Journal And Transactions Of The Board Of Agriculture Of Upper Canada

Agricultural societies founded in the colony of Upper Canada were the institutional embodiment of the ideology of improvement, modelled on contemporary societies in Britain and the United States. In Improving Upper Canada, Ross Fair explores how the agricultural improvers who established and led these organizations were important agents of state formation. The book investigates the initial failed attempts to create a single agricultural society for Upper Canada. It examines the 1830 legislation that publicly funded the creation of agricultural societies across the colony to be semi-public agents of agricultural improvement, and analyses societies established in the Niagara, Home, and Midland Districts to understand how each attempted to introduce specific improvements to local farming practices. The book reveals how Upper Canada’s agricultural improvers formed a provincial association in the 1840s to ensure that the colonial government assumed a greater leadership role in agricultural improvement, resulting in the Bureau of Agriculture, forerunner of federal and provincial departments of agriculture in the post-Confederation era. In analysing an early example of state formation, Improving Upper Canada provides a comprehensive history of the foundations of Ontario’s agricultural societies today, which continue to promote agricultural improvement across the province.

This list of agricultural periodicals of the United States and Canada does not represent a complete list.

This comprehensive history of Ontario's agricultural development, first published in 1946, is a classic of scholarship and readability. It will appeal not only to agriculturalists and historians but also to anyone interested in life in early Ontario.

Educating the Neglected Majority is Richard Jarrell’s pioneering survey of the attempt to develop and diffuse agricultural and technical education in nineteenth-century Canada’s most populous regions. It explores the efforts and achievements of educators, legislators, and manufacturers as they responded to the rapid changes resulting from the Industrial Revolution. Identifying the resources that the state, philanthropic organizations, private schools, moral reform societies, and churches harnessed to implement technical education for the rural and industrial working classes, Jarrell illuminates the formal and informal learning networks of Upper Canada/Ontario and Lower Canada/Quebec at this time. As these colonial societies moved towards mechanization, industrialization, and nationhood, their educational leaders looked to US and British developments in pedagogy and technology to create academic journals, evening classes, libraries, mechanics’ institutes, museums, specialist societies, and women’s institutes. Supervising these varied activities were legislatures and provincial boards, where key figures such as E.-A. Barnard, J.-B. Meilleur, and Egerton Ryerson played dominant roles. Portraying the powerful hopes and sometimes unrealistic dreams that motivated energetic and determined reformers, Educating the Neglected Majority presents Ontario and Quebec’s response to the powerful industrial and demographic forces that were reshaping the North Atlantic world.