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We acknowledge that we live and work on unceded Indigenous territories and we thank the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations for their hospitality.
Established in 1969, BC Studies is dedicated to the exploration of British Columbia's cultural, economic, and political life; past and present.
Each issue offers articles on a wide range of topics, in-depth reviews of current books, and a bibliography of recent publications.
BC Studies welcomes the submission of articles, research notes, and soundworks dealing with all aspects of British Columbia.
Featuring an interactive map of BC Studies articles; photos and videos of BC, and BCS blogs.
The latest news and announcements from BC Studies including upcoming events and more.
Nikkei History
In recent decades, scholars on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border and in Japan have contributed to the development of a rich and growing body of literature that addresses the historical experience of Japanese immigrants and their descendants in North America. This special issue of BC Studies will take stock of what this has meant for Nikkei history in British Columbia and ask how approaches developed in other regional or disciplinary contexts might be applied to further enhance our understanding of the Nikkei experience in British Columbia. Guest edited by Andrea Geiger, the issue features an excerpt from Joy Kogawa’s Gently to Nagasaki, articles by Greg Robinson, Janice Matsumura, Daniel Lachapelle Lemire and Patricia Roy, and a photo essay by Robert Muckle.
To read the full issue online, visit our OJS site.
Add to Cart - $20.00 View in OJSThis Space Here
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Book Review
In their introduction to Keeping Promises, the editors express the hope that its essays are “easy to read and accessible to the public” (6). As someone who has been keenly interested in these issues for...
Book Review
. The titles of the books under review possess a certain similarity, each promising to take the reader on an intellectual journey towards a better relationship between First Nations and Canada. Both books strongly argue...
Book Review
Gerhard Ens and Joe Sawchuck’s co-written volume From New Peoples to New Nations approaches historical and contemporary Métis identity from a perspective that is uncommon and even contested among Indigenous histories. From a social constructionist...
Book Review
A student in search of a thesis topic or a scholar seeking to understand the shape of historical writing in New Zealand over the past fifty years need go no further. In this collection of...
Book Review
One great irony of historical archaeology is that far more research is done on nineteenth century British material culture overseas than in Britain itself, despite the importance of the Empire and its material culture to...
Book Review
Books by Glyn Williams are always a delight. He is one the foremost historians of European voyages of exploration to the Pacific and the Arctic and has a rare and enviable ability to bring his...
Book Review
Jim McDowell’s Uncharted Waters: The Explorations of José Narváez is a comprehensive examination of one of the most important and overlooked explorers of the Pacific Coast during the late eighteenth century. McDowell traces Narváez’s long career from his...
Book Review
Sarah Jameson Craig was born in 1840 in St Andrews, New Brunswick, a descendant of United Empire Loyalists, and she grew up in a log cabin in the isolated backwoods with no local post office...
Book Review
In the practice of military history, historians have tended to examine conflicts independently of each other, separating them out from other conflicts and from broader social currents and non-military events. Conflicts are often treated individually,...
Book Review
In Jack Hodgins’s Broken Ground (1998), memories of the Great War haunt the fictional community of Portuguese Creek on Vancouver Island, but what should be remembered of the horrors of France remains uncertain. The notebook...
Book Review
Can you see it? It would be terrifically ironic if you couldn’t. And there’s a pun in there as well — “Barr colonists”? But the least visible commonality is the landmark work from which these...
Book Review
Home, Work, and Play is a reader designed for university or college students studying Canadian social history. The editors have put together a diverse collection that can be used at any level from a second...
Book Review
Two powerful and iconic institutions can be found at the centre of most histories of tourism and recreation in the mountains of western Canada: the Canadian Pacific Railway and the agency known today as Parks...
Book Review
Most of the world’s water basins are transborder. The vast majority of North America’s surface freshwater falls within a border watershed. Indeed, contemporary water governance within just one country is already complex enough — overlaying...
Book Review
This is a story of contested authority. Dan Malleck has drawn from legal, medical, newspaper, policy, and pharmacy perspectives to explore the shifting conceptualizations of opium addiction and regulation in nineteenth century Canada. In some...
Book Review
Provincial specialists can have crowded bookshelves. Because good material is dispersed and rare, many things grace my shelves “just in case.” But this anthology arrives just in time — and I will work it hard...
Book Review
The credit union movement in British Columbia is, in a way, a legacy of the Great Depression. When banks and governments were unwilling or unable to respond appropriately to economic crisis, mutual aid arrangements became...
Book Review
When Ivan Henry’s wife Jessie contacted Vancouver Police Department (VPD) detectives in 1982, she initiated a series of events that would see her husband spend the next twenty-seven years in prison for crimes he maintained...
Book Review
How do scientists and advocates who work in the thick of issues like global warming and biodiversity loss keep up their spirits and pass on more than a sense of doom and gloom to the...
Book Review
This large format book documents many of the significant works in the collection of the newest public art museum in Canada, the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, which opened in March 2016. In Canada, art...
Book Review
There are many reasons why Jeff Wall’s photographs speak to so many people. They celebrate the ordinary. They are non-descriptive. And they draw on a compositional vocabulary — from the woodcuts of the Japanese master...
Book Review
Over sixty years after her death, Emily Carr has hit the international scene. It began in June 2012 when seven of her paintings were featured in Kassell, Germany’s prestigious Documenta, an art fair that showcases...
Book Review
For nearly four decades, Francisco Kripacz (1942-2000) created the most exuberant interiors for buildings designed by the renowned Canadian architect Arthur Erickson. Born in Hungary, raised in Venezuela, and educated around the world, Kripacz met...
Contributors
Andrea Geiger is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University. Her first book, Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885-1928 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), was awarded the 2011 Theodore Saloutos Book Award (Immigration and Ethnic History Society) and the 2013 Association of Asian American Studies History Book Award. Her current book project examines historical encounters between early Japanese immigrants and Indigenous people in the North American West.
Joy Kogawa was born in Vancouver, BC. Her best-known work is a novel, Obasan. She has recently published a memoir, Gently to Nagasaki, by Caitlin Press.
Daniel Lachapelle Lemire is putting the final touches to his PhD thesis on the reimagination of the Japanese Canadians’ collective identity. He is currently working in parallel on a book project – a translation of essays written by Japanese Canadian children for their language school’s newsletter before the Second World War. He dedicates a sizeable pro- portion of his spare time to the practice and teaching of two Japanese martial arts, iaido and kendo.
Janice Matsumura is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. The focus of her research has been the Asia-Pacific War (1931–45), including the relationship between state propaganda and medical policies.
Robert (Bob) Muckle has been teaching, practising, and writing about archaeology and anthropology in BC since the 1980s. He is a faculty member of the Department of Anthropology at Capilano University in North Vancouver.
Greg Robinson is a Professor of History at l’Université du Québec à Montréal, and a researcher at the Center for United States Studies of the Chaire Raoul-Dandurand. His book, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (Columbia University Press, 2009), won the 2009 History book prize of the Association for Asian American Studies, and his book After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (University of California Press, 2012), won the Caroline Bancroft History Prize in Western U.S. History. His most recent book, The Great Unknown: Japanese American Sketches (University Press of Colorado, 2016), offers an alternative history of Japanese Americans. Professor Robinson is the editor of Pacific Citizens: Larry and Guyo Tajiri and Japanese American Journalism in the World War II Era (University of Illinois Press, 2012), and co-editor of Miné Okubo: Following Her Own Road, on the groundbreaking nisei artist and writer.
Patricia E. Roy, a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Victoria, has contributed a number of articles to BC Studies over the years. She has written extensively on the Chinese and Japanese in British Columbia, but her most recent book is Boundless Optimism: Richard McBride’s British Columbia (UBC Press, 2012).