Fast Sailing And Copper Bottomed

The days when Aberdeen’s "fast sailing and copper-bottomed" ships carried emigrant Scots to Canada are brought to life in this fascinating account of the northern Scotland exodus during the sailing ship era. Taking readers through new and little-used documentary sources, Lucille H. Campey finds convincing evidence of good ships, sailed by experienced captains and managed by reputable people, thus challenging head on the perceived imagery of abominable sea passages in leaking old tubs. And by considering the significance of ship design and size, she opens a new window on our understanding of emigrant travel. Instead of concentrating on the extreme cases of suffering and mishaps, to be found in anecdotal material, Campey’s approach is to identify all of the emigrant sea crossings to Canada made on Aberdeen sailing ships. Observing the ships which collected passengers from the port of Aberdeen as well as those which collected emigrants at Highland ports, especially Cromarty and Thurso, Campey reveals the processes at work and the people who worked behind the scenes to provide the services. Her following of the emigrant Scots on to their New World destinations in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Upper Canada provides us with an opportunity to see how events in Canada were influencing both the decision to emigrate and choice of location. These emigrant Scots succeeded, often after difficult beginnings, and would endow Canada with their rich traditions and culture which live on to this day.

When novelist Dinah Craik (1826–87) died, expressions of grief came from Lord Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, T.H. Huxley, and James Russell Lowell, among others, and even Queen Victoria picked up her pen to offer her consolation to the widower. Despite Craik’s enormous popularity throughout a literary career that spanned forty years, she is now all but forgotten. Yet, in an otherwise respectable life bookended by scandal, this was precisely the way that she wanted it. Victorian Bestseller is the first book to relate the story of Dinah Craik’s remarkable life. Combining extensive archival work with theoretical work in disability studies and the professionalization of women’s authorship, Karen Bourrier engagingly traces the contours of this author’s life. Craik, who wrote extensively about disability in her work, was no stranger to it in her personal and professional life, marked by experiences of mental and physical disability, and the ebb and flow of health. Following scholarship in the ethics of care and disability studies, the book posits Craik as an interdependent subject, placing her within a network of writers, publishers, editors and artists, friends, and family members. Victorian Bestseller also traces the conditions in the material history of the book that allowed Victorian women writers’ careers to flourish. In doing so, the biography connects corporeality, gender, and the material history of the book to the professionalization of Victorian women’s authorship.

In recent years, over one million Canadians have claimed Polish heritage - a significant population increase since the first group of Poles came from Prussian-occupied Poland and settled in Wilno, Ontario, west of Ottawa in 1858. For over a century, descendants from this community thought of themselves as Polish, but this began to change in the 1980s due to the work of a descendant priest who emphasized the community’s origins in Poland’s Kashubia region. What resulted was the reinvention of ethnicity concurrent with a similar movement in northern Poland. Creating Kashubia chronicles more than one hundred and fifty years of history, identity, and memory and challenges the historiography of migration and settlement in the region. For decades, authors from outside Wilno, as well as community insiders, have written histories without using the other’s stores of knowledge. Joshua Blank combines primary archival material and oral history with national narratives and a rich secondary literature to reimagine the period. He examines the socio-political and religious forces in Prussia, delves into the world of emigrant recruitment, and analyzes the trans-Atlantic voyage. In doing so, Blank challenges old narratives and traces the refashioning of the community’s ethnic identity from Polish to Kashubian. An illuminating study, Creating Kashubia shows how changing identities and the politics of ethnic memory are locally situated yet transnationally influenced.