluctant to branch out from trade into mining, shipbuilding and the promotion
of manufacturing as opportunities appeared.
Mining was another ru ral activity that Samson ex a m i n e s. In early ye a rs,
grindstones we re an important ex p o rt . At firs t , poor settlers tre ated the quarries as
common pro p e rt y, but cooperated to manage access. Samson traces the process that
led to the ‘ e n cl o s u re ’ o f these re s o u rces by the more we l l - t o - d o. M i n e ral rights in
coal had been claimed by the Crow n , and the state exe rted more control of t h e s e
re s o u rces than of gr i n d s t o n e s. I n i t i a l ly, a few simple mines we re established that pro-
duced sufficient coal to supply the ga rrisons in Halifax and New fo u n d l a n d , a l t h o u g h
in defiance of gove rnment reg u l at i o n s, s e t t l e rs often dug coal from coastal outcro p s
or from seams on their own land.
Coal was ‘ e n cl o s e d ’ when the General Mining A s s o c i ation establ i s h e d well
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Daniel Samson, "The Spirit of Industry and Improvement: Liberal Government and Rural-Industrial Society, Nova Scotia, 1790-1862" (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Pressm 2008)

Macias, Anthony

another on the political and social impact of cars on the Motherland.
As such, the book focuses on the main auto producing cities (the vast
“Soviet Detroits”), Russia’s age-old problems of poor roads, the use and mean-
ing of autos in the Soviet era, and how the increase in car usage came to be
seen as a political and ideological problem for the government. Along the way,
Siegelbaum inundates the reader with fascinating tales of Soviet Russia’s auto
revolution— from the pervasive influence of foreign manufacturers (Fords and
Fiats were long part of the Soviet autoscape, the latter built in Togliatti, a mas-
sive car city named after the Italian Communist leader), to the role played by
cars in the October Revolution (Kerensky attempted to flee in one, but the
Bolsheviks had disabled all of them the previous night), to images of Lenoid
Breshnev’s driver’s license. A true voyage of discovery for Siegelbaum, and
clearly a labour of love, at times the book reads like a personal travel memoir.
Fighting Traffic and Cars for Comrades are two very different books, yet
for all the geographic and disciplinary distance between them, they are intimate-
ly connected: Siegelbaum’s book shows how the growing desire (not the more
state-controllable demand, as Siegelbaum makes clear) for cars and the private
personal mobility they represented was incongruent with the dictates of com-
munism; Norton’s book illustrates how the growth of personal mobility in the
US was incongruent with the idea of public space. In each case, motordom
won out over the notion of the commonweal, in both instances with very mixed
results. Ultimately, the car might have meant freedom, but as both books
demonstrate, the cost was tremendous— be it the right to walk across the street,
or the very notion of collective effort. The ubiquitous car plays a role in shap-
ing cities, and toppling empires, too.
Dimitry Anastakis
Trent University
Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance
During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
With this fascinating work of scholarship Luis Alvarez bridges social and cultur-
al history, Chicano and African American History, Ethnic Studies and American
Studies. The book’s comparative structure linking Los Angeles and New York
City both broadens and deepens its analysis of youth culture, style politics, citi-
zenship, race, gender, sexuality, and class. The author successfully sheds new
light on a multifaceted subject, arguing that hep cats, pachucos, and pachucas
“employed a ‘body politics of dignity’” (9) as a way to resist being segregated,
regulated, racialized, criminalized, and dehumanized. He situates popular cul-
ture as a site of everyday politics, and the body as a site of power relations, all
within the context of the Double V campaign to defeat fascism abroad and dis-
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crimination at home. In his introduction and throughout chapters on political
economy, class politics, body politics, jazz and public space, and vigilante race
riot violence, Alvarez develops his theses that young male and female zoot suit-
ers played a critical role as subversive others in the national debate over identity
and belonging in American culture, and that they “practiced a complicated and
sometimes contradictory cultural politics in which they did not simply assimilate
into wartime society or rebel against it” (10). By the end of an epilogue that
connects the zoot era to present-day youth culture, the study ultimately persuad-
ed me of both the power of the title, and the resistance of the subtitle.
Methodologically, the author draws from key secondary sources in new
ways, from primary documents, including many personal papers, special collec-
tions, and oral histories, as well as twenty contemporaneous illustrations, and
from seven original author interviews of former zoot suiters to fill in gaps in
the historiography. Within American History, Alvarez pushes the periodization
of the civil rights movement farther back to the war years, and he weaves
Chicanos into the American tapestry of GI’s, sailors, and Rosie the Riveters.
Within Chicano History, he revisits World War II as a turning point for Mexican
Americans challenging segregation and pursuing upward mobility, and he fore-
grounds the complex relationship between the Chicana/o and the African
American experiences. Alvarez employs – and validates – cultural studies theo-
ries by substantiating his claims with historical evidence based on rigorous
research. The Power of the Zoot could thus be taught in undergraduate courses on
the 1940s, black-brown relations, or popular culture, as well as in graduate semi-
nars on cultural politics, historiography, or American Studies. The book speaks
to related studies of youth cultures, subcultures, whiteness, and urban space, it
adds to constructs such as “imagined community” and “social horizon,” and it
introduces new concepts such as “subaltern counterpublic” (116, 151) and zoot
“mobilization” (79-81).
One can still argue over whether the cultural production of the zoot
suiters represented a nascent form of radical politics; whether the draped youth,
with their politics of the possible, were transforming the system or, with their
politics of refusal, not even reforming it. Nevertheless, Alvarez enlivens this
long-standing debate over the larger significance of the zoot suit by grounding
his cultural analysis in socioeconomic factors, and by acknowledging the exis-
tence of both “opposition and accommodation” (9), as well as the limitations –
such as consumerism and sexism – of the somewhat indirect zoot challenge to
America’s “structures of domination” (244). After methodically illustrating how
the mainstream press demonized nonwhite youth as dirty, foreign, deviant,
immoral, and violent, and how conservative and liberal whites “framed the p ro b-
lem of j u venile delinquency in racial term s ” ( 5 1 ) , he conv i n c i n gly demonstrates how
“ zoot suiters claimed dignity by asserting their public pre s e n c e ” (115).
In the end, the author places racial minorities on the center stage of a
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wartime morality play, not as an ideological move, or even a revisionist recovery,
but because the brown bodies in question were in fact engaged in a dramatic
struggle for dignity on the home front, one that called into question the domi-
nant discourses of American democracy, liberty, and equality. By consistently
comparing the East and West Coasts, by using examples from Texas, and by
analyzing the so-called zoot suit riots of Los Angeles and Harlem along with
those of Detroit and of the South, Alvarez inserts Mexican Americans and
African Americans into the all-too-often nostalgic national narrative of the
Depression-World War II “Greatest Generation.” The book therefore has the
topical appeal and intellectual import to attract non-specialist academic readers,
as well as those from a broader general audience interested in “interethnic cul-
tural exchange,” “social relationships that value rather than denigrate differ-
ence,” and the power of “social spaces and cultural identities” (243).
Anthony Macías
University of California, Riverside
David H. Price, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect
of American Anthropology in the Second World War (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008).
Contemporary anthropology shares some general awareness about the field’s
professional contributions to the Second World War on the US side, but the
actual range of US anthropologists’ engagement so far was not well understood.
Most among anthropology’s active participants refrained from publishing about
it in any detail after 1945. For the next generations of scholars, anthropology’s
involvement in a just war against Nazism and fascism seemed to raise few ques-
tions, and thus merely attracted mild scholarly interest.
It took the new international contexts of the late Cold War era and of
the present post-Cold War times, to bring that difference between general
awareness and lack of actual knowledge and understanding back to scholars’
attention. Recent military challenges for contemporary anthropology, such as
the US presence in Iraq since 2003 and the debate about scholars’ involvement
in it, further contributed toward transforming that difference between awareness
and knowledge into a new and timely research field: How did it all begin? What
were the historical foundations of US anthropology’s involvement with the mili-
tary, and which directions did it take? 
David Price pursued these questions at first as one element within an
important earlier project of his. When he researched the archives for his
“Threatening Anthropology” volume (2004) about the FBI’s surveillance of
activist anthropologists in the McCarthy era, he discovered that many scholars’
cooperation with intelligence and military services originated in the years before
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