Report Of The Royal Commission Of Inquiry Into Farming Conditions

Fears and Fantasies: Modernity, Gender, and the Rural-Urban Divide explores the ways in which fantasies about returning to, or revitalising, rural life helped to define Western modernity in the early twentieth century. Scholarship addressing responses to modernity has focused on urban space and fears about the effects of city life; few studies have considered the 'rural' to be as critical as the 'urban' in understanding modernity. This book argues that the rural is just as significant a reference point as the urban in discourses about modernity. Using a rich Australian case study to illuminate broader international themes, it focuses on the role of gender in ideas about the rural-urban divide, showing how the country was held up against the 'unnatural' city as a space in which men were more 'masculine' and women more 'feminine'. Fears and Fantasies is an innovative and important contribution to scholarship in the fields of history and gender studies.

Improved Earth is a history of the making of 'abstract spaces of modernity' in the setting of the Canadian prairies, particularly rural Saskatchewan, from 1869 to 1944. Rod Bantjes demonstrates how three interrelated projectsstate formation, agrarian class formation, and the transformation of the environmentwere conceived in spatial terms and employed competing visions of spatial possibility. Bantjes proposes that the prairies be thought of as a site of modernity, and makes a case for viewing prairie farmers as 'modernists' who not only embraced, but took an active role in the making of modernity. Indeed, many of the questions that excited the imaginations of prairie politicians and reformers are alive today: the ecological and social value of 'localization' in agricultural production; the potentials for 'community' maintained and linked by transportation and communications technologies; and the possibilities of democratic decentralization within large translocal networks. The first systematic treatment of the spatial dimensions of the colonization of the prairie west, Improved Earth is a unique and thorough study certain to provoke new debates about the way space and time are imagined.

Saskatchewan: Geographic Perspectives is Saskatchewan's first comprehensive geography textbook. Its major sections cover these themes: Physical Geography, Historical and Cultural Geography, Population and Settlement, and Economic Geography. Eighteen chapters provide an excellent overview of the province from a variety of geographic perspectives, while twenty-nine focus studies explore specific topics in depth ... presents the work of forty-three scholars and is well-illustrated, with more than 150 figures, 70 tables, and over 60 full-colour plates. It also includes full reference lists and a comprehensive index. Although prepared specifically for use in post-secondary geography programs, this book is also appropriate for high school research projects and for anyone interested in the many facets of this vast and varied province."--Googlebooks.