bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Cemetery and Cultural Memory: Montreal, 1860–1900
Authors: Watkins Meredith G.
Published: September 2013

﻿The common conception that the cemetery is a site of memory for all who died and were buried before us is a false one. There were certain biases in who was being commemorated, a form of selectivity to the memorial process that caused a great number of people to be eroded from the landscape. The argument is based on observations from a sample of seventeen hundred individuals from the latter half of the nineteenth century in Montreal. A selection of twelve surnames from archival data includes the three main cultures present in Montreal in the nineteenth century (French Canadians, Irish Catholics and English Protestants) and allows me to reconstitute families, to identify their kinship ties and to determine their situation in life. Records from the cemeteries on Mount Royal confirm the burial of individuals from the sample. The presence or absence of these individuals in the cemetery landscapes depends on different commemorative practices influenced by religion, culture, gender, status, age and cemetery regulations.
Our 30th Anniversary
Authors: Taylor John
Published: September 2013

The Review/Revue began in a happy conjuncture of people, propinquity and technology, or what we used to call "agents" and "faceless forces".
La ville au cœur de la nation : l’utilisation du passé dans l’élaboration de l’identité urbaine
Authors: Bérubé Harold
Published: September 2013

La ville au cœur de la nation : Vutilisation du passé dans Vélaboration de Videntité urbaine1 Harold Bérubé Résumé Les cérémonies commémoratives entourant le centenaire de Vincorporation de Toronto (1934) et le tricentenaire de la fondation de Montréal (1942) sont l’occasion d’élaborer des discours qui témoignent de l’importance de l’expérience urbaine dans l’élaboration et la transformation des identités nationales au 20e siècle. Le rabbin Maurice N. Eisendratb et l’abbé Lionel Groulx prononcent, à quelques années d’intervalle, des communications qui mettent le passé au service du présent et de l’avenir, dans le but défaire la promotion d’une identité urbaine, garante de l’épanouissement de leur nation respective. Au delà des divergences entre les hommes et leurs idéologies, des points de convergence fondamentaux apparaissent. Ainsi, tous deux utilisent des stratégies discursives analogues, dans le but ultime de lier un présent incertain à un passé «fort », pour forger et renforcer l’identité collective, tant urbaine que nationale.
Introduction
Authors: High Steven
Published: September 2013

Historian Rosemary Ommer gave the W. Stewart MacNutt Memorial Lecture at the University of New Brunswick in 1993, a year after the collapse of groundfish stocks had led the federal government to issue fishing moratoria in Atlantic Canada. It was entitled "One Hundred Years of Fishery Crises in Newfoundland." As a historian of the fishery and a resident of St. John’s, Ommer used this occasion to grapple with the meaning of the dire economic crisis now facing Newfoundlanders and to reflect on the historian’s role in the societal search for answers. What can the historian offer, she asked? A first step, Ommer told the audience, was for scholars to understand the crisis and provide insight into what went wrong: "We must trace where it came from, we must ask why it was not foreseen and prevented, and we must seek out the most useful approach to a solution for the future. In so doing, we will need to be aware of the implicit ideologies, beliefs and pressures that underlie the thinking of the policy makers of the day." A second step was to ensure that the "historical record" that was already being marshalled in support of one political position or another was not distorted beyond recognition. A steady stream of studies has since appeared on the crisis in the Atlantic fisheries.
Deindustrialization as Public History: An Exhibition at the Manitoba Museum
Authors: Reilly Sharon
Published: September 2013

The mass settlement and industrialization of southern Manitoba that began in the 1870s, and the reversal of much of this development in the twentieth century, is a major theme of the newest permanent gallery at the Manitoba Museum.1 This paper examines this history of industrial activity and deindustrialization and explores how these processes have been interpreted in the Parklands/Mixed Woods Gallery. Three distinct industries are considered: the Leary Brick Works in Roseisle, the Manitoba Glass Company of Beausejour, and Mary Maxim Limited, a mail-order woollens company that began in the village of Sifton.
"The Heritage of the People Closed Against Them:" Class, Environment, and the Shaping of Burlington Beach, 1870s–1980s
Authors: Cruikshank Ken , Bouchier Nancy B.
Published: September 2013

Following serious flooding in the 1970s, Hamilton, Ontario politicians and planners sought to transform the Burlington Beach area into a recreational parkland. This dream was not a new one. One hundred years earlier, Hamilton social and political leaders also had envisioned the area, with its fine lakeside beaches and scenic bayside shoreline, as a recreational area. In the 1870s they consciously took control of this small fishing and farming community, contending that the area should be preserved for "the health and welfare of the people. " The people, it turned out, were well-to-do residents eager to create a private summer refuge from the heat, dirt, and people of an industrializing city. Within a generation, however, city residents of more modest means challenged "the aristocratic seclusion" of the beach, and successfully struggled to create beaches and parks that would be open to a wider public. Not for long. Within another generation, the beach strip ceased to be an attractive recreational area. Working Hamil-tonians saw it as a site for relatively inexpensive housing, and expanded the private residential community. They helped to build the unique community that would frustrate a new generation of recreational promoters in the 1970s. Residents of the community had inherited the private property claims and rights that city politicians had fostered in the area since the 1870s, and forced politicians and planners of the 1970s and 1980s to adopt an alternative vision of the beach strip. This paper traces the struggle of social groups to create and enforce their vision of the beach, a struggle that was in turn shaped by the particular urban and industrial development of the Hamilton region between the 1870s and 1980s. The environmental transformation of this strip of land, and the degradation of the waters surrounding it, affected the ways in which social groups perceived the beach and the purposes it might serve. Its history provides insights into the interaction of leisure, class, and the environment in an industrial city.
Understanding the Built Form of Industrialization along the Lachine Canal in Montreal
Authors: Bliek Desmond , Gauthier Pierre
Published: September 2013

This article tracks the morphogenesis of one of the birthplaces of Canadian industry: the Lachine Canal corridor in Montreal. The authors propose a reading of the evolution of the artifacts and spatial forms to be found along the canal from its construction starting in 1819. This work complements the history of Montreal’s industrialization and working-class communities by offering the untold story of apiece of the city whose birth and long sedimentation of built forms testifies to the emergence, peak, and decline of a new industrial order. The urbanization of the Lachine Canal corridor is, we argue, the result of a complex dialectic between a residential spatial order of the faubourg and a first- and second-generation industrial spatial order. Accordingly, the fine folds and articulations of domestic space and the sidewalks, streets, and church steps that are the sites of socialization and exchange succeed, or have imposed upon them a divided space organized by the flows of goods, materials, and energy destined to serve the industrial machine. The urban tissues, residential and industrial, today testify through their artifacts and spatial configurations to the historical conditions that saw them created and transformed.
Lassoed and Branded: The Calgary Exhibition and Stampede and the City of Calgary, 1889-1976
Authors: Foran Max
Published: September 2013

There is a complex relationship between the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede (Stampede) and the City of Calgary, On the one hand, the Stampede depends on the municipal government for its very existence. On the other, its arm’s-length structure and success in attracting power and influence lend an independence more typical of a private corporation. Since both agree on the value of the Stampede to the City, relations between the two have been far more co-operative than strained. However, in the two instances of public controversy over decisions made by both, the City has allowed the Stampede to take the burden of blame, with the result that the public’s image of the Stampede has blurred while its aura of independence has been enhanced.
How Did Calgary Get Its River Parks?
Authors: Nelles H. V.
Published: September 2013

How did Calgary get its river parks? They certainly were not there to begin with. They weren’t there as the city grew. They had to be built. As this paper shows, they were constructed relatively recently, and only after an astonishingly close brush with modernism, in which the land might have been dedicated to other dramatically different uses. Calgary’s river parks appeared following a wrenching act of negation that bitterly divided the city in the mid-1960s. The organized women’s movement of Calgary allied with urban elites, and the new planning bureaucracy and philanthropists combined to push the project forward—but not without the active co-operation of the river itself The citizenry became so attached to their newly designed river that they were prepared to entertain a higher risk of flooding to keep it green. The result could have been quite different, and almost was. This paper maps a profound but nonetheless contingent shift in popular and political attitudes towards the river in urban life in Calgary that mirrored broader cultural reconsiderations of the environment and nature.
Urban Waste Sinks as a Natural Resource: The Case of the Fraser River
Authors: Keeling Arn
Published: September 2013

The discursive and material construction of rivers as natural waste-treatment systems highlights important historical connections between urban sanitary networks, conservation ideology, and urban environmental values in the twentieth century. Early-mid-century sanitary engineers oversaw the transformation of space and nature in North American cities through the planning and construction of sewerage and drainage networks. In doing so, they drew from the ideas and methods of the technocratic conservation movement, which advocated the expert management of natural resources to ensure their maximum beneficial utilization. Pollution control and conservation were linked through the doctrine of "assimilative capacity," a concept used by engineers to describe the ability of natural waters to absorb, dilute, and disperse urban and industrial wastes. Using powerful new quantitative representations of nature, sanitary engineers proposed to incorporate natural biophysical processes into technological networks for waste disposal. This approach to urban waste-disposal problems is exemplified by the case of Vancouver’s Fraser River, which was enrolled by engineers and planners as a sink for urban wastes. However, the attempt to construct the river as a kind of "organic machine" for waste disposal resulted in long-term environmental problems in the river’s estuary. By the late 1960s, this pollution, along with Vancouver ites’ changing environmental values, led to political and social protest over the exploitation and degradation of the river.
Special Issue on Housing
Authors: Harris Richard S.
Published: September 2013

Although in most respects the amount and quality of Canadian research on the history of urban housing cannot compare with that on British and U.S. cities, in recent years its comparative disadvantage has been reduced. As much significant scholar ship has been published on the subject in the past ten years as in the previous fifty.1 The 1990s have seen the publication of the first history of housing in Canada;2 the first scholarly history of federal housing policy;3 and the first comprehensive, historical overview of housing since World War II.4 On a smaller scale, but with significant detail, it has seen the first history of housing in a Canadian province (Alberta);5 the first history of the politics of housing in an English-Canadian city (Vancouver);6 the first history of planning in a Canadian city;7 the first book-length history of an English-Canadian suburb;8 and the first systematic study of housing and suburban development in a Canadian city (Toronto).9 In a different, and more ambitious vein, it has also seen the publication of an attempt to write a history of North American housing through the lens of a Canadian city (Hamilton).10 In addition, it has seen the publication of substantial studies of apartment housing, préfabrication, boarding, and residential financing.11 Recent issues of Canadian Folklore Canadien and the Material History Review have also been devoted to the subject12. Altogether, the quantity of research on the history of housing in urban Canada has never been greater, or the quality higher.
Wartime Housing as Cultural Landscape: National Creation and Personal Creativity
Authors: Evenden Leonard J.
Published: September 2013

Early in the 1940s, in response to a housing crisis compounded of lack of construction during the depression, rural to urban migration, and the relocation of labour to the burgeoning wartime industries, dockyards and military bases, the federal government assumed responsibility for the provision of worker housing throughout the country. Construction was initiated through the newly-created crown corporation Wartime Housing Ltd. After some 26,000 rental dwellings were built across the country, the program evolved into veterans' housing. A narrow range of designs (four basic plans) was employed, leading to a image of uniformity, conformity and repetition. A distinctive Canadian residential landscape was thus created, along with a common housing experience. As these dwellings were sold into private hands following the war, modifications were introduced which were integrated into the original simple designs. The appearance of the surviving wartime housing landscapes is nuanced by regional characteristics, but the character of the core units is often still apparent. Authority-based, rational, central planning, a feature of Canada's wartime effort, provided the country with a core stock of dwellings. In half a century a distinctive Canadian residential landscape has evolved from this, with diversity introduced as a result of individual taste, ability to pay, and local regulation.
Sûreté, salubrité et monolithisme : l’introduction du béton armé à Montréal, de 1905 à 1922
Authors: Poitras Claire
Published: September 2013

Sûreté, salubrité et monolithisme: l'introduction du béton armé à Montréal, de 1905 à 1922* Claire Poitras Résumé: Le béton armé a été introduit à Montréal au cours de la période qui va de 1905 à 1922. Cet article vise à retracer les mécanismes à l'oeuvre dans le processus de légitimation du nouveau matériau de construction durant cette période. L'usage de celui-ci se généralise dans un contexte où des considérations relatives à un environnement urbain sécuritaire et hygiénique sont inscrites au coeur des représentations collectives. Face à une interprétation dominante qui privilégie les facteurs esthétiques, Vétude met en lumière d'une part, les facteurs économiques et, d'autre part, les caractéristiques socioculturelles de la demande pour le béton à partir d'aspects qualitatifs et subjectifs reliés aux notions modernes de salubrité et de durabilité telle que mises de l'avant par les promoteurs du nouveau matériau.
The French Cartographer Jacques-Nicolas Bellin's Plans of 18th-century Urban Settlements in Present-Day Canada
Authors: Ferley Paul
Published: September 2013

This research note examines the 18th century plans of five urban settlements located in present-day Canada. These plans were contained in the 18th century atlas, Le Petit Atlas Maritime, by the French cartographer Jacques-Nicolas Bettin. The plans were not only of the French settlements of Québec, Louisbourg and Montréal but also the English settlements of Halifax and St. John's. This note extends the analysis by John W. Reps of the French and English town planning traditions in the New World to exclusively Canadian settlements. The French settlements were influenced both by geography and by decisions taken by their original founders. The English settlement of Halifax was influenced by the formal planning tradition that emerged from the early settlements in the Tidewater colonies of present-day Virginia and Maryland. Geography had a more dominant impact on the plan of St. John's with the harbour shoreline defining what was eventually to become the main thoroughfare in the settlement.
The Politics of Municipal Annexation: The Case of the City of London’s Territorial Ambitions during the 1950s and 1960s
Authors: Meligrana John F.
Published: September 2013

Southern Ontario’s local government system was under considerable stress immediately following the Second World War as rapid urban growth spilled over traditional municipal units. This situation generated a number of potential local government reforms. The paper focuses on the politics surrounding one type of reform, annexation. The London-Middlesex region is used as a case study to answer the question: why, how, and under what conditions did annexation come to dominate the regional political discourse? The paper examines the political tactics, procedures, and strategies that the City of London employed to support and articulate its territorial ambitions before the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) and other forums during the 1950s and 1960s. London’s 1961 annexation was the fiercest and final annexation battle that the OMB decided between the city and Middlesex County. The paper also unpacks the politics surrounding the 1961 annexation by reviewing the minutes of local council meetings, government reports, records of the OMB, and newspaper articles. It concludes that London’s annexation success resulted from the city’s superior political skills, a disorganized rural opposition, and the proceedings and operations of the OMB that divorced the issue of municipal boundaries from local governance, thereby biasing the outcome in favour of annexation.
The Spread of Commuter Development in the Eastern Shore Zone of Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1920-1988
Authors: Millward Hugh
Published: September 2013

This study uses evidence from archival and recent topographic maps to plot developing patterns of commuter-induced residential construction in the Eastern Shore sector of the Halifax commuter zone. Building counts were made from 1:50,000 topographic maps surveyed in 1917-20 (pre-commuter situation), 1960—7 (early commuter), and 1988 (mature commuter), and the mapped patterns were analyzed visually and statistically.

Both regionally and locally, a typical sequence of development is apparent and is discussed with examples. The evolving pattern of development has been moulded by five sets of variables: access, services, environment, socio-cultural factors, and planning. Some variables operate primarily at the regional scale (notably distance to the city centre), some at the district level (notably distance to an elementary school), and some are highly localized (e.g., the availability of road frontage). The results may be useful for anticipation and control of future development.
Safeguarding “The Frog Pond”: London West and the Resistance to Municipal Amalgamation 1883–1897
Authors: Stott Greg
Published: September 2013

The London, Ontario, suburb of London West (1874 to 1897) provides an example of a community that strove to maintain its municipal autonomy. Composed of independent wage earners, artisans, and small-business owners, London West cultivated a sense of identity separate from that of its neighbouring city. While a devastating flood in 1883 devalued property and greatly soured relations between the village and London, it buttressed community unity in London West. The flood similarly caused the villagers to insist upon the maintenance of certain controls in order to assure the security of their property and families in their negotiations with the city for amalgamation. After several protracted periods of discussions, the village tenaciously held out against the city until 1897, when ratepayers had little alternative but to accept London’s less than satisfactory conditions. While the ultimate decision to join the city in 1897 was based more upon the village’s dismal financial situation, London West’s protracted resistance to municipal amalgamation indicates that nineteenth-century suburbs in Ontario were complex communities in their own right and not simply undifferentiated adjuncts that craved amalgamation with their urban neighbours.
In the Nature of Things: Integrating the History and Archaeology of Nineteenth-Century Canada and Australia
Authors: Mayne Alan
Published: September 2013

This special issue of Urban History Review resulted from three conversations I had recently, in Québec City, Vancouver, and Hamilton. I am an Australian, a visitor to Canada, and my hosts were making me welcome.
After the Sprawl? Suburban Pasts and Futures In the Greater Toronto Area
Authors: Buzzelli Michael
Published: September 2013

As students of the city, we concern ourselves in large part with urban form, specifically with the ways that cities are built, the consequences of form for urban residents, and alternatives we have for urban growth. In the exhibit After the Sprawl? Suburban Pasts and Futures in the Greater Toronto Area, curator Michael McMahon presents these issues in the context of suburbanization in the Toronto region after World War Two. Its main message is that suburbanization has continuously bred counter-movements, each meant to solve the problem of sprawl, though never succeeding. Visitors are shown that if sprawl is to be managed, viable past efforts at containment and new alternatives must be put into practice. But as the exhibit title itself suggests, the momentum of Toronto’s city-building practices are too entrenched to deal with sprawl effectively, making alternatives appear hopelessly optimistic.
Home Building Under the Veterans' Land Act (1942): An Interview with Harry Hall
Authors: Shulist Tricia
Published: September 2013

The Second World War has often been regarded as a critical moment in the formation of Canadian national identity. Programs that helped veterans readjust to civilian life were very important. The Veterans' Land Act (VLA) of 1942 was part of Canada's veteran rehabilitation program, and helped to establish veterans as farmers, fishermen, and part-time farmers on small holdings. Of the 1.2 million veterans of World War II, over ten percent participated in the VLA program. In spite of this, little has been written about veterans programs in general, or about the Land Act in particular.
She's No Lady: The Experience and Expression of Gender among Halifax Women Taxi Drivers since World War II
Authors: Berry Kimberly
Published: September 2013

"She's No Lady" explores the complex relationship between gender identity and work culture as experienced by women taxi drivers in Halifax. Working in a traditionally male industry, women taxi drivers often attract the attention of the press and the public as an amusing novelty or a scandalous disgrace. These reactions are, in part, the result of the popular perception that masculine and feminine domain are mutually exclusive, restricted to men and women separately and respectively.Further-more, characterized as highly competitive, independent operators in a dangerous industry, taxi drivers embody a popular image of masculinity. While the place of women is generally considered to be outside of masculine culture, women taxi drivers demonstrate the fluidity of gender cultures as they adeptly navigate the contested terrain of their masculine work-culture. Despite the routine comments and questions from passengers and colleagues alike, most women drivers find a considerable degree of membership within the larger community of drivers, and in this sense become "one of the men"; seen first as taxi drivers and then women.
The Growth of the Industrial City and Inner Toronto's Vanished Church Buildings
Authors: Caulfield Jon
Published: September 2013

Based on research about ninety churches located in inner Toronto in 1893, this article considers four explanations for the disappearance or adaption to new uses of many of these buildings and concludes (1) that the city's shift to industrial urbanism, as well as a degree of ecclesiastic overdevelopment, were the main factors leading to church abandonment and (2) that evidence does not strongly support secularization or highest-best-use hypotheses.
Ethnicity and Home Ownership in Montreal, 1921–51
Authors: Choko Marc H.
Published: September 2013

Montreal has long been perceived as "a city of tenants** in a North-American world of owners. This perception has been explained by the strong presence of French Canadians who were poor and had a lower preference for home ownership. This article provides for the first time relevant data that allows a detailed comparison of housing types; values, tenure and occupations of French Canadians, English Canadians and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and for the cities of Montreal, Lachine, Outremont, Verdun and Westmount, between 1921 and 1951. Indeed, Montreal was largely a town of tenants living in plexes. But these data show that, in proportion, French Canadians were as much owner-occupants as other ethnic groups and that, in fact, the low rate of owner-occupancy was due more to English Canadians and Eastern Europeans who were attracted to the new apartment buildings. These data also show that one can be a wealthy tenant living in a downtown apartment of great value, or the owner with limited means of a house of little value on the outskirts of the city.
"...to produce the highest type of manhood and womanhood": The Ontario Housing Act, 1919, and a New Suburban Ideal
Authors: Sendbuehler Matt , Gilliland Jason
Published: September 2013

While most scholars generally focus on the failings of the post-WWI Federal-Provincial housing scheme in Canada, we contend that it had far-reaching implications for three major facets ofurbanism: housing policyf town planning, and residential architecture. We do so primarily through an examination of the impacts of the Ontario Housing Act, 1919, in the context of contemporary visions of ideal residential environments. In the 1920s, a major reconceptualization of planning and architecture generated a new ideology of house, home and city which intended to remake existing cities and to create new, efficient and healthy settlements. The ideal city featured increasingly similar, but separate, working-and middle-class homes and neighbourhoods, as well as the sharper definition of functionally specific spaces within the home and the city. State-designed and state-sanctioned working-class housing associated with the housing scheme represented a practical attempt to realize these new ideals on the ground. Since a suburban context was integral to these ideals, we maintain that planning and architecture in 1920s Canada amounted to a new suburban ideal.
The Redevelopment of Fairview Slopes in Vancouver, 1975–1995
Authors: Zacharias John
Published: September 2013

Fairview Slopes was almost completely transformed as the political class and the planning and development community focused much of their efforts for a time on this inner city district. While city planning reports in the 1970s were concerned with the preservation of the existing community and the heritage buildings of Fairview Slopes, the redevelopment nevertheless resulted in rapid displacement of the population and replacement of the buildings. This article is concerned with the spatial and temporal patterns of redevelopment. In this case, the redevelopment shows regular temporal and spatial distributions sensitive to topography and location. On the other hand ownership, land use and the distribution of the existing community were relatively unimportant in explaining the distribution of development over time. Municipal regulations introduced at the onset of redevelopment had an important effect on the shape and size of the projects, while redirecting land assembly activity.
Les stratégies fiscales municipales et la gestion de l’agglomération urbaine : le cas de la Ville de Montréal entre 1910 et 1965
Authors: Collin Jean-Pierre
Published: September 2013

Cet article se veut une première contribution à l'analyse des stratégies fiscales et financières de la Ville de Montréal depuis le début du siècle. Nous mettrons plus particulièrement en lumière comment la fiscalité a servi à cette dernière d'instrument d'appoint pour, d'une part, minimiser l'impact de la fragmentation municipale et d'autre part, pour faire face à son rôle de ville centre et à ses responsabilités de métropole. Nous décrirons ainsi comment, entre les années 1910 et les années I960, la Ville de Montréal a fait appel successivement et parfois concurremment à trois approches fiscales : la première consiste à faire payer le banlieusard-navetteur pour son exploitation des avantages de la ville centrale; la seconde mise plutôt sur l'établissement d'une véritable fiscalité régionale; la dernière se contente défaire reconnaître pour la ville centrale un statut de métropole.
The Political Geography of Water Provision in Paris, Ontario, 1882–1924
Authors: Hagopian John
Published: September 2013

This article examines the social and political factors which influenced the development of the Paris, Ontario waterworks system from 1882 to 1924. Commercial, industrial and upper-class residential areas received prior service, even though the debt financing of the system was borne by taxpayers generally. This pattern reflects the purpose of the system, which was to protect valuable property from fire, rather than to improve public health. Municipal voting laws gave disproportionate power to owners of property and thus allowed their will to prevail The findings could be expected in all Ontario municipalities, as municipal voting laws were provincially legislated. Historically, there has been a bias in water provision in favour of the affluent.
Mapping the Changes: The spatial development of Industrial Montreal, 1861–1929
Authors: Slack Brian , Meana Lourdes , Langford Martha , Thornton Patricia
Published: September 2013

In 1991, a research team centred at Concordia University undertook a contract for the city of Montreal. The task was to prepare an inventory of all industrial establishments that had been in existence in the city between the 1820s and 1950. One of the most important contributions of the project was to make its inventory of indu striai firms available for spatial display. Computer generated maps of a large set of industrial categories are available to assist research into the industrialisation process in Canada*s largest and most diverse manufacturing city of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper employs the data and the maps of one industrial group (food and beverage), and all industries to describe some of the important spatial processes occurring in Montreal's industrialisation.
Fragmented Integration: The Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company and the Anatomy of an Urban-Industrial Landscape, c. 1912
Authors: McCann L. D.
Published: September 2013

This paper examines how forces of fragmentation within the Maritimes contribute a partial but important explanation of the urban-industrial collapse that marked the region in the early 20th century. Specifically, weaknesses that affected the spatial strategies of the vertically-integrated industrial giant, the Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company, provide evidence of limited interaction within the Maritime urban system. Profits from exporting staples, pig iron, and steel products to foreign and national markets, although initially aided by tidewater location and control over all phases of production, were not sufficient to overcome, in the long-run, such forces of fragmentation as dispersed and limited regional markets, increased costs of producing poor quality resources, or the minimal presence of external economies. With "Scotia's" eventual demise, towns like Sydney Mines, Trenton, and New Glasgow suffered economic and population decline.
Battling "the bane of our cities": Class, territory, and the prohibition debate in Toronto, 1877
Authors: Sendbuehler M. P.
Published: September 2013

In the nineteenth century, the tavern was an important institution in urban working-class life. Because of the social ills associated with alcohol abuse and public drinking, there were frequent attempts to lessen the tavern's importance or to eliminate it entirely. This paper examines several tavern-related issues that emerged in Toronto in the 1870s and 1880s. The Crooks Act, passed in 1876, employed powerful measures to deal with political and temperance questions simultaneously. The intersection of class, politics, temperance, and urban life led to a territorial solution to the liquor question. These issues were dealt with by the people of Toronto in 1877, when they declined to prohibit public drinking in the city via the Dunkin Act, a local option prohibition statute of the Province of Canada.
The "Sting" of Vancouver's Better Housing "Spree", 1919–1949
Authors: Wade Jill
Published: September 2013

Contrary to other accounts of the 1919 national housing program, this article examines the plan's long-term history using Vancouver as a case study. It argues that a basic structural flaw in the local Better Housing Scheme created financial hardship for the City of Vancouver as well as for mortgagors during the depression. The burden of mortgage repayment that fell to the city discouraged it from participating in other housing initiatives in the 1930s and 1940s. Still, the labour, women's, and veterans' organizations that supported the scheme represented the beginnings of Vancouver's social housing movement that matured in the late 1930s and achieved significant improvements in residential conditions in the 1940s.
Publications Noted
Authors: Taylor John H.
Published: September 2013

Luc Dauphinais pour La Société historique de Saint-Boniface, Historié de Saint-Boniface: à i'ombre des cathédrales, des origines de la colonie jusqu'en 1870. Saint-Boniface: Les editions du Blé, 1991, tome I. Pp. 335. Illus.
« Faire avec ce qu’il y a 1 »
Authors: Lepage Élise
Published: September 2013

La plupart des recueils de poèmes de Michael Delisle reviennent régulièrement à la question de la médiocrité, de la maladresse envers le monde, les autres et plus encore : envers les mots. « Tous les ratages sont bons pour la littérature », écrit-il dans Chose vocale. C’est cette conscience de l’approximation, de l’« inhabileté fatale » (André Frénaud) — qui est à la fois celle du sujet et du lecteur — face au poème que cet article se propose d’interroger. Cette posture poétique repose selon l’auteure sur une humilité ressentie comme nécessaire à l’avènement de la parole par le sujet, et elle en étudie les différentes formes à travers plusieurs recueils. Suivant les réflexions que Pierre Nepveu a consacrées à Saint-Denys Garneau dans « La prose du poème », elle analyse par analogie dans quelle mesure cette humilité naît d’un certain prosaïsme qui n’est pas sans emprunter au versant fictif de l’oeuvre. Un temps de la réflexion est donc consacré à l’intrusion du récit et de la fiction dans le poème. Enfin, ces quelques incursions du côté de la fiction permettent de cerner ce qui s’apparente à une esthétique de la pauvreté et de l’imperfection.
L’absence du père dans « Relation » de Michael Delisle*
Authors: Cusson Marie
Published: September 2013

La constance dans l’oeuvre de Michael Delisle est liée à l’omniprésence de la mère juxtaposée à l’absence du père. Sur les sept nouvelles du recueil Le sort de Fille, cinq accordent à la représentation de la mère une place importante. « Le Pont » et « Relation » sont les seules nouvelles à traiter de la question de la rencontre du personnage de « Mike », alter ego de l’auteur, avec le père. « Relation » se présente comme une suite à la démarche entreprise par le jeune Mike dans la nouvelle « Le Pont ». Alors que Mike parvient à s’affranchir d’un pôle identitaire maternel trop fusionnel résultant de l’absence du père dans la première nouvelle, « Relation » raconte l’histoire de la quête symbolique de ce père absent vers trois lieux de dévotion dans trois grandes villes européennes. Cet article se propose d’analyser la nature de cette quête de foi en mettant en relief le rapport dialectique entre le réel et l’idéal qui se dessine au cours de ce voyage initiatique.
Entre Ducharme et le Mexique
Authors: Nareau Michel
Published: September 2013

Le roman Drame privé de Michael Delisle semble peu lié à l’ensemble de ses textes narratifs, tant priment dans ce récit un éclatement de la narration, un recours abondant aux marqueurs artistiques, un cadre urbain huppé. Ce texte fait d’emblée écho au roman L’hiver de force de Réjean Ducharme, par la mise en récit du milieu intellectuel montréalais, par la présence d’un narrateur s’exprimant au « nous » (pronom qui évoque la gémellité des protagonistes) et par une série de références à une jeunesse innocente. Or, une rupture survient dans le roman, qui fait bifurquer l’action vers le Mexique, transformant ainsi le cadre référentiel proposé. Dans ce changement se jouent le statut de la culture artistique mise en évidence et la capacité de cerner la valeur des pratiques culturelles observées. De la proximité, voire de la connivence, entre les artistes et les narrateurs à la lecture distanciée du tourisme de masse, se creuse un écart de sens, un vertige culturel qui fait l’intérêt du roman. Dans cet article, l’auteure s’attarde à la fonction de cette dérive des sens, aux conditions de lisibilité culturelle évoquées par ce travail de labilité, de même qu’à la signification de ce détour mexicain, qui s’appuie certes sur le tourisme dans la diégèse, mais qui est autrement littéraire, par l’appareil paratextuel qui recourt à des citations de nombreux auteurs latino-américains. Ce dernier point (intertextualité fécondée par la tension entre pastiche et déférence) permet enfin de cerner le rôle de Ducharme dans cette remise en cause des apports culturels.
Literature and the Munich Crisis
Authors: Ellis Steve
Published: September 2013

The upheaval, moral self-questioning and uncertainty into which the Munich negotiations and settlement of September 1938 threw the British nation are examined in a series of now almost totally forgotten works which constitute the genre of the ‘Munich Crisis novel’. These are then related to better known post-Munich writings by, among others, Forster, Woolf, Orwell, MacNeice and Patrick Hamilton. A range of reactions to the crisis – pro- and anti-appeasement, pacifism, anxiety over air bombardment, paralysis, dilemma – thus emerge as components of what Forster analysed as ‘the 1939 State’, and which this article substantiates in greater detail.
Minimum Wages
Authors: Neumark David , Wascher William L.
Published: September 2013

A comprehensive review of evidence on the effect of minimum wages on employment, skills, wage and income distributions, and longer-term labor market outcomes concludes that the minimum wage is not a good policy tool.

Minimum wages exist in more than one hundred countries, both industrialized and developing. The United States passed a federal minimum wage law in 1938 and has increased the minimum wage and its coverage at irregular intervals ever since; in addition, as of the beginning of 2008, thirty-two states and the District of Columbia had established a minimum wage higher than the federal level, and numerous other local jurisdictions had in place “living wage” laws. Over the years, the minimum wage has been popular with the public, controversial in the political arena, and the subject of vigorous debate among economists over its costs and benefits. In this book, David Neumark and William Wascher offer a comprehensive overview of the evidence on the economic effects of minimum wages. Synthesizing nearly two decades of their own research and reviewing other research that touches on the same questions, Neumark and Wascher discuss the effects of minimum wages on employment and hours, the acquisition of skills, the wage and income distributions, longer-term labor market outcomes, prices, and the aggregate economy. Arguing that the usual focus on employment effects is too limiting, they present a broader, empirically based inquiry that will better inform policymakers about the costs and benefits of the minimum wage. Based on their comprehensive reading of the evidence, Neumark and Wascher argue that minimum wages do not achieve the main goals set forth by their supporters. They reduce employment opportunities for less-skilled workers and tend to reduce their earnings; they are not an effective means of reducing poverty; and they appear to have adverse longer-term effects on wages and earnings, in part by reducing the acquisition of human capital. The authors argue that policymakers should instead look for other tools to raise the wages of low-skill workers and to provide poor families with an acceptable standard of living.
Design of Experiments for Factor Hierarchization in Complex Structure Modelling
Authors: Kasmi C. , Hélier M. , Darces M. , Prouff E.
Published: September 2013

Modelling the power-grid network is of fundamental interest to analyse the conducted propagation of unintentional and intentional electromagnetic interferences. The propagation is indeed highly influenced by the channel behaviour. In this paper, we investigate the effects of appliances and the position of cables in a low voltage network. First, the power-grid architecture is described. Then, the principle of Experimental Design is recalled. Next, the methodology is applied to power-grid modelling. Finally, we propose an analysis of the statistical moments of the experimental design results. Several outcomes are provided to describe the effects induced by parameter variability on the conducted propagation of spurious compromising emanations.
Nanocomposite C-Pd thin films – a new material with specific spectral properties
Authors: Suchańska M. , Baghdasaryan H. , Kęczkowska J.
Published: September 2013

In this paper, the results of optical investigations for thin films of carbon-palladium (C-Pd) nanocomposites are presented. This films were prepared using two steps method (PVD/ CVD). The optical and Raman spectroscopy has been used to characterize the material. The multinanolayer model was used to explain the specific spectral properties.
Couplonics Of Cyclic Ternary Systems: From Coupled Periodic Waveguides To Discrete Photonic Crystals
Authors: Boucher Y. G.
Published: September 2013

In the context of coupled periodic waveguides, "couplonics" refers to the rigorous equivalence between continuous wave coupling and localized interactions. We extend it here to a cyclic ternary system, looked upon as the simplest discrete photonic crystal with actual periodic boundary conditions. A linear decomposition on a supermode basis enables one to reduce the original sixwave problem to three independent two-wave distributed Bragg reflectors (or 1D PC).
Identifying Axial Spondyloarthritis in Dutch Primary Care Patients, Ages 20–45 Years, With Chronic Low Back Pain
Authors: van Hoeven Lonneke , Luime Jolanda , Han Huub , Vergouwe Yvonne , Weel Angelique
Published: September 2013

Objective

To identify axial spondyloarthritis (SpA) in Dutch primary care patients with chronic low back pain (CLBP), and to design a simple referral model for general practitioners (GPs) that would identify patients at risk for axial SpA.

Methods

Patients (ages 20–45 years) with CLBP were identified from GP records. Assessments included inflammatory back pain questionnaires, medical interviews, physical examinations, HLA–B27, C‐reactive protein level, conventional radiography, and magnetic resonance imaging. The outcome measure was axial SpA defined by the Assessment of SpondyloArthritis international Society (ASAS) criteria. Multivariable regression analysis with bootstrapping was used to develop the referral model.

Results

A total of 364 patients (mean ± SD age 36.3 ± 6.8 years) was recruited with a median symptom duration of 9.0 years. Eighty‐six patients (24%) fulfilled the ASAS criteria for axial SpA. Of all potential determinants, the ASAS inflammatory back pain questionnaire, good response to nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs, family history of SpA, and symptom duration were identified as most relevant for diagnosing axial SpA by multivariable regression analysis related to axial SpA. The shrunken regression coefficients were, respectively, 1.04, 0.83, 0.73, and 0.23. The combination of these 4 items proved a useful area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.75 (SE 0.03). In a simplified score model, at the suggested cutoff value of 1.5, the sensitivity was 83% and specificity was 59%.

Conclusion

This study shows that 1 of 4 primary care patients with CLBP was classified as having axial SpA. A preselection in primary care based on a combination of clinical items may be useful to facilitate the identification of patients at risk of axial SpA.
Making sense of digital traces: An activity theory driven ontological approach
Authors: Karanasios Stan , Thakker Dhavalkumar , Lau Lydia , Allen David , Dimitrova Vania , Norman Alistair
Published: September 2013

Social web content such as blogs, videos, and other user‐generated content present a vast source of rich “digital‐traces” of individuals' experiences. The use of digital traces to provide insight into human behavior remains underdeveloped. Recently, ontological approaches have been exploited for tagging and linking digital traces, with progress made in ontology models for well‐defined domains. However, the process of conceptualization for ill‐defined domains remains challenging, requiring interdisciplinary efforts to understand the main aspects and capture them in a computer processable form. The primary contribution of this article is a theory‐driven approach to ontology development that supports semantic augmentation of digital traces. Specifically, we argue that (a) activity theory can be used to develop more insightful conceptual models of ill‐defined activities, which (b) can be used to inform the development of an ontology, and (c) that this ontology can be used to guide the semantic augmentation of digital traces for making sense of phenomena. A case study of interpersonal communication is chosen to illustrate the applicability of the proposed multidisciplinary approach. The benefits of the approach are illustrated through an example application, demonstrating how it may be used to assemble and make sense of digital traces.