Peasants In The Promised Land

For many years following Confederation, Canada remained an absurd country: with its vast West still free of agricultural settlers, John A. Macdonald's vision of a great nation bound together by a transcontinental railway and a nationalist economic policy remained an unfulfilled dream. On the other side of the Atlantic, the present-day Ukraine was vastly overpopulated with "redundant" peasants. Their increasingly precarious existence triggered emigration: more than 170 000 of them sailed for Canada. Life in the promised land was hard. Many Canadians seemed to think that the only good immigrants were British; some went so far as to suggest that the Ukrainian newcomers were less than human. But on the harsh and remote prairies, the Ukrainians triumphed over the toil and isolation of homesteading, putting down roots and prospering. Peasants in the Promised Land is the first book to focus on the formative period of Ukrainian settlement in Canada. Drawing on his exhaustive research, including Ukrainian-language archival sources, Jaroslav Petryshyn brings history to life with extracts from memoirs, letters and newspapers of the period. His text is illustrated with maps and historical photographs.

Field study, peasant movements, civil war, El Salvador - historical roots of rural area poverty, living conditions of the peasantry, social conflicts and violence, state intervention in rural institutions, role of Catholic Church and other social change agents, rural worker organizations, politics, revolution, popular political power in controlled zones, agrarian reform, etc. Bibliography, graphs, illustrations, photographs, statistical tables.

This book represents the first harvest in the English language of the work of the Land Research Action Network (LRAN). LRAN is an international working group of researchers, analysts, nongovernment organizations, and representatives of social movements. -- pref.

One of Poland's most engrossing twentieth-century epics, by the 1924 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature In the village of Lipce, scandal, romance and drama crackle in every hearth. Boryna, a widower and the village's wealthiest farmer, has taken the young and beautiful Jagusia as his bride - but she only has eyes for his impetuous son Antek. Over the course of four seasons - Autumn to Summer - the tangled skein of their story unravels, watched eagerly by the other peasants: the gossip Jagustynka, pious Roch, hot-blooded Mateusz, gentle Witek ... Richly lyrical and thrillingly realist, at turns comic, tragic and reflective, Wladyslaw Reymont's magnum opus is a love song to a lasting dream of rural Poland, and to the eternal, timeless matters of the heart.

Written from the migration systems perspective, From Peasants to Labourers places the migration of Ukrainian and Belarusan peasant-workers within the context of Old- and New-World economic structures and state policies. Through painstaking analysis of thousands of personal migrant files in the archives of the Russian consulates in Canada, Kukushkin fills a void in our knowledge of the geographic origins, spatial trajectories, and ethnic composition of early twentieth-century Canadian immigration from Eastern Europe. From Peasants to Labourers also provides important insights into the nature of ethnic identity formation through an exploration of the meaning of "Russianness" in early twentieth-century Canada.