Abstract: Frontier regions regularly attract successive waves of immigrants until their territory is fully settled. This does not necessarily mean, however, that local society is open to newcomers. Both the process of socio-economic evolution at work in those areas, and the deliberate actions of earlier settlers trying to provide their offspring with the best possible opportunities may prevent the integration of later migrants into the original community. The result may be, as in the upper St. John valley, the emergence of a clearly stratified society dominated by the descendants of the charter families, and this within 50 years of foundation. Les fronts pionniers attirent normalement plusieurs vagues successives d’immigrants, jusqu’a ce que leur territoire soit entierement occupe. Ceci toutefois ne signifie pas necessairement que la societe locale soit ouverte aux nouveaux venus. Aussi bien le processus d’evolution socio-economique qui caracterise ces regions, que les strategies des premiers pionniers essayant d’accroitre les chances de leurs descendants, peuvent prevenir l’integration d’immigrants plus recents dans la communaute de depart. Il peut en resulter, comme dans la vallee de la St-Jean, l’apparition d’une societe visiblement stratifiee, dominee par les descendants des familles souches, et ce moins de 50 ans apres la fondation.

Abstract: For Mennonites who immigrated from Pennsylvania to Upper Canada beginning in the early nineteenth century and for those who arrived from the Russian Empire later that century and from the Soviet Union beginning in the 1920s, the community midwife served multiple purposes: not only did she assist at numerous births when hospital deliveries and physicians were rare or inaccessible, but she also provided a wide range of essential health care services that were crucial to individuals and families experiencing the trauma of uprooting and the challenges of rural settlement. Community and family studies profile some of the more prominent midwives in early Mennonite settlement communities, supplementing the information found in the midwifery journal of Mennonite immigrant Sarah Dekker Thielman. While women such as Sarah did hold characteristics that fit the image of the “neighbour” midwife, a concept that has dominated historical portrayals of women who assist at childbirth, their personal lives and chosen career paths exhibited a great deal more diversity. Chez les Mennonites qui ont immigre de la Pennsylvanie au Haut-Canada au debut du XIXe siecle et chez ceux qui sont arrives de l’Empire russe plus tard durant ce siecle et de l’Union sovietique au debut des annees 1920, la sage-femme du village s’acquittait de roles multiples : non seulement aidait-elle souvent les femmes a accoucher la ou les hopitaux et les medecins etaient rares ou inaccessibles, mais elle offrait egalement une foule de services de sante essentiels qui etaient cruciaux pour les personnes et les familles aux prises avec le traumatisme du deracinement et les defis de l’etablissement en milieu rural. Des etudes sur les communautes et les familles dressent le profil de certaines des plus eminentes sages-femmes des premiers etablissements de pionniers mennonites, etoffant l’information trouvee dans le journal de sage-femme de l’immigrante mennonite Sarah Dekker Thielman. Si des femmes telles que Thielman correspondaient bel et bien a l’image typique de la sage-femme du « voisinage », un concept qui a domine la representation historique des femmes aidant a l'accouchement, leur vie personnelle et leurs choix de carriere logeaient a l'enseigne d’une diversite beaucoup plus grande.

Abstract: Over the span 1880 to 1900, Montreal was a city of newcomers, a majority of them women, and most of them arrived before age 30 from Britain, Europe, the United States, or rural counties of Quebec and Ontario. Young people aged 15 to 29 accounted for a third of the population and half of the recorded labour force. The authors’ analyses of 1881 census data and a 5 per cent sample for 1901 uncover a wide range of factors affecting life transitions. A substantial increase in participation of young unmarried women in the waged labour force was made possible by shifts in the timing of life transitions: the ages at which girls left school, left home, entered the work force, and married. The schedule was affected by migration, and it differed among the three principal cultural communities — French-speaking Catholic, English-speaking Catholic, and Anglo-Protestant. All three groups of women increased their rates of participation in the labour force, but the distinctions based on cultural affiliation persisted in both the scheduling of life transitions and the kinds of work in which they engaged. De nombreux immigrants arriverent a Montreal durant les dernieres decennies du XIXe siecle. Plus de la moitie d'entre eux etaient des femmes et la plupart arrivaient a un âge plutot jeune, en provenance de la Grande-Bretagne, d’Europe, des Etats-Unis, ou encore des regions rurales du Quebec et de l’Ontario. Les jeunes de 15 a 30 ans representaient alors le tiers de la population totale et occupaient la moitie de tous les emplois declares. Tirant parti des donnees du recensement de 1881 et d’un echantillon de 5 p. 100 de celui de 1901, ce texte examine les facteurs susceptibles d'influencer le parcours de vie des jeunes Montrealaises a cette epoque : âge auquel elles cessent d’aller a l’ecole, quittent le domicile familial, commencent a travailler et se marient. L'experience migratoire affecte ces trajectoires, qui varient aussi selon la communaute culturelle d'appartenance. Les femmes des trois principaux groupes – franco-catholique, irlandais catholique et anglo-protestant - connaissent toutes une augmentation de leur taux de participation au marche du travail, mais les trajectoires empruntees et le type de travail effectue ne sont pas les memes dans tous les groupes.

Abstract: Innovations in computing are presenting historians with access to new forms of expression with the potential to enhance scholars’ capacities and to support novel methods for analysis, expression, and teaching. Computer-generated form can change the way we generate, appropriate, and disseminate content. If these benefits are to be realized, however, the discipline must make room for a new domain of practice-based research. The practices we have for knowledge generation were devised in association with print technology, and historians must now acquire and develop practices that can inform our use of digital forms of representation, as well as the platforms that sustain them. Les innovations informatiques donnent aux historiens l’acces a de nouvelles formes d’expression et offrent la possibilite d’accroitre les capacites des universitaires et de favoriser l’emergence de nouvelles methodes d’analyse, d’expression et d’enseignement. L’ordinateur peut changer notre facon de generer, de nous approprier et de diffuser le contenu. Pour recolter de tels fruits, la discipline doit toutefois faire place a un nouveau domaine de la recherche fondee sur la pratique. Nos pratiques de generation du savoir sont fonction de la technologie de l’imprime, et les historiens doivent maintenant acquerir et developper des pratiques qui pourront nous aider a maitriser les formes numeriques de la representation de meme que les plateformes qui leur servent d’assise.

Abstract: From the mid-1890s to the mid-1920s, a number of women and men from Japan landed in two Canadian seaports, Vancouver and Victoria, and after varying periods of time crossed the border to the United States. Evidence derived from an analysis of quantitative and qualitative sources sheds light on the different experiences passage across the Canada-U.S. border entailed for men and women. While the border’s porous nature at the beginning of this period provided a double opportunity for a substantial number of Japanese male migrants, for women the presence or sponsorship of a spouse was essential to their passage across the border. Such findings ostensibly strengthen the conventional view that Japanese men played active roles in migration and that Japanese women were marginal in this movement. However, evidence also points to the salient, and indeed indispensable, role of Japanese women in the emergence of new communities on both sides of the border. Du milieu des annees 1890 au milieu des annees 1920, un certain nombre de Japonaises et de Japonais ont debarque dans les ports de mer canadiens de Vancouver et de Victoria, choisissant a divers moments par la suite de franchir la frontiere vers les Etats-Unis. Des donnees tirees d'une analyse de sources quantitatives et qualitatives nous eclairent sur l'experience differente que vivaient les hommes et les femmes de leur traversee de la frontiere canado-americaine. La porosite de la frontiere au debut de cette periode ouvrait une double porte a un tres grand nombre d’immigrants japonais de sexe masculin, ce qui n'etait pas le cas pour les femmes, dont la presence ou le parrainage d'un epoux etait imperative a leur traversee de la frontiere. De tels resultats renforcent ostensiblement l'explication classique voulant que les hommes japonais jouerent alors un role actif dans la migration et que les Japonaises n'en jouerent qu'un marginal dans ce mouvement. Mais les donnees tendent aussi a demontrer que les Japonaises ont joue un role de premier plan, voire indispensable, dans l'emergence de nouvelles communautes des deux cotes de la frontiere.

Abstract: The history of nineteenth-century Canada is one of tentative nation-building when varied influences combined to determine the shape, content, and identity of the new country. Historians and anthropologists are increasingly using the concept of “transnationalism” both to emphasize that individual lives transcend national territory and to acknowledge the undeniable power that national states, cultures, and elites possess in delineating the parameters of multi-sited social spaces and their meaning. The study of immigration agents is a useful tool to demonstrate transcultural competency and its value to both the individual and the host society. Nearly all immigration agents in post-Confederation Canada were men, yet Elise von Koerber is one notable exception. Through her work, von Koerber, whose outlook was profoundly transnational, contested interpretations of the meaning of gender, ethnicity, and class from her own vantage point in the intellectual and ideological borderlands between Europe and North America. Although various currents in 1870s Canada and Continental Europe created a favourable climate for Koerber’s approach, her gendered transnationalism intersected and collided with national projects. Her ideas were cautiously endorsed on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1870s, yet lost ground to the dominant vision of Canada as integral part of the British Empire by the 1880s. L'histoire du Canada du XIXe siecle, c’est la tentative de bâtir un nouveau pays a une epoque ou les influences s’entremelaient pour en determiner la forme, le contenu et l’identite. Les historiens et les anthropologues utilisent de plus en plus le concept de « transnationalisme » a la fois pour marquer le fait que la vie individuelle transcende le territoire national et pour reconnaitre le pouvoir indeniable qu'ont les Etats-nations, les cultures et les elites de delimiter les parametres et le sens d’espaces sociaux a poles multiples. L’etude des agents d’immigration est utile pour demontrer la competence transculturelle et sa valeur tout autant pour l'individu que la societe d'accueil. Presque tous les agents d'immigration dans le Canada post-Confederation etaient des hommes. Elise von Koerber est une exception notable. Par son travail, von Koerber, dont les perspectives etaient profondement transnationales, contestait le sens que l'on pretait aux notions de genre, d'ethnicite et de la classe a travers le prisme intellectuel et ideologique a mi-chemin de l’Europe et de l’Amerique du Nord qu'etait le sien. Si des courants divers creaient un climat favorable a l'approche de von Koerber au Canada et dans l'Europe continentale des annees 1870 le transnationalisme de celle-ci se conjuguait et se butait aux projets nationaux. Durant les annees 1870, on a prudemment souscrit a ses idees des deux cotes de l'Atlantique, mais au cours des annees 1880, celles-ci ont perdu du terrain a la faveur de la vision dominante d'un Canada faisant partie integrante de l'Empire britannique.

Abstract: J. W. Bengough of Toronto began an “Independent Political and Satirical Journal” called Grip in 1873. A grab-bag of commentary, cartoons, and satire, Grip was virtually required reading for the Canadian elite, including politicians, scholars, business leaders, and journalists. Today Bengough is regarded largely as a reformer. Yet his commitment to progressive causes did not deter him from publishing antisemitic, anti-Catholic, and other racist views. An analysis of Bengough’s antisemitic words and images demonstrates how, through Grip, antisemitism gained respectability in late-nineteenth-century Canada. J. W. Bengough de Toronto a lance une « revue politique independante et satirique » intitulee Grip en 1873. Pot-pourri d’opinions de bandes dessinees et de satire, Grip etait de lecture pratiquement incontournable pour l’elite canadienne, politiciens, lettres, chefs d'entreprise et journalistes compris. Aujourd'hui, Bengough est generalement considere comme un reformateur. Pourtant, son engagement envers les causes progressistes ne l’a pas dissuade de publier des opinions antisemites, anticatholiques et a d’autres penchants racistes. L’analyse des ecrits et des images de Bengough demontre comment, par l'entremise de Grip, l’antisemitisme a gagne en respectabilite au Canada a la fin du XIXe siecle.

Abstract: Over 4,000 nurses served with the Canadian armed forces during the Second World War, comprising a second generation of military nurses known by rank and title as Nursing Sisters. Military medical records and personal accounts reveal that military nurses enjoyed an elite professional status based on their relative closeness to the front lines of combat and to the frontiers of medical technology. Reductions in morbidity and mortality rates were frequently attributed to the presence of Nursing Sisters in forward field units. While Nursing Sisters capitalized on their position within the armed forces to enhance their expertise and develop expanded practice roles, such efforts were contingent on geographical setting, the availability of physicians and medical orderlies, and the social construction of medical technologies as men’s or women’s work. Flexibility and autonomy were more evident closer to the front lines, where patient acuity was higher, skilled personnel fewer, and risk-taking more acceptable. Such flexible boundaries, however, were “for the duration” only. Plus de 4 000 infirmieres ont servi dans les forces armees canadiennes durant la Deuxieme Guerre mondiale, formant une deuxieme generation d’infirmieres militaires. On decouvre a l’etude des dossiers medicaux militaires et des recits personnels que les infirmieres militaires jouissaient d’un statut professionnel d’elite du fait d’etre a proximite relative des zones de combat et aux premieres loges de la technologie medicale. La reduction des taux de morbidite et de mortalite etaient souvent attribuee a la presence des infirmieres militaires dans les unites de campagne sur les fronts de guerre. Si les infirmieres militaires profitaient de leur position au sein des forces armees pour gagner en expertise et accroitre leur role de praticiennes, de tels efforts etaient fonction de l’emplacement geographique, de la disponibilite de medecins et de preposes aux soins et de la construction sociale voulant que les technologies medicales soient du ressort des hommes ou des femmes. Il y avait davantage de souplesse et d'autonomie pres des lignes de front, ou l’acuite des besoins du patient etait plus grande, le personnel qualifie, moins nombreux et les risques, plus acceptables. Cette flexibilite ne valait toutefois que « pour la duree » du conflit.

Abstract: home itself constituted an incentive to further abandonments. The availability — this interesting suggestion needs to be followed up further! — of women willing to abandon their own infants and nurse others for pay enables the institutionalization of infant care. Bianchi’s superbly researched and constructed book advances our understanding of the critical problem of unwanted children in past times. MARGARET L. KING The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Abstract: The Church Missionary Society (CMS) and its missionaries held that, regardless of race, the wives of CMS agents could facilitate the Society’s work in the Canadian mission field. The Society also maintained, however, that the Native wives of CMS agents in Canada possessed advantages over their European-born counterparts, including hardier physical constitutions and ties of kinship, culture, and language to local Aboriginal populations. Nevertheless, because prejudices and axioms rooted in racial assumptions governed the attitudes of European-born individuals towards those of Aboriginal ancestry, many contemporaries doubted the ability of Native women to overcome what were considered to be racially inherent weaknesses and to embrace and project the core essential values and ideals deemed necessary of middle-class missionary wives. La Church Missionary Society (CMS) est ses missionnaires jugeaient qu’independamment de la race, les epouses des agents de la CMS pouvaient faciliter le travail de mission de la CMS au Canada. La CMS estimait egalement que les femmes autochtones de ses agents au Canada possedaient des atouts que n'avaient pas leurs homologues nees en Europe, dont leur physique plus robuste et leurs liens parentaux, culturels, et linguistiques avec les populations autochtones. Quoiqu'il en soit, comme les prejuges et les axiomes ancres dans les a priori raciaux gouvernaient les attitudes des personnes nees en Europe envers la population d’ascendance autochtone, de nombreux contemporains doutaient de la capacite des femmes autochtones de pallier ce que d'aucuns qualifiaient de faiblesses essentiellement raciales et d'adopter et de projeter les valeurs et les ideaux de base que devaient necessairement posseder, estimait-on, les epouses des missionnaires de la classe moyenne.

Abstract: WITH THESE WORDS John Milton reminded readers of his midseventeenth-century tragedy of the final days of Samson Agonistes as a captive of the Philistines in the Bible’s Book of Judges. Echoing too the famed classical work Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, Milton’s work is reflective of a Greek tragedy. Yet his prose is arguably more Hebraic than Hellenic in tone. After the blind and bound Samson reconciles — or seeks to reconcile — himself with his tribesmen, family, and fellow man, the tragic biblical story concludes with Samson’s final heroic and suicidal display of strength for his assembled Philistine captors, when he pulls down the pillars of their temple, thereby destroying himself and all inside it (Judges 1:13–16). The tragedy is emblematic, some have suggested, of Milton’s own sightless condition and the destruction of his own political dreams with the failure of the Commonwealth in 1660. Contemporaries could not but have drawn the connection, too, between the fate of the Philistines, whose corpses lay strewn amidst the rubble in