Property And Inequality In Victorian Ontario

A meticulously researched and revisionist study of the nineteenth-century Ontario's Married Women's Property Acts. They were important landmarks in the legal emancipation of women.

While we know a great deal about the role religion played in institutions in Victorian Canada, its place in home and family life has remained relatively unexplored. Drawing on a treasure trove of family papers and material culture, Marguerite Van Die depicts religion as "lived experience" in a portrait of an emblematic Protestant middle-class family in Quebec's Eastern Townships. The Colbys were members of Canada's emerging economic elite, active in the local community, public life, and politics. Their lives offer rich insights into the construction and practice of domestic religion and the moral and social legislation of early post-Confederation Canada. Taking a multidisciplinary approach that locates the home rather than the church as the primary site of religious change, Van Die concludes that the origins and continuity of Protestant religion in Victorian Canada depended on a unique set of socioeconomic and cultural forces.Van Die is a sympathetic and perceptive observer and a gifted and deft interpreter. In her examination of the Colbys of Carrollcroft she draws attention to the links connecting domestic religion and private life, business concerns, and social change in one family's life over three generations.

Toronto’s Poor reveals the long and too often forgotten history of poor people’s resistance. It details how people without housing, people living in poverty, and unemployed people have struggled to survive and secure food and shelter in the wake of the many panics, downturns, recessions, and depressions that punctuate the years from the 1830s to the present. Written by a historian of the working class and a poor people’s activist, this is a rebellious book that links past and present in an almost two-hundred year story of struggle and resistance. It is about men, women, and children relegated to lives of desperation by an uncaring system, and how they have refused to be defeated. In that refusal, and in winning better conditions for themselves, Toronto’s poor create the possibility of a new kind of society, one ordered not by acquisition and individual advance, but by appreciations of collective rights and responsibilities.

By the mid-nineteenth-century, 'public opinion' emerged as a new form of authority in Upper Canada. Contemporaries came to believe that the best answer to common questions arose from deliberation among private individuals. Older conceptions of government, sociability and the relationship between knowledge and power were jettisoned for a new image of Upper Canada as a deliberative democracy. The Capacity to Judge asks what made widespread public debate about common issues possible; why it came to be seen as desirable, even essential; and how it was integrated into Upper Canada's constitutional and social self-image. Drawing on an international body of literature indebted to Jürgen Habermas and based on extensive research in period newspapers, Jeffrey L. McNairn argues that voluntary associations and the press created a reading public capable of reasoning on matters of state, and that the dynamics of political conflict invested that public with final authority. He traces how contemporaries grappled with the consequences as they scrutinized parliamentary, republican and radical options for institutionalizing public opinion. The Capacity to Judge concludes with a case study of deliberative democracy in action that serves as a sustained defense of the type of intellectual history the book as a whole exemplifies.

In Becoming Modern in Toronto, Keith Walden shows how the Toronto Industrial Exhibition, from its founding, in 1879, to 1903 (when it was renamed the Canadian National Exhibition), influenced the shaping and ordering of the emerging urban culture.

This book focuses on wealth inequality trends in the North Atlantic Anglo-sphere countries of Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States over the period from 1668 to 2013: a wider perspective than generally used when wealth inequality is discussed. This book demonstrates that it is important to put current dimensions of wealth inequality into historical context by looking at performance over the long run rather than simply a few decades. Moreover, this contribution compiles a substantial amount of data on estimates of wealth inequality and provides a concise overview of trends as well as the drivers of inequality over the long term. It serves as a short supplementary text for economics and sociology courses on economic inequality, economic history and social change—while remaining of interest to scholars and policymakers invested in equality debates of the past and present.