Voices in the Legal Archives in the French Colonial World: "The King is Listening" offers, through the contribution of thirteen original chapters, a sustained analysis of judicial practices and litigation during the first era of French overseas expansion.The overall goal of this volume is to elaborate a more sophisticated "social history of colonialism" by focusing largely on the eighteenth century, extending roughly from 1700 until the conclusion of the Age of Revolutions...

This book explores the courtship and marriage of Gwyneth Murray, an English woman, and a Canadian, Harry Logan, who wrote in the personae of their vagina (Dardanella) and penis (Peter) during World War I. Through an analysis of their extensive daily correspondence over nearly a decade, it uncovers the couple’s changing attitudes to the intersection of sexuality and religion, to marriage and childrearing, as they navigated the transition from Victorian to modern values. By focusing on first...

In the decades following the Second World War, North America and Western Europe experienced widespread secularization and dechristianization; many scholars have pinpointed the 1960s as a pivotally important period in this decline. The Sixties and Beyond examines the scope and significance of dechristianization in the western world between 1945 and 2000.A thematically wide-ranging and interdisciplinary collection, The Sixties and Beyond uses a framework that compar...

Changing social and cultural strategies of Protestant and Catholic religious institutions have shaped the social order in Quebec and English Canada. Through a sustained comparison of Protestantism and Catholicism this volume explores the transition from pre-industrial to industrial society and challenges conventional chronologies of religious change.

Set against a background of intense religious and cultural change and tensions over the meanings of nationalism and federalism in both Quebec and Canada, Michael Gauvreau's The Hand of God traces the emergence of Claude Ryan as a public intellectual. This is the first comprehensive biography of Ryan based on his personal papers and extensive writings as a social commentator, editorialist, and director of the newspaper Le Devoir.At a time of Catholic religious fervour and n...

Religious institutions, values, and identities are fundamental to understanding the lived experiences of Canadians in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Christian Churches and Their Peoples, an inter-denominational study, considers how Christian churches influenced the social and cultural development of Canadian society across regional and linguistic lines.By shifting their focus beyond the internal dynamics of institutions, Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau ad...

By examinng education, charity, community discipline, the relationship between clergy and congregations, and working-class religion, the contributors shift the field of religious history into the realm of the socio-cultural. This novel perspective reveals that the Christian churches remained dynamic and popular in English and French Canada, as well as among immigrants, well into the twentieth century.

Over the past decade, scholars and policy makers interested in Canadian multiculturalism have begun to take religion much more seriously. Moreover, Christian communities have become increasingly aware of the impact of ethnic diversity on church life. However, until very recently almost no systematic academic attention has been paid to the intersection between the ethnic and religious identities of individuals or communities. This gap in both our academic literature and our public discourse...

In 2004 a public attitudes survey suggested that 31 per cent of British people believed that all or most MPs told the truth. In 2012 this had dropped to 20 per cent.In 2004 50 per cent of respondents believed that all or most MPs did not use their power for personal gain. In 2012 this had dropped to 33 per cent.Over the whole period from 2004–2012 the average level of trust in judges was over 80 per cent, that of MPs less than 30 per cent.The report also showed that...

Between 1800 and 1914, Canadian society and its school systems were forged, populated, expanded and reformed. The Promise of Schooling explores the links between social and educational change in this complex and dynamic period. It raises and seeks to answer a number of questions: How extensive was schooling in the early nineteenth century? What lay behind the campaign to extend publicly funded education? What went on inside the Canadian classroom? How did schools address the needs...

"As Canadian as the maple leaf" is how one observer summed up the United Church of Canada after its founding in 1925. But was this Canadian-made church flawed in its design, as critics have charged? A Church with the Soul of a Nation explores this question by weaving together the history of the United Church with a provocative analysis of religion and cultural change.The story begins in the aftermath of Confederation, when the prospects of building a Christian nation persu...

With nine out of ten Canadians claiming a religious affiliation of some kind - Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Aboriginal, or one of dozens of other religions - faith has huge impact on our personal and social lives. In this book, Robert Choquette offers a comprehensive history of religion in Canada and examines the ongoing tug-of-war between modernity and conservatism within the religious traditions themselves.