Index
Results (81)
Book Review
Selling Canada: Three Propaganda Campaigns that Shaped the Nation
In his latest project Daniel Francis takes on a series of publicity campaigns, running from the 1870s through to 1940: immigration to western Canada, the First World War, and the promotion of tourism from the...
BC Studies no. 177 Spring 2013 | Page(s) 182-83
Book Review
Yip Sang and the First Chinese Canadians
Francis Hern’s Yip Sang and the First Chinese Canadians is the biography of a prominent merchant in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The story begins with Yip Sang’s arrival in...
BC Studies no. 177 Spring 2013 | Page(s) 189-90
Book Review
Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885-1945
This is a groundbreaking book in Chinese Canadian History and in the history of the global Chinese diaspora. It challenges conventional perceptions of Chinese relations with the mainstream society in Canada during the historical era...
BC Studies no. 173 Spring 2012 | Page(s) 147-48
Book Review
Contesting White Supremacy: School Segregation, Anti-Racism, and the Making of Chinese Canadians
In September 1922, the Victoria, B.C. school board ordered 155 Chinese children (97 were Canadian-born and many spoke only English) to leave its regular elementary schools and move to segregated schools which only they would...
BC Studies no. 173 Spring 2012 | Page(s) 148-50
Book Review
Geography of British Columbia: People and Landscapes in Transition 3rd Edition
I was intrigued by this textbook and agreed to review it for two reasons: first, because it is more than fifteen years since I lived in British Columbia and I was keen to discover how...
BC Studies no. 174 Summer 2012 | Page(s) 132-3
Book Review
Whoever Gives us Bread: The Story of Italians in British Columbia
More than twenty years ago, Gabriele Scardellato lamented the dearth of attention to Italian Canadians living “beyond the frozen wastes” (Scardellato 1989). There have been modest advances since that time, including Patricia K. Wood’s Nationalism...
BC Studies no. 173 Spring 2012 | Page(s) 160-62
Book Review
Chilliwack’s Chinatowns: A History
Writing about immigrants has long been central to Canadian historical scholarship. Today, the history of immigration also constitutes an essential element of the popular imagination in Canada and, in turn, of our sense of national...
BC Studies no. 175 Autumn 2012 | Page(s) 131-32
Book Review
Chinese Community Leadership: Case Study of Victoria in Canada
I am particularly interested in this volume, having been born in Vancouver’s Chinatown in 1938 and having a father who was treasurer of a district association. He was a shirt tailor, and I remember in...
BC Studies no. 169 Spring 2011 | Page(s) 158-161
Book Review
Human Welfare, Rights, and Social Activism: Rethinking the Legacy of J.S. Woodsworth
Human Welfare, Rights, and Social Activism is one of those unique edited volumes in which the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. As suggested in the subtitle, the legacy of J.S. Woodsworth...
BC Studies no. 172 Winter 2011-2012 | Page(s) 141-45
Book Review
Municipalities and Multiculturalism: The Politics of Immigration in Toronto and Vancouver
Kristin R. Good, a political scientist, accomplished two main objectives in this book: (1) investigating how and why municipalities responded to dramatic changes in their ethno-cultural composition and (2) evaluating her findings about municipal multicultural...
BC Studies no. 170 Summer 2011 | Page(s) 177-179
Book Review
UBC: The First 100 Years
With its heavy glossy paper, large format, and copious illustrations, this looks like a celebratory coffee table book. To classify it as such would be wrong. Drawing on previous histories of the University of British...
BC Studies no. 166 Summer 2010 | Page(s) 109-11
Book Review
Gold Dust on His Shirt: The Story of an Immigrant Mining Family
British Columbia produces an astounding number of works on non-British immigrants on the west coast. Many recent books, such as Voices Raised in Protest (2008), The Triumph of Citizenship (2007), Nikkei Fishermen on the BC...
BC Studies no. 163 Autumn 2009 | Page(s) 142-3
Book Review
Book Review
The Ker Family of Victoria, 1859- 1976: Pioneer Industrialists in Western Canada
Approached by David Nation Ker to document the history of his family in British Columbia since Robert Ker’s arrival in 1859, John Adams has produced an engaging narrative, principally focused on the lives and careers...
BC Studies no. 162 Summer 2009 | Page(s) 196-8
Book Review
Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada
This is an interesting and provocative book that will motivate readers to rethink the role of the state in directing and managing a multicultural society. Exalted Subjects is divided into a number of sections labelled...
BC Studies no. 160 Winter 2008-2009 | Page(s) 135-137
Book Review
The Trail of 1858: British Columbia’s Gold Rush Past
After the California and Australia gold rushes, the Fraser River rush of 1858 was considered the third great exodus of gold seekers in search of a New El Dorado. At the time, it was said:...
BC Studies no. 160 Winter 2008-2009 | Page(s) 121-3
Book Review
In Search of Canadian Political Culture
In Search of Canadian Political Culture positions itself at the centre of debates over the nature of political culture in Canada, taking on disputes within what Alan Cairns would call the “sociological school” (behavioural versus...
BC Studies no. 159 Autumn 2008 | Page(s) 152-5
Book Review
Book Review
Finding Families, Finding Ourselves: English Canada Encounters Adoption from the 19th Century to the 1990’s
This book is a long-overdue corrective to existing literature on the history of the Canadian family. Adoption, as Veronica Strong-Boag asserts, “is a far from marginal phenomenon in Canadian history” (vii), yet historians have given...
BC Studies no. 154 Summer 2007 | Page(s) 134-7
Book Review
Book Review
The Wheel Keeper
In The Wheel Keeper , first-time novelist Robert Pepper-Smith, an instructor at Malaspina University College in Nanaimo, British Columbia, has written an engaging and often enchanting tale that draws heavily on three generations of the...
BC Studies no. 147 Autumn 2005 | Page(s) 132-4
Book Review
Nationalism from the Margins: Italians in Alberta and British Columbia
According to Patricia Wood, ethnic studies in Canada – or at least the study of Italian immigrants and their descendants – is at best a marginal or fringe activity in the Canadian academy. She complains,...
BC Studies no. 147 Autumn 2005 | Page(s) 123-7
Book Review
Watara- Dori (Birds of Passage)
WATARA-DORI (Birds of Passage) is a biographical fiction of a half-year period (24 June 1915 to 1 January 1916) in the life of a Japanese-Canadian fisher. Mitsuo Yesaki has a thorough knowledge of the Pacific coast fisheries,...
BC Studies no. 146 Summer 2005 | Page(s) 120-1
Book Review
A Modern Life: Art and Design in British Columbia, 1945-1960
An early and still not inappropriate epithet for Vancouver is Terminal City. This epithet denotes not only a peripheral cultural as well as a geographical location but also the city’s potential for development, despite its...