Index
Results (250)
Review
Capital and Labour in the British Columbia Forest Industry, 1934-1974
A few exceptions aside, the remarkable escalation of books that have investigated British Columbia’s forests and forest economy in recent years have not paid much attention to labour. Yet labour’s role is vital to the evolution...
BC Studies no. 159 Autumn 2008 | Page(s) 155-7
Review
Guarding the Gates: The Canadian Labour Movement and Immigration
Understanding immigration is central to understanding Canadian working-class history and the fortunes of the Canadian labour movement. This is the case not just because immigration stocked, and restocked, the labour market but also because workers...
BC Studies no. 155 Autumn 2007 | Page(s) 145-7
Review
Unfree Labour?: Struggles of Migrant and Immigrant Workers in Canada
Canada has a long history of reliance on the labour of both permanent immigrants and migrant workers. In recent decades, the number of migrant workers entering Canada has increased significantly relative to permanent immigrants. A...
BC Studies no. 196 Winter 2017-2018 | Page(s) 161-163
Review
Partisanship, Globalization, and Canadian Labour Market Policy: Four Provinces in Comparative Perspective
This is a book that I will use in two of my university courses: one on Canadian political economy and the other on labour policy. It is well researched, deals with issues that have immediate...
BC Studies no. 153 Spring 2007 | Page(s) 119-21
Review
Review
A Hard Man to Beat: The Story of Bill White, Labour Leader, Historian, Shipyard Worker, Raconteur
Selected as one of ten Vancouver books reprinted to celebrate the city’s 125th anniversary, A Hard Man to Beat is perhaps even more important now than when it was first published. Then, Bill White’s lively...
BC Studies no. 177 Spring 2013 | Page(s) 191-93
Review
Indigenous Women, Work, and History 1940-1980
Historian Patrick Wolfe has foregrounded the contradictory condition of Indigenous labour within Euro-American settlement by arguing that mythic narratives of settler diligence coexisted with a heavy reliance on colonized Indigenous labour. As he observes in...
BC Studies no. 191 Autumn 2016 | Page(s) 162-164
Review

On The Line: A History of the British Columbia Labour Movement
On The Line is an account of BC trade unions by the BC Labour Heritage Centre (an offshoot of the BC Federation of Labour) written by retired Vancouver Sun labour reporter Rod Mickleburgh. In a well-illustrated...
Review
The Business of Women: Marriage, Family, and Entrepreneurship in British Columbia, 1901-1951
Despite the rich historiography of women and work in Canada, we know very little about the history of female self-employment in this country. Historians have tended to focus on women who worked for wages,...
BC Studies no. 171 Autumn 2011 | Page(s) 138-139
Review
Labour Goes to War: The CIO and the Construction of a New Social Order, 1939-45
Labour Goes to War is a welcome new study whose title promises readers an analysis of the major industrial union organizing drive led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during the Second World War....
BC Studies no. 183 Autumn 2014 | Page(s) 164-65
Review
Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada
With Rebel Youth, Ian Milligan hearkens back to the political youth movements that went to the barricades, the conferences, and the picket lines in the 1960s, and in the process historicizes the events and people...
BC Studies no. 186 Summer 2015 | Page(s) 178-79
Review
Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948-1972
Labour historians have been arguing about the left in British Columbia politics and labour for ages. Now, through a skilful conversion of his 2008 University of New Brunswick dissertation “Tug of War,” University of Victoria...
BC Studies no. 174 Summer 2012 | Page(s) 143-4
Review
Working Mothers and the Childcare Dilemma
The history of twentieth century childcare has received scant attention from historians in Canada. Lisa Pasolli’s compact study of childcare debates in British Columbia from the 1900s through the Harper era reveals what a historian...
BC Studies no. 193 Spring 2017 | Page(s) 224-225
Review
Coldstream: The Ranch Where It All Began
When Lord and Lady Aberdeen purchased the Coldstream Ranch near Vernon in 1891, they could hardly have suspected their experience with the property would establish patterns that would be followed for the next century. By...
BC Studies no. 148 Winter 2005-2006 | Page(s) 127-9
Review
Mountain Timber: The Comox Logging Company in the Vancouver Island Mountains
Richard Mackie’s Mountain Timber is the second volume of a projected three-volume history of the Comox Logging and Railway Company’s operations on Vancouver Island. This volume begins c.1927 with the company’s expansion of its steam-powered...
BC Studies no. 173 Spring 2012 | Page(s) 156-57
Review
The Punjabis in British Columbia: Location, Labour, First Nations, and Multiculturalism
Kamala Elizabeth Nayar’s groundbreaking work, The Punjabis in British Columbia, represents a significant addition to a number of fields. At a basic level, it focuses on the important but sorely understudied community of Punjabis who...
BC Studies no. 182 Summer 2014 | Page(s) 240-242
Review
Negotiating Demands: The Politics of Skid Row Policing in Edinburgh, San Francisco and Vancouver
Negotiating Demands originates from Huey’s PhD dissertation of the same title completed at UBC in 2005 under the supervision of Dr. Richard Ericson, a professor of criminology and law. Unfortunately, due to the above fact,...
BC Studies no. 158 Summer 2008 | Page(s) 131-3
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
Review
Colonization and Community: The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbian Working Class
JOHN DOUGLAS BELSHAW has provided the historical community with a well-researched, artfully written, and well-indexed account of an important aspect of Vancouver Island coalmining history: the experience of nineteenth-century British immigrant miners. He gives the...
BC Studies no. 141 Spring 2004 | Page(s) 124-6
Review
Citizen Docker: Making a New Deal on the Vancouver Waterfront 1919-1939
In Citizen Docker Andrew Parnaby explores industrial relations on the Vancouver waterfront during the interwar years. The analysis is linked to a broader consideration of the transition to the welfare state and the new industrial...
BC Studies no. 160 Winter 2008-2009 | Page(s) 139-141
Review
Raising the Workers’ Flag: The Workers’ Unity League in Canada, 1930-1936
The struggle to build trade unions in the extractive and manufacturing industries of Canada — mining, forestry, fishing, clothing, furniture, and others — was meteoric and its demise equally rapid. Raising the Workers’ Flag provides...
BC Studies no. 178 Summer 2013 | Page(s) 149-151
Review
Review
Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People’s Enlightenment in Canada, 1890-1920
It took a mountain of labour to write this book, but the result is a molehill of meaningful history. This is the second volume of Ian McKay’s planned multi-volume history of the left in Canada,...
BC Studies no. 164 Winter 2009-2010 | Page(s) 122-127
Review
Myra’s Men: Building the Kettle Valley Railway, Myra Canyon to Penticton
In August 2003, the Okanagan Mountain Park fire southeast of Kelowna destroyed or damaged the Myra Canyon trestles, eighteen railroad structures, and the roadbed between them. This 5.5-mile (8.9-km) elevated path around a mountainous amphitheatre...