Metamorphoses Of Landscape And Community In Early Quebec

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries French settlers radically transformed the landscape of the St Lawrence river, creating strong local communities that became the crucibles of a New World nationalism. Drawing on the insights and methods of cultural history, Colin Coates examines the seigneuries of Batiscan and Sainte-Anne de la Pérade, recreating the social relations between individuals and ethnic groups that inhabited the area. He shows that successive waves of immigrants sought to appropriate the landscape of the New World and replace it with a physical and cultural reality much closer to their European roots and traditions.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries French settlers radically transformed the landscape of the St Lawrence river, creating strong local communities that became the crucibles of a New World nationalism. Drawing on the insights and methods of cultural history, Colin Coates examines the seigneuries of Batiscan and Sainte-Anne de la Pérade, recreating the social relations between individuals and ethnic groups that inhabited the area. He shows that successive waves of immigrants sought to appropriate the landscape of the New World and replace it with a physical and cultural reality much closer to their European roots and traditions. French settlers distanced the indigenous people and flora and fauna to create a landscape that by the mid-eighteenth century had become recognisably European. British industrialists and landowners attempted similar appropriations with far less durable results and the area remained a heartland of French-Canadian life, with a sense of cohesive community. This community spirit, rooted in agrarian landscape, was channelled into the developing sense of colonial nationalism of the 1820s and 1830s. Drawing on maps by explorers and surveyors, correspondence documenting the conflict between a backwoods priest and his parishioners, a gentlewoman's sketchbook, and the documents of a bitter court case between a seigneur's wife and a local priest, Coates illuminates the development of the region and the social, cultural, and economic ties and tensions within it, providing insights into the often hidden values of a rural community. Colin M. Coates is director of the Centre of Canadian Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

A study of the black experience in Montreal.

Using a family-reconstruction method, Gossage (history, U. de Sherbrooke) explores how the rise of industrial capitalism transformed the lives of the Quebec town's French-speaking, Catholic families. He draws on local registers and manuscript census schedules to focus on marriage, household organization, and family size in the context of the social and economic change. Among his findings are a growing divergence between bourgeois and proletarian families in regard to marriage and fertility patterns. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

In The Christie Seigneuries, Françoise Noël provides a detailed case study of the Christie Seigneuries in the Upper Richelieu Valley (in what is now Quebec) during the period from the French surrender to the British in 1760 to the commutation act of 1854 ending seigneurial tenure. While most seigneurial studies have focused on the censitaires, Noël examines the administrative practices of the seigneurs themselves. She reveals that management practices of seigneuries were influenced more by the personality of the seigneur and his family circumstances, as well as changing economic conditions, than by the judicial rights of the seigneur.

A study of the local school board as a key political and social institution in Protestant communities in Quebec.

In the late Victorian era, smoking was a male habit and tobacco was consumed mostly in pipes and cigars. By the mid-twentieth century, advertising and movies had not only made it acceptable for women to smoke but smoking had become a potent symbol of their emancipation. From mass cigarette production in 1888 to the first studies linking cigarettes to lung cancer in 1950, The Freedom to Smoke explores gender and other key issues related to smoking in Montreal, including the arrival of "big tobacco," first attempts to ban the cigarette, wartime tobacco funds, French Canadian smoking habits, rituals of manliness, and the growing respectability of women smokers - none of which have been examined by historians. Jarrett Rudy argues that while people smoked for highly personal reasons, their smoking rituals were embedded in social relations and shaped by dominant norms of taste and etiquette. The Freedom to Smoke examines the role of the tobacco industry, health experts, churches, farmers, newspapers, the military, the state, and smokers themselves. A pioneering city-based study, it weaves Western understandings of respectable smoking through Montreal's diverse social and cultural fabric. Rudy argues that etiquette gave smoking a political role, reflecting and serving to legitimize beliefs about inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy that were at the core of a transforming liberal order.

An analysis of two elite families in the shaping of English and French Quebec.