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Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 227
avec elle. L’auteure clôt son analyse en présentant la vie de quelques veuves, certaines 
fortunées, d’autres plus pauvres. Comme le précise Bradbury dans l’introduction, ces 
biographies ont été choisies non pas parce qu’elles étaient représentatives, mais parce 
qu’elles démontrent la diversité des expériences vécues par les veuves montréalaises. 
 En définitive,  Wife to Widow  est une œuvre magistrale qui a bien mérité le prix Clio 
2011 décerné par la Société historique du Canada ainsi que le Prix Lionel Groulx – Fon-
dation Yves-Saint-Germain 2011 remis par l’Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française. 
Il est difficile d’imaginer comment l’ouvrage aurait pu être plus complet, plus fouillé 
ou plus convaincant. Il est déjà un ouvrage incontournable de l’histoire du Bas-Canada. 
 Michel Ducharme 
 University of British Columbia 
 Brookfield , Tarah –  Cold War Comforts: Canadian Women, Child Safety, and Global 
Insecurity . Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012. Pp. 290. 
 Tarah Brookfield’s very good book sheds a great deal of new light on Canadian women 
and the Cold War. Although its title is somewhat curious – there are few Cold War com-
forts to be found in this book, and more than a little Cold War discomfort – its subtitle 
accurately reflects the book’s preoccupations. Brookfield contends that many Canadian 
women perceived children to be the primary potential victims of global insecurity in the 
decades following the Second World War. The book thus details activist women’s efforts, 
both at home and abroad, to “save the children” from the consequences of international 
military and diplomatic conflict. While Brookfield’s subjects were concerned with real 
children, they were also driven by visions of what historian Karen Dubinsky has called 
the “symbolic child”. 
 Brookfield’s Cold War is both long – from the immediate post-Second World War 
years through the 1970s – and broad. Readers of the book will be reminded of how 
immediate and acute concerns about the arms race and nuclear holocaust were for many 
Canadians, right up until the early 1980s; the Cold War discussed here, however, includes 
not only the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, but also North American efforts to topple 
Communist regimes overseas, and notably in Asia. While this is a study of Canada as a 
whole, readers will gain, not so much a sense of the ways in which different Canadian 
regions experienced the Cold War, as a sense of the experiences of key activist women, 
mostly English-Canadian, and their associations, such as the Voice of Women (VOW) 
or the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Many of these 
activist women were motivated, Brookfield argues, by maternalism. A key component of 
Canadian women’s political stances and strategies in the last decades of the nineteenth 
century, maternalist ideologies were still present (and useful) some seventy-five years 
later. While for some women, and some associations, maternalism may have simply been 
adopted as rhetoric, difficult to attack even in an era that insisted upon political confor-
mity, other militant women appear to have felt deeply that they, as real, potential, or 
surrogate mothers, were particularly well-placed to protect and defend the human race 
in the face of mid-twentieth-century threats. Maternalist thinking existed alongside, and 
228 Histoire sociale / Social History
sometimes took a back seat to, other ideologies: nationalism, for instance, predicated 
on a particular vision of the role that Canada might play in the Cold War, or progressive 
internationalism, such as that espoused by WILPF. 
 The first section of the book, entitled “At Home”, examines women’s efforts to stave 
off the consequences of the Cold War in Canada. Three chapters explore, in turn, com-
munity-based civil defence efforts; the building of fallout shelters (a campaign that never 
really ‘took’ with ordinary Canadian women); and campaigns in favour of disarmament. 
Brookfield chooses to draw upon the historiography of postwar North America that 
insists upon the links to be made between Cold War diplomacy, on the one hand, and 
domesticity incarnated by the nuclear family, on the other – notably the well-known work 
of Elaine Tyler May, Veronica Strong-Boag, and Doug Owram. 
 The book’s second section, “Abroad”, is fascinating, and is the truly novel part of 
this study. Here we see Canadian women’s involvement in various campaigns involving 
children in other parts of the world: donations to, and fundraising for, United Nations-led 
efforts to improve the health and safety of children, such as UNICEF; fostering children 
in (non-Communist) countries such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Greece; aid, in 
money and in kind, to children who had suffered the fall-out of the war in Vietnam; and 
the thorny and controversial question of international adoption, notably as it played out 
in Vietnam and Cambodia. The author’s analysis is perceptive and nuanced: she examines 
these complex issues from different angles, pointing out the problematic nature of the 
politics involved in some of these causes while at the same time drawing a sympathetic 
portrait of the Canadian women who believed so strongly in them. Brookfield is able 
to draw on existing works on some of these topics, notably the excellent and thought-
provoking studies of adoption by Dubinsky and by Strong-Boag, but in most of the sec-
ond part of her book she is breaking new historiographical ground. Where possible, the 
author attempts to ascertain the thoughts and sentiments of those on the receiving end 
of Canadian aid: for example, she shares with her readers some heartbreaking and per-
plexing extracts from letters written by South Korean children to their Canadian foster-
parents and underlines the complex nature and unclear meanings of this fostering. In 
general, Brookfield makes excellent use of the records of voluntary associations and non-
governmental organizations, as well as of governmental records such as those created 
by the Departments of External Affairs, Defence, and Health and Welfare, unearthing 
correspondence and other documents that testify to the persistent lobbying undertaken by 
some Canadian women. She also makes good use of oral histories, including some fifteen 
interviews that she herself conducted. These manuscript sources and oral histories allow 
Brookfield to glimpse the unwavering commitment of some remarkable and dedicated 
women – Ursula Franklin, Muriel Duckworth, Elizabeth Brown, Lotta Hitschmanova, 
Marion Kerans, Lil Greene, among many others – as well as the personal costs of this 
activism for some of these women (notably Goldie Josephy, who, by her own account, 
sacrificed both her health and her marriage to the cause of world peace). 
 The author is generally well served by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, although the 
book is marred by a number of typos. Some black-and-white images (photos, film stills, 
and excerpts from leaflets and brochures) are to be found in the book, but most of them 
are quite small and have been inserted discreetly into the text rather than showcased as 
they deserve. But these are quibbles related to the production of the book, and not to its 
Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 229
content. The analysis found in  Cold War Comforts is important and original, and this 
study will undoubtedly interest scholars of social movements, of women’s activism, and 
of twentieth-century Canada more broadly. 
 Magda Fahrni 
 Université du Québec à Montréal 
 Classen , Constance –  The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch . Chicago: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 2012. Pp. 227. 
 In  The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch , Constance Classen gives readers 
a “feel” for medieval and early modern Europe while demonstrating the centrality of 
touch to the social, cultural, and religious formations of premodernity. More broadly, 
she advocates for sensory history, and for the role that scholars in the social sciences and 
humanities have to play in our understanding of the senses. Early in the book Classen 
reminds readers that “to rely on science for a true understanding of perception is both 
to disregard the ways in which science is itself a social construct and to detract from the 
significance of culturally specific models of sensation” (p. xv). The sensory practices 
and symbolism of any period and its cultural values and norms are closely related and 
indeed mutually constituted. Foregrounding the senses therefore provides an innova-
tive analytical lens for understanding past cultures; Classen argues that such analyses 
have the potential to make the “dry bones of historical fact…more interesting and more 
memorable” (p. xii). 
 Classen defines touch broadly to include not just bodily contact, but also the sensa-
tions associated with temperature, corporeal movement, pleasure, pain and other aspects 
of embodied experience. She also carefully acknowledges the multisensory nature of 
human experience rather than trying to disentangle touch from the other senses. Drawing 
such wide boundaries around her subject allows Classen to investigate an eclectic range 
of ideas and experiences related to touch by exploring “the tactile values that shaped the 
sensibility and sociality” of medieval and early modern Europe (p. xiii). 
 The Deepest Sense challenges the common assertion that the transition to modernity 
can be charted through a straightforward narrative of the rise of the cultural importance 
of vision – which Enlightenment thinkers came to associate with rationalism – and a 
corresponding decline in the primacy of touch – which the same thinkers associated 
with primitivism and base emotion. This is, of course, an embodied version of the equa-
tion that allowed the Middle Ages to be characterized and dismissed as “dark.” Classen 
problematizes these assumptions, arguing that “the sensory patterns of history are too 
complex” for such a simplified account (p. 159). She writes that “touch does not simply 
recede from cultural life in modernity, it is re-educated, and while it retreats from some 
domains, it expands into others” (p. xiv). For example, although Classen would not sug-
gest that one replaced the other, the practice of touching artifacts was newly banished 
from museums and art galleries in the nineteenth century at the same time that the rise 
of the department store (regularly cited as representative of the new regime of  vision ) 
provided a new public venue for handling both precious and profane objects. This shift, 


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goldman, Andrea S. — Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770-1900. 
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Pp. 365.
From 1770 to 1900, Beijing was the center of a vibrant opera culture in multi-ethnic Qing 
China, where the Manchu minority ruled over the Han Chinese majority. Tightly anchored 
on historical and literary sources, and informed by gender and cultural studies, Goldman’s 
erudite social history of opera takes us on an exciting walk in the capital city, from the 
height of the empire to the foreign occupation in 1900 that disrupted the state, the society, 
and the practice of opera. Augmented by fascinating illustrations, the text unravels the 
evolving opera culture as it tracks turning points where politics, society, and war shaped 
the urbanite community of a million people. 
 In the first chapter Goldman constructs the contemporary discourse of opera through 
sixteen guidebooks, or “flower registers,” a genre that she compares to ethnographies. These 
were nostalgic biographies of “boy actresses” (boys playing young lady roles and eroticized 
as female beauties and flower metaphors), homoerotic poetry, patronage, and theater gossip. 
The authors, themselves opera fans and aficionados, were male and southerners sojourning 
in Beijing, all immersed in classical literature and feeling unappreciated by the social and 
political echelons of power. Like the biographers of courtesans, they intended to address 
the gap in the historical records on the opera actors, their skills, beauty, and sensibilities. 
The flower registers equated the gender ambiguity of a boy-actress acting feminine to 
that of a courtesan possessing the male scholar’s literary skills; such “gender performing” 
and “gender-bending” conduct was acceptable social practice for entertainers and did not 
transgress social norms. This discourse of opera circulated in public space, guided opera 
connoisseurship, and educated the audience. 
 The next two chapters focus on state interventions in performance venue and opera genre. 
The commercial playhouses and temple fairs served as public venues while private venues 
were located in salons and Qing palaces. Opera was considered a Han cultural practice 
that the Manchu emperors and banner aristocracy enjoyed. To preserve the distinction 
between Manchus and Han Chinese, the state allowed playhouses to be located only in the 
Outer City, where 90% of the population was Han Chinese. High-ranking officials and the 
bannermen were forbidden to go to the playhouses and mix with the Chinese population. 
Nor were women allowed, on stage or in the audience. To better regulate public morality 
and maintain social control, the state imposed curfews and forced performances to begin 
at noon and to wrap up by 5-7 pm. But enforcement became relaxed, as wealthy women 
attended and Manchu patrons mixed with the Han Chinese. Goldman contends that cross-
dressing on stage did not transgress social norms of gender, especially when such acts 
were accompanied by parody and humor. The temple fairs were open to women and the 
poor; they had fewer restrictions but the state still scrutinized the performances. In the 
private venues, scheduling was more flexible and invited guests included women, who sat 
in segregated space. 
 The Qing state achieved greater success at mandating the musical style, taste or the 
performance genre, but the genre that it eventually patronized was the product of extensive 
blending of regional styles. Earlier the state preferred the elitist, highbrow, kun opera, so 
it ordered the popular qinqiang performers to switch to kun and yi styles. To meet with the 
legislation, qinqiang actors changed names and adjusted melodies; at the same time kun 
troupes also borrowed from qinqiang style. In the 1770s, Anhui troupes arrived in Beijing 
and incorporated xipi and erhuang melodies to produce the hybridized pihuang opera, now 
known as Beijing opera. Designated as lowbrow entertainment, pihuang opera became 
popular among lower classes. When the Taiping Rebellion dismantled kun troupes in the 
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554 Histoire sociale / Social History
1850s, the Qing court in Beijing forged a new identity with commoners and treated the 
outlawry found in pihuang opera as patriotism. The Qing patronage of pihuang opera gave 
it new respect and elevated it to middlebrow and high culture.
 In the last two chapters Goldman analyzes the scripts of Garden of Turquoise and Jade 
and the I, Sister-in-law operas to gauge audience reception. Garden uses some Suzhou 
dialect in a plot in which a clever seamstress and a clown stop a powerful and corrupt 
official from appropriating a poor scholar’s plot of land. When the seamstress marries the 
scholar’s son and the clown gets a job, the theater-goers identified with the downtrodden 
and rejoiced at the triumph of social justice against corruption, and some among them 
relished the erotic allure of the actors and cross-dressing youths on stage. 
 In the I, Sister-in-Law scripts, women characters from the novel, Water Margin, are 
killed as punishment for plotting their husbands’ deaths and for seducing their husbands’ 
biological or sworn brothers. Goldman states that the kun scripts maintained a balance 
between “titillation and decorum” and accorded primary attention to these women, whose 
plight garnered sympathy from the audience. The pihuang operas were entirely performed 
in Beijing dialect; they were misogynous and put primary focus on the wronged husband 
and brother, who violently executed the unfaithful women before joining the outlaws to 
bring down the government. While the I Sister-in-law kun scripts are female-centered, the 
pihuang scripts are male-centered and heap praise on male martial valor and outlawry. 
The clever seamstress and sexually charged I Sister-in-law scripts air private desires in 
public space and as such could be observed as violating the social norms of class and 
gender hierarchies.  Indeed, Goldman’s overall thesis argues that opera served as “a site of 
resistance” in Beijing when the characters, actors, and the audience blurred the boundaries 
of gender, class, ethnicity and morality. She correctly concludes that it was the intersection 
of opera culture with commercial interests and state intrusion that prevented the playhouses, 
actors, and audiences from turning this site into a public sphere where oppositional politics 
could challenge state authority. 
Jennifer W. Jay
University of Alberta
humphries, Mark Osborne — The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public 
Health in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. 323.
If, like me, you tried to write an undergraduate essay in the early 2000s on “Spanish Flu” 
in Canada, you probably found few sources, wrote your 10 or 20 pages, and moved on 
with your life thinking you knew what there was to be known. Mark Osborne Humphries’ 
The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada now joins 
Esyllt Jones’s Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg (UTP 2007) in 
showing us how little we actually understood. Humphries’ important and insightful book 
significantly alters the place of Spanish Flu in the landscape of Canadian social and medical 
history. Some 50,000 Canadians died in this epidemic, and in The Last Plague Humphries 
demonstrates that their deaths ultimately brought Canada into a new, modern era of public 
health work and knowledge.
 Even if they have never spared a thought for cholera, smallpox, or any other historical 
epidemic, most students and scholars of modern history are at least familiar with the 
existence of the global 1918-19 influenza pandemic, hot on the heels of the First World War. 
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emerged: large-scale specialized farms that hired labour, and small scale diversified 
farms sustained by families and wage-labour off the farm. Part III analyzes the division 
of labour and relations of power in farm families through extended personal narratives. 
Family patterns varied considerably; in some men held the off-farm jobs, while women 
cultivated the land, and in other families these roles were reversed. Yet whether on or off 
the farm, women continued to participate in income-producing labour, and they exercised 
considerable power and influence as business managers, and in making decisions about 
the intergenerational transfer of the enterprise. Immigrant (Ukrainian, Czech) families 
purchased small scale farms, and Osterud interviewed women from these as well as “native-
born” families. All found ways to create “partnerships characterized by mutuality rather 
than marginality” (p. 170). A commitment to the family farm counteracted the “gender 
divisions and hierarchies of power that seemed to prevail outside their rural culture” 
(p. 169).
 Part IV deals with how rural men and women organized to solve the economic and 
social problems they faced. They rejected capitalistic solutions and business models, in 
favour of producers’ cooperatives, drawing on the strong tradition of the Grange, and 
undertaking new forms of collective action. The result was a revitalization of rural society. 
The influx of newcomers of varied ethnicities and religions was accommodated through 
new and old forms of social organization that accommodated diversity while avoiding 
controversy. Gender integration continued to be a characteristic of farm organizations, and 
the foundations of cooperative work and mutuality remained secure, as did the mutually 
beneficial ties between generations. All of this had changed however, by the mid twentieth 
century, when the mutual –aid ethos and male-female partnerships collapsed, along with 
the economic viability of small-scale farming. 
 Osterud makes a compelling case that gender flexibility and integration, reciprocity, 
mutual aid, social equality and collective action were the core values of the rural way of 
life in the Nanticoke Valley for generations. The personal narratives provide fascinating 
evidence of this. It would be interesting to compare this community with others in the 
U.S. and North America. It many respects it echoes the situation in Western Canada for 
example, but in other ways it seems worlds away. Farm women on the Canadian prairies 
made common cause with farm men on many issues, but departed from and challenged 
them on others. Women contributed to market-oriented production, but only men legally 
profited from that production. They coped with profound legal inequalities, and fought for 
the vote to acquire dower, married women’s property, homestead and other rights. Western 
Canadian activists sought legislation that would recognize farm women’s labour as central, 
not subsidiary. It is striking that there are few signs of such activism in the Nanticoke 
Valley of the early 20th century. It was a world of great harmony and accord, inclusiveness 
and cooperation. 
Sarah Carter
University of Alberta
ray, Arthur J. — Telling it to the Judge: Taking Native History to Court. Montreal & 
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. Pp. 260. 
The pursuit of history, it seems, involves greater self-awareness now than a generation ago. 
Autobiography, whether in book form or in the pages of leading journals, is a recognized 
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573
form of communication, especially for senior figures in the discipline. Closely related, 
though more specifically focused, is the recounting of courtroom experiences by historians 
– or, in the case of Arthur J. “Skip” Ray, a historical geographer – who have been called 
to testify in legal cases. Most such cases have involved aboriginal and treaty rights, and 
Ray’s extensive experience encompasses the crucially important Delgamuukw case as well 
as an extended series of other First Nation and Métis proceedings in locations stretching 
from British Columbia to Ontario. His memoir is a welcome addition to a specialized but 
growing historical genre. A doctoral graduate of the University of Wisconsin, supervised 
there by the magisterial Canadian historical geographer Andrew Hill Clark, Ray testified 
first in the Horseman case in Alberta in 1985. The final case to be covered in the book is 
another tried in Alberta, this time in 2009, that of Hirsekorn and Jones, meaning that Ray’s 
experience spans a crucial era during which the roles of the courts and of academic expert 
witnesses underwent a profound transition.
 The considerable strengths of Ray’s book include a succession of astute observations on 
the way the courts work and the extent to which they form an arena in which any academic 
witness needs to make an enforced adjustment in order to be effective. Lawyers and judges, 
Ray notes, tend to take a “textual rather than contextual approach” to evidence (p. 14). A 
document, in this view, can be taken to be “plain on its face” (p. 72) – that is, free of the 
nuances and at times the contradictions that historians would routinely identify in, say, 
treaty texts. And, correspondingly, historians themselves may have to be forceful in their 
testimony as interpretive scholars in order to avoid the presumption that they are “little more 
than highly-educated clerks … [with] the special ability to ferret out relevant documents for 
the courts to interpret” (p. 34). Cross-examination is another facet of the trial process with 
which Ray deals extensively and revealingly. It is, he observes, “an inquisition” (p. 30) and 
an often-painful experience – notably in Delgamuukw – far removed from the ambience 
of a PhD defence, where at least the inquisitors hope at some level that the candidate will 
succeed. In a cross-examination, the purpose of the opposing lawyer is to discomfit and 
even to discredit, and, as Ray indicates, a witness who has published extensively has to 
be especially wary, as earlier works can be mined for the inevitable contradictions that 
arise in an extended body of evolving scholarship (p. 37). Yet, all cross-examinations are 
not the same, and Ray documents some that were downright friendly. The most intriguing 
account he gives is of a searching cross-examination in Hirsekorn and Jones. Here, Ray 
consistently uses the first person plural to encompass himself and Thomas Rothwell, the 
Crown prosecutor – “our exchange” (p. 136), “we returned to the subject” (p. 140), and so 
on. A cross-examination, among other things, is a dance that takes two partners.
 A further strength of Telling it to the Judge is the scholarly framework within which Ray 
consistently situates his account. Some courtroom memoirs can gravitate into war stories 
told for their own sake, but this one never does. Ray’s archival work, notably in the records 
of the Hudson’s Bay Company, is highlighted throughout, and two substantial appendices 
exemplify the sources on which his testimony was based. The relationships between 
evidence and interpretation, and between primary and secondary evidence – as explicated 
by, among others, Edward Hallett Carr – are given their due, and other reflections on the 
nature of evidence both scholarly and legal give thought-provoking insights. For example, 
because historical testimony in court is often based on new research that has not yet made 
its way into print, the expert witness may have to swim against a tide of antiquated but 
nevertheless established and peer-reviewed orthodoxies that strike a judge as tried and true 
to a degree that an innovative argument can never be (pp. 154-5). Ray also deals sensitively 
with the decision made by the legal team of the Gitxsan-Wet’suet’en in Delgamuukw to lead 
with the testimony of the elders and then use the academic experts for support – regardless 
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574 Histoire sociale / Social History
of the integrity of this approach, it did not prevent British Columbia Chief Justice Allan 
McEachern from defining life in traditional Gitxsan-We’suet’en societies in Hobbesian 
terms as “having been ‘nasty, brutish, and short’” (p. 41).
 This is, therefore, a reflective book and one of substance. It also necessarily raises 
debatable questions. The notion that the role of an expert witness is to educate the court – 
with “only one ‘student’ – the judge” (p. 145) – is prominent in the concluding chapter. Yet, 
education can take place, arguably, only when the student recognizes the authority of the 
educator. While qualification of an expert witness implies recognition of a sort, the greater 
reality is surely that an expert witness is a witness – no more, no less – and that aspiring 
to be an educator of the judge may make presumptions that are unlikely to be shared by 
the court. Secondly, Ray’s treatment of the perennial dilemma of the expert witness as to 
how to resist being drawn into explicit advocacy in the context of an adversarial process 
is insightful, but disappointingly brief (pp. 155-6). In such areas it might well have been 
helpful to engage with others who have written about the courtroom experience – James 
Axtell and, more recently, William Wicken come to mind – and compare approaches. 
Finally, considering Ray’s long involvement in the “intensifying struggles” of Aboriginal 
participants in the legal process, we gain more understanding of the how than the why 
of his commitment and stamina over so many years. That taking an important role in 
proceedings through which “major gains” were realized, and winning recognition by the 
elders for doing so, “made the very stressful aspects of being an expert witness-educator so 
worthwhile” (pp. 158-9) is undoubtedly true and laudable, but the equation through which 
personal stress and the expenditure of scholarly time and energy are balanced with the 
quality of the goal is passed over lightly.
 Nevertheless, to try to edge a fine and successful courtroom narrative too far in the 
direction of autobiography may be to risk ingratitude for what is, as it stands, an acute 
and invaluable piece of testimony. For historians and those in related disciplines, bearing 
witness in court proceedings can be an important dimension of scholarship, and from Arthur 
J. Ray’s experience and his lucid telling of it we can gain both insight and invigoration.
John G. Reid
Saint Mary’s University
roche, Daniel — La gloire et la puissance. Histoire de la culture équestre, XVIe-XIXe siècle, 
Paris, Fayard, 2011, 495 p.
Après avoir, dans un premier volume intitulé Le cheval moteur, abordé le rôle fonctionnel 
du cheval, du début des temps modernes jusqu’à l’ère de la mécanisation, en mettant 
en lumière les divers aspects de l’utilisation de l’animal dans la vie quotidienne et dans 
l’univers du travail, l’auteur, avec ce deuxième volume, centre son propos sur la place que 
le cheval a occupée, durant la même période, dans le genre de vie et dans la culture des 
élites. Le champ chronologique dans lequel s’inscrit cette réflexion, intégrant l’Ancien 
Régime, la Révolution et l’avènement d’une société de notables, sur fond de révolution 
industrielle, est le cadre de changements profonds qui induisent une évolution marquée 
de la culture équestre. Le rôle du cheval de travail est, à terme, voué à s’estomper et à 
disparaître, tandis que la possession de montures ou d’animaux d’attelage, la maîtrise de 
l’art équestre, le recours à une équitation récréative deviennent des marqueurs sociaux.
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is able to reconnect with “traditional” culture in an ever more internationalized Japanese 
world largely through the enthusiastic efforts of adepts (almost all women) trained under 
dominant tea schools such as Urasenke.
 Finally, Surak reflects upon the ubiquity of tea in Japanese popular culture as a symbol 
of national identity in Chapter Five (Beyond the Tea Room: Toward a Praxeology of 
Cultural Nationalism). After reviewing an array of examples of tea and its symbolism 
from public education, museums, tourist sites, advertising, film, television and print media, 
Surak closes with several comparisons to other similar types of “nation-work” in the 
European world in order to suggest a methodology for further investigating “the roots of 
garden-variety nationness” (p. 186) in Japan and beyond.
 In Making Tea, Making Japan, Surak has done an admirable job of unearthing the 
complex processes by which the elite tea culture of Japan’s medieval age became a potent 
embodiment of mass national culture in the twentieth century. Some readers might wish 
for even deeper analysis of class identity in the construction of tea as a national symbol, or 
perhaps more explicit comparison of how people in the West and Japanese themselves have 
constructed tea as a representation of Japanese society. Nonetheless, beautifully written 
and lucidly argued, the book offers much of value for scholars and students of modern 
Japan and the cultural manifestations of national identity there and in other parts of the 
world.
Erik Esselstrom
The University of Vermont
théorêt, Hugues — Les chemises bleues. Adrien Arcand, journaliste antisémite canadien-
français, Québec, Septentrion, 2012, 416 p. 
Journaliste de profession, Hugues Théorêt est également connu pour être le rédacteur en 
chef de Hier encore, une revue d’histoire outaouaise, et l’auteur d’une étude sur une autre 
personnalité de l’antisémitisme du Canada d’avant-guerre (Le docteur Lalanne. Le faiseur 
d’anges à la croix gammée, 2011). Il signe ici la troisième biographie à avoir été écrite sur 
Adrien Arcand, cette figure de proue du fascisme canadien. Il s’agit en fait de la deuxième 
biographie publiée en moins de trois ans. Celle d’Hugues Théorêt a la particularité d’être 
en partie tirée d’un mémoire de maîtrise qui a été largement remanié et complété par un 
travail d’envergure. Le mémoire traitait en effet des activités d’Arcand après 1945, alors 
que le livre couvre l’ensemble de son existence. 
 Les chemises bleues nous décrit la vie d’Adrien Arcand de manière chronologique et 
essentiellement factuelle. Arcand est d’abord présenté comme un journaliste actif à La 
Patrie, puis à La Presse. Suite à un licenciement en 1929, il devient animateur de différents 
petits périodiques antisémites. Il a également fondé divers mouvements d’inspiration 
ouvertement fasciste : l’Ordre patriotique des goglus, le Parti national social-chrétien et 
le Parti de l’unité nationale du Canada (PUNC). La biographie offre un bon résumé de 
l’idéologie d’Arcand. Celui-ci professait une haine du juif virulente et était un corporatiste 
à la manière de Mussolini. Il se voulait aussi un impérialiste convaincu, qui détestait les 
séparatistes et faisait peu de cas des nationalistes canadiens-français. Son activité militante 
et ses idées ont fini par inquiéter les autorités à la veille de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, 
si bien qu’il a été interné de 1940 à 1945. 
Compte rendus / Book Reviews
© Histoire sociale / Social History, vol. XLVI, no 92 (Novembre / November 2013)
588 Histoire sociale / Social History
 Le grand apport de la biographie d’Hugues Théorêt à la connaissance que nous avons 
d’Adrien Arcand est ce qui provient de ses travaux de maîtrise. L’auteur consacre en effet 
près du tiers de son livre à l’après-guerre. Plusieurs pages sont alors dédiées à l’analyse 
des ouvrages publiés par le chef antisémite après 1945, ce que les autres biographes ne 
font pas. Les idées véhiculées par À bas la haine! – le dernier livre écrit par Arcand – sont 
ainsi largement expliquées. Malgré la défaite du fascisme en Europe, Arcand est demeuré 
un antisémite convaincu jusqu’à la fin de sa vie. Il a contribué au discours négationniste, 
en étant notamment le mentor d’Ernst Zündel. Le biographe cherche aussi à placer Adrien 
Arcand dans les réseaux néo-fascistes internationaux actifs durant la guerre froide. Il 
montre qu’Arcand entretenait une correspondance soutenue avec plusieurs personnalités de 
l’extrême droite de l’époque. Si une partie de cette correspondance a déjà été mentionnée 
dans les autres biographies d’Adrien Arcand, Hugues Théorêt explique en détail qui était 
chacun des correspondants. Plusieurs informations utiles sur l’héritage d’Arcand sont 
également fournies. L’activité de certains de ses collaborateurs suite à sa mort est ainsi 
décrite.
 L’auteur affirme, dans une note sur l’historiographie en fin de livre, que l’originalité de 
son ouvrage réside aussi dans l’insistance qu’il porte à l’antisémitisme d’Adrien Arcand 
plutôt qu’à son fascisme. Le fondement de cette haine du juif est cependant peu expliqué 
et contextualisé. Hugues Théorêt dresse le portrait du vieil antisémitisme catholique et 
affirme qu’Arcand était un intégriste religieux dans son idéologie antijuive (p. 164). On 
aurait cependant aimé comprendre les distinctions entre cet antisémitisme et celui professé 
par Hitler. C’est d’autant plus important qu’Arcand a été un admirateur du Führer, même 
s’il a fini par prendre ses distances avec le nazisme. Est-ce qu’il y a eu une évolution dans 
son antisémitisme? L’auteur avance en fait qu’Arcand était un catholique convaincu qui 
aurait abandonné son intérêt pour Hitler après la publication en 1937 de l’encyclique Mit 
brennender sorge, condamnant les nazis (p. 380). Pourquoi n’a-t-il alors pas tenu compte 
de l’encyclique Non abbiamo bisogno, publiée en 1931 et quelque peu critique du fascisme 
italien? Il est également souvent fait mention d’Édouard Drumont, antisémite français très 
influent, mais le biographe se contente surtout de faire des analogies avec Arcand et de dire 
qu’ils s’abreuvaient aux mêmes sources. Il n’est jamais expliqué comment Drumont a pu 
influencer Arcand directement, ni pourquoi il s’intéressait à lui plus qu’à d’autres ténors de 
l’antisémitisme. La biographie renseigne en fait peu sur l’histoire des idées, même si elle 
offre un bon récit événementiel du parcours d’Adrien Arcand. 
 L’ouvrage comporte par ailleurs quelques problèmes dans l’appareil de référence. 
Il y a par exemple plusieurs renvois aux notes précédentes qui ne sont manifestement 
pas liés correctement, notamment aux chapitres 3, 4 et 9. Le principal reproche qu’on 
peut faire à l’ouvrage d’Hugues Théorêt est cependant l’absence de certaines sources qui 
auraient grandement éclairé la vie d’Adrien Arcand. L’auteur rapporte notamment que 
la Gendarmerie royale du Canada (GRC) aurait détruit les documents qu’elle a produit 
sur Arcand et son parti (p. 142), alors que ces archives sont faciles à trouver. Pour y 
avoir accès, il suffit de savoir qu’une partie de la GRC est devenue le Service canadien 
du renseignement de sécurité suite à la Commission McDonald. Le biographe cite aussi 
souvent le fonds RG 117 conservé à Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, sans dire qu’il 
s’agit du Bureau du séquestre des biens ennemis et sans expliquer la responsabilité que 
celui-ci avait sur les personnes internées durant la guerre. Les archives produites par l’État 
concernant Arcand sont autrement omises. Il n’est ainsi pas fait mention des documents 
créés par le ministère de la Justice du Canada et par le ministère des Affaires étrangères, 
ni des dossiers des tribunaux où des causes impliquant Adrien Arcand ont été portées 
(notamment la Cour des sessions de la paix et la Cour de l’échiquier). Les archives des 
589
camps où il a été interné et son dossier de militaire ne sont pas non plus utilisés. Pas 
plus que le recueil de correspondance du chef fasciste publié par certains de ses anciens 
collaborateurs (Arcand ou… la vérité retrouvée, 2002) ou le fonds Alexandre Duhaime, 
un militant du PUNC, acquis par Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec en 2010. 
Il aurait enfin été intéressant d’analyser Le Bavard, périodique publié durant la guerre par 
Joseph Ménard, grand collaborateur d’Arcand.
 Malgré quelques lacunes, la biographie écrite par Hugues Théorêt demeure un bon 
ouvrage qui permet de connaître les principaux pans de la vie d’Adrien Arcand. Elle saura 
sans doute plaire aux amateurs d’histoire et de biographies. Elle pourrait également être 
utile aux chercheurs chevronnés, mais ils devraient tenir compte de ses limites.  
David Rajotte
Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
whitaker, Reg, Gregory S. kealey, and Andrew parnaBy — Secret Service: Political 
Policing in Canada from the Fenians to Fortress America. Toronto: University of 
Toronto Press, 2012. Pp. 687.
The authors of this impressively-researched and detailed work wrestle with fundamental 
questions at the heart of liberal democracies: to what degree should police or security 
agencies monitor their citizens and organizations? When does surveillance of political 
dissent violate the fundamental principles of democracy? To what degree should political 
policing be accountable to elected authority or civilian oversight? Secret Service examines 
more than 150 years of how federal police agencies and, starting in the 1980s, the civilian 
Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), spied on Canadians. The authors have 
years of experience in researching and writing on political policing and state responses to 
labour and the left; one of them has been the subject of his own RCMP dossier. As they 
document, most of this surveillance was hidden from the public and not reported to or 
debated in parliament. Although the RCMP shared information with the United States, 
Canada’s political policing was largely self-contained until the 2001 Al-Qaeda attacks on 
New York. With “9/11,” the situation changed, and Canada’s spy agencies became more 
integrated with those of the United States and operated for the first time beyond Canadian 
soil. This new reality was revealed by the O’Connor inquiry and a Military Police 
Complaints Commission which investigated the rendition of Maher Arar to Syria and the 
role of CSIS and military intelligence in the transfer of Afghan prisoners captured by the 
Canadian army to the custody Afghanistan’s notorious security service. 
 Historically, security and intelligence was not a burning issue politically and focused 
almost entirely on Canadian citizens in Canada. Yet, external links were often the catalyst 
for action; the first secret police effort responded to Fenian threats within Canada and 
from the United States in the 1860s. Gilbert McMicken’s secret police, with agents and 
informants in border cities, by 1870 had all but neutralized the Irish nationalist security 
threat to Canada. The Dominion Police, formed in 1868 following the assassination of 
Thomas D’Arcy McGee, was the nucleus of Canada’s political policing effort. By the 
1910s, its focus had shifted to the South Asian community in British Columbia where 
“agitators” were challenging British rule in Indian and Canada’s immigration policies.
 By the early twentieth century, the Royal Northwest Mounted Police (RNWMP) 
became involved in monitoring dissent, notably from the radical left and organized labour. 
Compte rendus / Book Reviews
© Histoire sociale / Social History, vol. XLVI, no 92 (Novembre / November 2013)


French

Théorêt, Hugues – Les chemises bleues. Adrien Arcand, journaliste antisémite canadien-français

Metcalf, Thomas R.

305
des notes de cours), aux nouveaux établissements d’enseignement tels l’École 
Normale de l’an III, l’École centrale des travaux publics, Muséum, Collège de 
France, etc.
 L’ouvrage se termine par une conclusion de Boris Noguès et une postface de 
Dominique Julia qui en plus de faire ressortir les apports des contributions et de 
souligner leurs liens transversaux, proposent de nouvelles pistes de recherche. 
Cet ouvrage remarquable rend compte des recherches innovantes dans le champ 
de l’histoire des universités à la période moderne et représentera une référence 
obligée pour qui veut aborder l’université et la ville.
Lyse Roy
Université du Québec à Montréal
Amrith, Sunil – Crossing the Bay of Bengal: the Furies of Nature and the Fortunes 
of Migrants. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 353.
Sunil Amrith announces the central argument of this compellingly crafted work 
in its first sentence. The Bay of Bengal, he says, “was once a region at the heart 
of global history” (1).  Suffused with nostalgia for what once was, Crossing the 
Bay of Bengal tells us the story of the growth, both cultural and economic, of 
this “densely woven together” region during the centuries of European imperial 
dominance, followed during the 1940s and 1950s by a collapse of “astonishing 
rapidity” (3). In the end the Bay fragmented into two distinct global regions—
labeled South Asia and Southeast Asia—governed by a patchwork of jurisdictions 
with little in common among them.
 Much of this story is of course well-known, and, from the era of the trading 
companies through to the crisis of the Second World War, it has been the subject 
of much research over many decades. At one level, Amrith’s account effectively 
brings together this existing scholarship. At another, he pulls the reader into a 
richly textured narrative, based on extensive original research that gives the story 
a fresh, even exciting, telling. At its heart are the two themes identified in the sub-
title: the challenges of nature, and the experiences of overseas migrants. The work 
is fundamentally chronological in its organization.
 The Bay of Bengal is of course the eastern half of the much larger Indian 
Ocean, and it cannot be consistently kept separate from its western half, linking 
India with Africa and the Middle East. As Amrith makes clear in his opening 
chapter on “the life of the Bay of Bengal”, the monsoons, arising in the western 
ocean, shape the life of the entire oceanic basin. Migrant flows too went west, 
to Mauritius and beyond, as well as to Burma and Malaya. Kerala and Gujarat 
looked westward much as maritime Bengal and the Coromandel coast looked 
eastward. Linking the two oceanic halves is the island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 
where one can stand, as I did recently, on the ramparts of the Portuguese fort at 
Galle, and look both east and west across the sea. Still, the Bay of Bengal possesses 
Comptes rendus / Book Reviews
306 Histoire sociale / Social History
a coherence of its own, and Amrith sensibly keeps his focus on the coastal traders, 
merchants, and migrants, who crossed that vast body of water.  For many people 
over many centuries, the “far shores of the sea’s littoral” were “closer—culturally, 
economically, imaginatively—than their own hinterlands” (27).
 Throughout, Amrith endeavors, wherever possible, to give the reader a sense 
of the life of the ordinary Indian who ventured across the Bay. Initially these 
migrants were predominantly merchants, like the Tamil Muslims who settled in the 
Straits, married local Malay women, and financed shipments of textiles, rice and 
pepper. From their marriages, and those of Chinese merchants, emerged the mixed 
Jawi Peranakan community of the colonial era. These merchants too, as they built 
shrines in the form of those they knew from Tamilnad, made of the Bay’s littoral 
“an arc of holy places” (88). The coming of steam, and with it an imperial order 
seeking access to the resources of the region, vastly increased its “human traffic” 
(the title of chapter 4). This movement, from the 1840s, Amrith insists, “took place 
amid servitude”, involving various kinds of recruitment and indenture, and was 
often propelled by famine in India (111). Most of these migrants traveled to the 
three rapidly growing colonial territories of Ceylon, Burma, and Malaya. In each 
chapter Amrith moves back and forth between these three territories as he assesses 
the fortunes of the migrants who settled in each.  In Ceylon and Malaya, brokers 
or agents employed by estates “used a combination of inducement, coercion, and 
above all debt to mobilize workers in South India, and then immobilize them 
on plantations” (115). In Burma, by contrast, many of the migrants, known as 
Chettiars, were well-to-do merchants, who established banking firms to finance 
rice cultivation for export. 
 Amrith sensitively explores what he calls the “collective memory” of Tamil 
workers who found themselves in Malaya. They at once “searched for the 
familiar”, he says, and sought also to make of their new homes a “land where 
they belonged” (125, 143). In what is perhaps the most original chapter, entitled 
“oceans’ crossroads”, Amrith skillfully evokes the lives of those who moved from 
the plantation to the city in the interwar years. It was, he argues, an encounter 
that produced “new forms of urban life and a great deal of cultural mixing” 
(146). Using oral histories and memoirs, he finds the 1930s remembered as “an 
experience of modernity”—marked by cinema shows, newspapers, bicycles, food 
stalls, and a cosmopolitan diversity of peoples (160, 179). 
 Economic upheaval, the rise of nationalism, and finally Japanese invasion 
snapped the cords that for so long had bound together the world of the Bay 
of Bengal. A chapter aptly titled “crossings interrupted” tells a tragic tale of 
refugees, of brutality, and of starvation. Once the war was over, independence 
for these former colonial territories reinforced the focus on the land rather than 
on the ocean. As Amrith writes, the sea had become an uninhabited “empty 
space” (190). Meanwhile the resident Indians scattered around its shores found 
themselves engaged in a desperate struggle for citizenship in what were now their 
own homelands. Amrith concludes the book with some unsettling reflections on 
climate change and the ecological transformation of the region under the pressure 
of development. With its low lying coasts, subject to devastating tsunamis and 
307
monsoonal fluctuations, the lands around the Bay of Bengal will, he argues, be 
among the hardest hit by the “rising waters” produced by a warming earth (266). 
Perhaps, Amrith wistfully hopes, looking forward, these threats will “open a small 
window” for “reimagining” the Bay of Bengal as an integral whole (284).
 Already a prize-winning book, Crossing the Bay of Bengal at once opens up the 
history of this often neglected region, and demonstrates how scholarly writing can 
be made accessible to all. A masterful work, this book deserves a wide readership.
Thomas R. Metcalf
University of California, Berkeley
BouchArd, Gérard (ed.) – National Myths: Constructed Pasts, Contested Presents.
London: Routledge, 2013. Pp. 306.
Our political identities and identifications are formed via processes at once 
communal and deeply psychological, the result of multifaceted historical, 
sociological, and cultural forces. As Seymour Martin Lipset (1959) wrote many 
years ago, the stability of nations, particularly nations existing through democratic 
consent, depends on effectiveness and legitimacy. Effectiveness refers to the 
performance of the state, primarily its ability to establish conditions for economic 
development and distribution. Legitimacy is more symbolic in nature, reflecting 
the support of the population for key institutions of society and how the political 
process prioritizes and addresses major issues of concern. Lipset underscored 
that, while effectiveness relies on instrumental assessment, legitimacy is more 
affective and tied to the maintenance of a common “secular political culture.” As 
Gérard Bouchard and his fellow contributors explore in this engaging collection 
of essays, a fruitful framework for understanding this symbolic and emotional 
connection between individuals and their political system is in terms of national 
myths, or the beliefs, values, meanings, memories, and ideals that are associated 
with the project of the state. 
 This volume consists of sixteen chapters, all but one of them examining the 
mythic dimensions of national identity in a specific country. The last chapter by 
Bouchard synthesizes themes from the constituent chapters and highlights topics 
for researchers going forward. The continents of North America, Europe, Asia, 
Africa, and South America are all represented in the book, although with certain 
selection biases. Canada gets two chapters; Japan has its own chapter and is also 
the focus of a chapter on Chinese attitudes; Australia, an interesting case for this 
kind of analysis, is omitted. In his brief Introduction, Bouchard explains that 
authors received free rein in regard to their definition of the concept of national 
myths as well as their focus on particular questions of mythic origins, functioning, 
impact, and evolution. While the result serves the editor’s aim of conveying “the 
richness” of this field of inquiry, it also presents intellectual and methodological 
inconsistencies bound to limit the collection’s appeal for some audiences.
Comptes rendus / Book Reviews


Amrith, Sunil – Crossing the Bay of Bengal: the Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 353.

Rochefort, David A.

307
monsoonal fluctuations, the lands around the Bay of Bengal will, he argues, be 
among the hardest hit by the “rising waters” produced by a warming earth (266). 
Perhaps, Amrith wistfully hopes, looking forward, these threats will “open a small 
window” for “reimagining” the Bay of Bengal as an integral whole (284).
 Already a prize-winning book, Crossing the Bay of Bengal at once opens up the 
history of this often neglected region, and demonstrates how scholarly writing can 
be made accessible to all. A masterful work, this book deserves a wide readership.
Thomas R. Metcalf
University of California, Berkeley
Bouchard, Gérard (ed.) – National Myths: Constructed Pasts, Contested Presents.
London: Routledge, 2013. Pp. 306.
Our political identities and identifications are formed via processes at once 
communal and deeply psychological, the result of multifaceted historical, 
sociological, and cultural forces. As Seymour Martin Lipset (1959) wrote many 
years ago, the stability of nations, particularly nations existing through democratic 
consent, depends on effectiveness and legitimacy. Effectiveness refers to the 
performance of the state, primarily its ability to establish conditions for economic 
development and distribution. Legitimacy is more symbolic in nature, reflecting 
the support of the population for key institutions of society and how the political 
process prioritizes and addresses major issues of concern. Lipset underscored 
that, while effectiveness relies on instrumental assessment, legitimacy is more 
affective and tied to the maintenance of a common “secular political culture.” As 
Gérard Bouchard and his fellow contributors explore in this engaging collection 
of essays, a fruitful framework for understanding this symbolic and emotional 
connection between individuals and their political system is in terms of national 
myths, or the beliefs, values, meanings, memories, and ideals that are associated 
with the project of the state. 
 This volume consists of sixteen chapters, all but one of them examining the 
mythic dimensions of national identity in a specific country. The last chapter by 
Bouchard synthesizes themes from the constituent chapters and highlights topics 
for researchers going forward. The continents of North America, Europe, Asia, 
Africa, and South America are all represented in the book, although with certain 
selection biases. Canada gets two chapters; Japan has its own chapter and is also 
the focus of a chapter on Chinese attitudes; Australia, an interesting case for this 
kind of analysis, is omitted. In his brief Introduction, Bouchard explains that 
authors received free rein in regard to their definition of the concept of national 
myths as well as their focus on particular questions of mythic origins, functioning, 
impact, and evolution. While the result serves the editor’s aim of conveying “the 
richness” of this field of inquiry, it also presents intellectual and methodological 
inconsistencies bound to limit the collection’s appeal for some audiences.
Comptes rendus / Book Reviews
308 Histoire sociale / Social History
 Bouchard’s own chapter on Quebec, which he portrays as “the small nation 
with the big dream,” is valuable not only for its detailed discussion of the 
collective imagination of this Francophone Canadian province, whose national 
strivings resulted in two referenda on sovereignty in 1980 and 1995, but also 
for his summary of the sociological approach to analyzing the concept of myth. 
Bouchard explains that myths are distinctive in four respects: they are complex 
hybrids of contending elements—fact and fiction, reason and emotion, conscious 
and unconscious beliefs; they have meaning in terms of both a particular social 
and historical setting and grander universal symbols and narratives; they possess 
an almost sacred, self-perpetuating power; and they can function either to promote 
or to inhibit social change. Bouchard locates all these themes in Quebec’s mythic 
heritage, although two “master myths” have wielded transcendent power during 
the last two hundred years—Quebec as “the dominated humiliated nation,” and 
Quebec as “the fragile threatened cultural minority.” Currently, disparate new 
myths are emerging in which the forces (and attractions) of globalization appear 
to be undermining Quebec’s historical preoccupation with nationality, yet without 
replacing this preoccupation with a coherent, vitalizing alternative for popular 
consumption. 
 Allan Smith’s chapter on the nation of Canada offers a telling companion piece 
to this focus on Quebec. Quebecois resistance to full absorption into the larger 
Canadian state project has not detracted from the myth making of English Canada 
so much as it has, in Smith’s words, contributed to the construction of a national 
“role as custodian and overseer of a power-allocating apparatus” devoted to 
maintaining the “correct balance” between centralized authority and subnational 
self-determination. This defining tension, in turn, has placed Canada, practically 
and psychologically, in the company of other countries—among them Spain, 
the United Kingdom, and Belgium—that all face predicaments of governance 
regarding “nations within nations.”  
 Ian Tyrrell from the University of New South Wales, Australia, writes the 
chapter on the United States. From the days of Tocqueville, American society has 
excited the curiosity of foreign observers, and there is something to be said for 
the perspective that political and cultural distance affords in this tangled business 
of national mythology. Tyrrell centers his discussion on the myth of American 
exceptionalism, or “the idea of the United States as a unique civilization outside 
the normal historically determined path of human history.” Three pillars of 
imagination uphold this general conviction: first, a strong religious sensibility 
capable of accommodating the value of freedom of worship as well as the notion 
of a divinely sanctioned democratic imperialism; second, the dual political 
principles of liberty and egalitarianism; and third, the belief in American economic 
abundance. What is perhaps most interesting about this myth of exceptionalism on 
the contemporary scene is not its broad-based unifying appeal, however, but its 
divisive appropriation in the discourse of the political right precisely as economic 
problems at home and military setbacks abroad have gnawed away at American 
self-confidence. And while Tyrrell notes how the mantra of exceptionalism 
effectively constrained the process of American health reform by marginalizing 
309
foreign practices in this sector, much more could be said along these same lines in 
policy areas ranging from capital punishment, to education, to global warming.     
 In his chapter on Russia, Yitzhak Brudny traces the mythic aftermath of the 
collapse of Soviet communism. Although many new post-communist countries 
have established identities that aim in the direction of liberal democracy, such 
is not the case with Russia. Rather, the national mythology of the new Russia 
contains decidedly anti-liberal and authoritarian elements that harken back to an 
old notion of Russia as “an empire with a unique non-Western path.” Consistent 
with this shift, there has even been a campaign under Putin for the rewriting of 
school textbooks to accent anti-Western perspectives and Russian nationalist 
themes. Brudny emphasizes the far-reaching policy consequences of this mind-
set, which induces political elites to take steps calculated to expand and glorify 
the state. More than just intellectually persuasive, these analytical observations 
provide a compelling means for understanding Russia’s aggressive actions in the 
region of Ukraine and Crimea since the winter of 2014. 
 This is but an illustrative sampling of the numerous “master” and “derivative” 
myths of nationhood encompassed in this compendium, which promises to have 
broad utility for comparativists working in political science, sociology, history, 
and related disciplines. Bouchard suggests that, contrary to the view of some 
commentators, national myths are hardly becoming less important in this era of 
global interconnection. In varying ways, these case studies support his claim, as 
well as the importance of his call for more investigation of the intricate pathways 
by which mythological structures rise, fall, and exert their hypnotic influence 
within the psychic underpinnings of the polity. 
David A. Rochefort 
Northeastern University
carstairs, Catherine and Nancy Janovicek – Feminist History in Canada: New 
Essays on Women, Gender, Work and Nation. Vancouver: University of British 
Columbia Press, 2013. Pp. 290.
Feminist History in Canada: New Essays on Women, Gender, Work and Nation 
is a thoughtful, well-written and ultimately convincing compilation of essays 
composed by leading scholars who have forever shaped the fields of women’s 
and gender history in Canada. Edited by historians Catherine Carstairs and 
Nancy Janovicek, this collection evocatively features works that demonstrate the 
important contributions women have made to the economic, social and cultural 
realm of Canada. With a strong focus on biography, the authors present a unique 
flare to Canadian feminist history, offering rich descriptions of various conditions, 
interactions and experiences faced by individual and collective groups of women 
over time. This anthology focuses on a wide range of issues and explores a variety 
of important themes, covering the latest debates in the field and providing thought-
Comptes rendus / Book Reviews


Bouchard, Gérard (ed.) – National Myths: Constructed Pasts, Contested Presents.London: Routledge, 2013. Pp. 306.

Ward, Allison Marie

331
activités humaines à travers les époques » (p. 115) sur le territoire à l’étude. 
Au même titre que ses collègues archéologiques, l’auteur ne s’est pas non plus 
embarrasser outre-mesure des paramètres historiques géopolitiques et à privilégie 
le long terme en s’intéressant d’abord aux processus d’évolution de l’occupation 
et des activités humaines en découlant. Il faut donc souhaiter la poursuite des 
travaux de Pelletier et de ses collègues archéologues, si l’on aspire à maintenir ce 
renouvellement de l’historiographie sur la Nouvelle-France. 
Nicolas Landry
Université de Moncton, Campus de Shippagan
Perrun, Jody – The Patriotic Consensus: Unity, Morale, and the Second World 
War in Winnipeg. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014. Pp. 292. 
Canada’s contribution to the Second World War, both on the battlefields and home 
front, is one of the most studied topics in Canadian history. It appeals to both 
academic historians and the popular reader, especially given recent anniversaries 
related to the conflict, such as the seventieth anniversary of the Allied landing 
on the beaches of Normandy. In The Patriotic Consensus, Jody Perrun takes 
this international story down to the local level. He examines how the people 
of Winnipeg adapted the implementation of nation-wide programs, such as 
recruitment and conscription, Victory Bonds, volunteer drives, and rationing, to 
suit their local context. He extends this analysis to emotional as well as practical 
components of life during the war, such as reactions to housing shortages, and 
post-war reunions. Perrun argues that traditional narratives, which suggest there 
was a “patriotic consensus” in the country that made the implementation of 
these programs possible, do not account for the “nuanced experiences of smaller 
communities,” ignoring emotions and reactions to policy in practice (p. 215). He 
suggests that analyzing these histories in a local, urban context provides a more 
effective framework through which to understand these reactions to the conflict. 
 Perrun frames his work within larger historiographical conversations about the 
experiences of people living in wartime cities, many of which focus on urban 
centres in Britain. This approach includes considering the effects that “problems 
related to work, wages, consumption and emotional well-being” had on how 
people experienced their lives at war (p. 215). Perrun suggests that these day-to-
day issues had a significant impact on people’s willingness to co-operate in war 
efforts on the home front. Given Winnipeg’s sizable population, and exceptional 
class, cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity, he believes that the city provides 
an excellent case study for answering questions about people’s experience of the 
war and their relationship to its new prevalence in their lives (pp. 4-10). While he 
acknowledges Winnipeg is exceptional because of its diversity, he suggests that 
that allows his conclusions to be applied more broadly, since they represent the 
Comptes rendus / Book Reviews
332 Histoire sociale / Social History
experiences of the diverse groups and communities represented in cities across 
Canada. (p. 14). 
 Each chapter of the book looks at one specific element of the war’s impact 
on the home front. These include wartime restrictions to freedom of speech and 
expression, the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities, the Victory Bond 
program, enlistment and volunteering, rationing and housing shortages, and family 
reunions. These chapters provide specific examples within this broader case study 
of national programs in the local context. Perrun tends to telescope in, starting 
with the national context of programs, such as Victory Loans, and then analyzing 
its application and impact in Winnipeg specifically. This approach allows him to 
immediately counter some of the national narratives about political consensus as 
they come up, rather than relegating the counter-narrative to one chapter or section. 
By looking at programs in isolation, Perrun is able to provide striking and vivid 
examples of life in wartime Winnipeg which help to illustrate his broader picture 
of the city. For example, his treatment of “If Day” brings his chapter on Victory 
Bonds to life. On February 18 1942, a variety of wartime agencies, soldiers, 
and volunteers came together to transform Winnipeg into a city under Nazi rule 
overnight. This exercise, known as “If Day,” was designed to prompt an upswing 
in investment in the Second Victory Loan campaign. The day’s activities included 
the arrest of clergymen and leaders of ethnic organizations, even greater rationing, 
roadside stops for impromptu investigations, and a bonfire of “banned books” (pp. 
109-112). Perrun’s description, and the inclusion of photographs and reproduced 
newspapers in the appendix, brings to life a chapter that otherwise necessarily 
relies on tables and statistics, used to prove Winnipegers were participating in 
Victory Bond drives throughout the war. Using examples such as these, Perrun is 
able to concretely demonstrate the ways in which local ingenuity could be applied 
to make national programs appealing and fresh. 
 Looking at each wartime program in isolation presents a clear picture of how 
it was implemented locally. However, it also limits Perrun’s ability to examine the 
impact of these programs as a whole on the “Patriotic Consensus.” For example, 
Perrun separates his discussion of rationing and material goods consumption from 
his analysis of wartime housing shortages. This approach leads to contradictory 
conclusions about two programs that effected many people in similar ways. 
Regarding rationing, he suggests it was broadly accepted and internalized, and 
that “Public acceptance of controls was important because grumbling about living 
conditions could adversely affect home front morale” (p. 166). He then goes on 
to discuss the so-called “slum conditions” that most Winnipeg residents lived in 
throughout the war, due to overcrowding and underdeveloped housing conditions 
(p. 170). He concludes that these conditions “took their toll on family morale 
during the war” (p. 184). However, he does not discuss these two interrelated 
wartime conditions together, even though it would seem that poor housing 
conditions, including a lack of heating and cooking equipment, would affect how 
one felt about and experienced rationing and other material deprivation. Similarly, 
in his discussion of Victory Bonds, he mentions that employees participating in 
Victory Bond programs often felt coerced by employers, managers, or supervisors 
333
to contribute to the program, and that the even the Wartime Information Board 
was concerned about how employees felt about this practice (p. 88). This point 
offers another perfect glimpse into the limits of consensus, but Perrun does not 
elaborate on the topic in his conclusion to the chapter, instead concluding that 
the high rate of sales demonstrated acceptance of the program. Examples such 
as these ones provide excellent opportunities for him to question what consensus 
looked like, but Perrun does not sufficiently elaborate on their significance as a 
whole or integrate them well into his conclusions. 
 The Patriotic Consensus provides a well-researched, dynamic and detailed 
study of the impact of war on one urban centre, and on broad cross-sections of 
the Canadian population. This book will certainly be of interest to historians of 
Winnipeg, and Canadian experiences on the home front during the Second World 
War. While its conclusions could have been pushed further, it nonetheless provides 
a refreshing look at how Western Canada participated in the war effort. Given that 
Western Canada is often overlooked in histories of during the Second World War, 
in favour of industrial Ontario or dissenting Quebec, it is a valuable addition to the 
national story of how Canadians experienced the war at home.
Allison Marie Ward
Queen’s University
PhilliPs, Mark Salber – On Historical Distance. New Haven and London: Yale 
University Press, 2013. Pp. 293.
There is often an underlying prescriptiveness in histories of historical thought that 
Mark Salber Phillips seeks to avoid in his beautifully written book On Historical 
Distance. “Distance” may seem an odd concept to focus on in this regard, as it is 
typically invoked to explain the historian’s privileged position of detachment as a 
product of the passage of time, a rather narrow and normative view that is difficult 
to separate from modern historical practice. What Phillips has in mind, however, 
is a more comprehensive understanding of distance as a form of mediation that 
helps us think about the various “ways in which we are placed in relation to the 
past […]. In broader terms, this means that historical distance belongs to a family 
of feelings, judgments, and actions that are bound up with our need to navigate 
the world around us” (12).
 This much broader view of historical distance suits Phillips’ understanding 
of the development of history, which is not best understood as a linear path that 
leads inevitably to some sort of true historical consciousness, but rather “as circles 
of overlapping and competing genres that collectively make up the full family 
of historical representation” (141). Hence historical writing is just one among a 
variety of forms that are analysed throughout the book, which include historical 
painting, literary history, popular forms of historical representation such as 
museums, as well as counterfactual fiction.
Comptes rendus / Book Reviews


Perrun, Jody – The Patriotic Consensus: Unity, Morale, and the Second World War in Winnipeg. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014. Pp. 292.

Diedler, Jean-Claude

Chats, loups, ours et autres cacodémons : le zoomorphisme démoniaque dans l’imaginaire du montagnard vosgien des XVIe et XVIIe siècles

 ,  

Livres reçus / Books Received

Thistle, John

575
Ingram, Darcy – Wildlife, Conservation, and Conflict in Quebec, 1840-1914. 
Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013. Pp. 272.  
Darcy Ingram’s Wildlife, Conservation, and Conflict in Quebec, 1840-1914, is a 
welcome addition to the growing literature on wildlife conservation in Canada. Its 
overall argument is that conservation in Quebec was in many ways unique when 
compared to the rest of North America. Conservation not only emerged earlier in 
Quebec than it did elsewhere, but according to Ingram it also took a rather unique 
form: that of a “public-private partnership (p. 132) between the colonial state and 
elite sportsmen. Faced with declining fish and game resources, in the second half 
of the 19th century state officials forged an alliance with what Ingram calls an 
“associational network” of elite Anglophone sport hunters and fishers, collectively 
referred to as patricians. At the heart of this partnership were exclusive hunting 
and fishing leases that enabled those who held them to control wildlife resources 
over very large areas. By the early 20th century, Quebec had created private leases 
covering many of the best and most accessible fish and game resources in the 
province. 
 Wildlife resources were important, not just to the patricians who wanted to 
protect and conserve them for sport and other purposes, but also to Quebec’s 
sprawling rural population who relied on them for food, trade, and, in the case of 
indigenous peoples, a whole range of social and cultural purposes. Rural peoples 
worked within the new conservation rules, but as Ingram shows they also broke 
them. In Quebec, as elsewhere, wildlife conservation created a new legal subject 
– the poacher. Law was not the only, or even the most important, means by which 
the new conservation rules were enforced, however. As Ingram observes: “In 
an effort to divide opposition and to recast the limits of patrician authority as 
forms of paternal benevolence,  the state also gave aboriginals the right to take 
salmon, lessees gave their catches to locals, and prosecutors forgave the deserving 
poor” (p. 100 emphasis in original). In this context, with conflicts over resources 
becoming more common, the point of paternalism was to encourage compliance, 
not simply to impose it.  
 Nonetheless the new system continued to generate opposition among rural and 
indigenous people, especially after 1880 as the original patrician approach, with 
it mix of paternalism and benevolence, gave way to a more rigid application of 
the law. The fish and game clubs who controlled wildlife at the end of the century 
had an economic interest in enforcement: a portion of the fines associated with 
poaching went to the clubs doing the regulating. It was also the case, however, 
that the original patrician vision of conservation had narrowed over time, leaving 
even less room for rural people. Increasingly, wildlife was valued simply for the 
sporting opportunities it afforded the middle and upper classes, and as a source of 
revenue for the provincial state. 
 If all this sounds somewhat familiar – the enclosure of fish and game 
resources by elite sport hunters, and the marginalization rural and indigenous 
uses of resources have become basic themes in the North American literature on 
conservation – the story of Quebec nonetheless offers some striking new insights. 
Comptes rendus / Book Reviews
576 Histoire sociale / Social History
For one thing, there was the public-private partnership that in the Quebec case 
enabled a few people with hunting and fishing leases to control resources over 
very large areas. According to Ingram’s analysis, there was nothing like the 
Quebec system of leases anywhere else in North America. The closest comparison, 
according to Ingram’s analysis, was Scotland, which had also pursued a system of 
private estates and more or less exclusive hunting and fishing areas as a means of 
conserving resources. The overwhelming reliance on hunting and fishing leases in 
Quebec is striking when compared to other jurisdictions that pursued a different 
path. 
 A second, and perhaps related insight, has to do with the ways in which 
conservation has been variously imagined and carried out in different provincial 
and national contexts. The patricians at the heart of Quebec’s early conservation 
movement were committed, not only to protecting and conserving resources, but 
also to notions of progress, improvement, and social order that no doubt had had 
parallels elsewhere in the world, but that nonetheless also reflected Quebec history 
and society in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is true that leases created 
an exclusive system of wildlife conservation that favoured elites. But Ingram 
also wants us to understand that the patricians who shaped conservation in the 
second half of the 19th century took a broad view of what wildlife conservation 
could achieve. Faced with declining resources, they set out to protect and improve 
fish and game populations in ways that would support broad social goals. This 
became less apparent over time as hunting and fishing clubs narrowed their 
vision, essentially becoming evermore exclusive. But as Ingram argues, for the 
first generation of patricians at least, conservation was about more than simple 
self-interest. It was also about progress, improvement, and, at the broadest level, 
social order in Quebec society. 
 Wildlife, Conservation and Conflict in Quebec is a carefully written and 
convincingly argued study that makes an important contribution to Canadian 
history. It also raises questions about conservation that may be relevant for future 
research. Ingram does not draw from geographic theory, but as an historical 
geographer I was especially struck by the degree to which conservation in Quebec 
was a spatial strategy: controlling resources implied a particular production of 
space. More and better maps might have made this point much more explicitly, but 
perhaps that is another study. Reading this book I also wondered about informal 
regulation of resources by rural and indigenous people before the patricians and 
their hunting and fishing leases arrived. Ingram acknowledges that “Euro-North 
American conservation strategies typically negated longstanding indigenous 
material and cultural practices that were in themselves alternate forms of 
conservation” (p. 21), but the details in Quebec case are left largely unexplored. 
Finally, at times I wondered about the evidence for depletion, and thus the need 
for conservation at all, at least as the patricians understood it. At times it seemed 
as though the only evidence that a fishery was being depleted was that someone 
of social standing (a patrician) had said so. How were local animal populations 
counted and evaluated? In fairness, these too may be entirely separate studies, 
with Ingram’s excellent analysis of the origins of conservation in Quebec serving 
577
as essential context. Indeed, as it stands Wildlife, Conservation and Conflict in 
Quebec is still a substantial historical study. It ought to be of interest not only to 
Canadian historians, but also to historians of conservation and social movements 
more generally. 
John Thistle
Memorial University
Laderman, Scott & Edwin Martini (eds.) – Four Decades on: Vietnam, the United 
States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War. Durham and London: 
Duke University Press, 2013. Pp. 344. 
“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in 
memory” (p. 132), declares Viet Thanh Nguyen, one of the eleven contributors of 
Four Decades On. The edited volume analyzes the legacies of the Vietnam War 
which ended in April 1975, when Communist troops unified the country under 
Hanoi’s rule. To justify the need for such a book, the editors Scott Laderman and 
Edwin Martini cite the lack of research on the war after 1975 (p. ix) and propose to 
offer more. This work gathers scholars from various backgrounds as well as from 
different generations. There is no clear thematic or theoretical articulation though, 
and it seems to move along a time loop: the first and the last chapters underline 
the importance of the late 1960s in understanding postwar Vietnam, while almost 
all other essays proceed from 1975 to the present. From this, two themes emerge, 
war memory and post-1975 transnational relations. To Laderman and Martini, all 
the essays in this collection demonstrate that there is a link between nation and 
narration (p. 11) and that “official narratives must contend with the ways in which 
memory, conflict, and trauma are inscribed in and out through artistic expression, 
cultural commodities, and everyday life” (p. 12).
 Ngo Vinh Long studies the last years of the Republic of Vietnam in Saigon 
and shows how political, social and economic bankruptcy eliminated political and 
social diversity even before the Communist victory of April 1975. The next five 
essays focus on war memory. Walter Hixson studies the cultural rehabilitation of 
the war through Hollywood movies and the creation of the war memorial, whereas 
Alexander Bloom insists on its consequences on both American war experience 
and presidential discourse. Heonik Kwon reveals that despite the Cold War logic 
of the conflict, families in their private sphere in Vietnam perform “ambidextrous 
practices” (p. 98), allowing those who mourned a revolutionary martyr to have a 
greater leeway in commemorating their sons fallen for South Vietnam. Schwenkel 
studies sites of memory and highlights how visitors reflect on the experience of all 
sides of the conflict. English literature and American studies scholar Viet Thanh 
Nguyen shows that compassion in various memoirs does not translate into a desire 
for peace, nor self-identification with the opposite camp, but manifests itself in 
resounding calls of despair and hope. 
Comptes rendus / Book Reviews


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