Reluctant Pioneer

In the 1870s in Ontario's Muskoka, teenager Thomas Osborne endured starvation, freezing, accidents with axes and boats, and narrow escapes from wolves and bears. Decades later, after moving to the United States, Osborne wrote down all his adventures in a graphic memoir four years before his death in 1938.

In the 1870s in Ontario's Muskoka, teenager Thomas Osborne endured starvation, freezing, accidents with axes and boats, and narrow escapes from wolves and bears. Decades later, after moving to the United States, Osborne wrote down all his adventures in a graphic memoir four years before his death in 1938.

A fishing community in Northwest Iceland has found a revolutionary way to regulate the shrimpfishery. This book is an ethnographic and sociological study of how the community and its shrimpfishers, marine biologists, and politicians struggle to come to terms with a new way of managing a marine resource. The impact is felt in the way shrimpfishers have had to redefine their own occupation and work. Center-periphery relations and relationships among several fishery sectors have also been affected. The research is based on the use of in-depth interviews, participant observation, private documents, and governmental records, providing fresh insights into grassroots acceptance of innovative marine-resource management policies.

This book explores the life and contributions of groundbreaking attorney, Elreta Melton Alexander Ralston (1919–98). In 1945 Alexander became the first African American woman to graduate from Columbia Law School. In 1947 she was the first African American woman to practice law in the state of North Carolina, and in 1968 she became the first African American woman to become an elected district court judge. Despite her accomplishments, Alexander is little known to scholars outside of her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. Her life and career deserve recognition, however, not just because of her impressive lists of “firsts,” but also owing to her accomplishments during the civil rights movement in the U.S. South. While Alexander did not actively participate in civil rights marches and demonstrations, she used her professional achievements and middle-class status to advocate for individuals who lacked a voice in the southern legal system. Virginia L. Summey argues that Alexander was integral to the civil rights movement in North Carolina as she, and women like her, worked to change discriminatory laws while opening professional doors for other minority women. Using her professional status, Alexander combatted segregation by demonstrating that Black women were worthy and capable of achieving careers alongside white men, thereby creating environments in which other African Americans could succeed. Her legal expertise and ability to reach across racial boundaries made her an important figure in Greensboro history.

The history of Ontario's premier cottage destination, Muskoka, was not commonplace or uneventful. Beginning in the 1860's, emigrants from the British Isles and Europe were lured to this desolate region with the promise of free land grants for farming. What they found were mature forests, swamp, and never ending rock. Their heroic attempts to make a living farming on the Precambrian Shield did not come without considerable discomfort. Pioneer Muskoka documents the struggles faced by these early homesteaders and their response to hardship, isolation, disease and poverty. This is the tale of a community banding together to overcome fear with courage and determination. Readers will be astounded by the lengths these settlers went in their quest to make a home for themselves and future generations in Muskoka. The eventual shift from farming to more profitable industries such as lumber and tourism brought a shift in attitude towards this now highly sought after locale. The first families, through their enormous efforts, were able to create this positive and enduring change....

Provides the first history of the North American farm novel, a genre which includes John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Sheila Watson's The Double Hook, and Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine. From John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese to Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine, some of the most famous works of American, English Canadian, and French Canadian literature belongto the genre of the farm novel. In this volume, Florian Freitag provides the first history of the genre in North America from its beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century to its apogee in French Canada around the middleof the twentieth. Through surveys and selected detailed analyses of a large number of farm novels written in French and English, Freitag examines how North American farm novels draw on the history of farming in nineteenth-centuryNorth America as well as on the national self-conceptions of the United States, English Canada, and French Canada, portraying farmers as national icons and the farm as a symbolic space of the American, English Canadian, and FrenchCanadian nations. Turning away from traditional readings of farm novels within the frameworks of regionalism and pastoralism, Freitag takes a comparative look at a genre that helped to spatialize North American national dreams. Florian Freitag is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany.