Studies on the History of Quebec/Études d'histoire du Québec

Réinventer Montréal retrace les idées et les actions de trois urbanistes ayant œuvré à repenser le développement de Montréal dans les années 1960, soit Hans Blumenfeld, Jean-Claude La Haye et Claude Robillard à partir d’un examen de leurs archives personnelles et des plans et des documents d’urbanisme qu’ils ont réalisés.

Before the advent of state-financed social services, poor relief in Quebec was private and sectarian. In Montreal a group of conservative, bourgeois women played a significant role by establishing institutions for destitute women and children. Their Benevolent Design explores how gender shaped the challenges inherent in their benevolent project.

Quels morts peut-on disséquer pour apprendre l’anatomie humaine et devenir un médecin compétent ? Cette science nécessaire fait la lumière sur une histoire originale et méconnue pour mieux comprendre l’essor de la profession médicale au Québec et l’histoire de la formation médicale globalement, ainsi que pour mettre en contexte les débats actuels sur le respect et la dignité dans les pratiques médicales et funéraires.

Countercurrents rewrites the history of post-war feminism in Montreal by incorporating parallel social movements, such as Red Power, Black Power, and Quebec liberation, into the larger narrative of the women’s movement. Case studies compare and reflect on the histories and political work of various feminist groups in Quebec.

Longtemps considérée comme une rébellion mineure, la tentative de révolution de 1837 a en réalité secoué l’ensemble de l’Amérique du Nord, menaçant de renvoyer le pouvoir britannique hors du continent, mais également d’inaugurer une expérience républicaine différente. La révolution a échoué, mais les idées qu’elle a véhiculées - tant progressistes qu’élitistes - résonnent encore aujourd’hui.

L’auteur se penche sur les réseaux des patriotes canadiens en exil aux États-Unis en s’appuyant sur des sources canadiennes et étasuniennes. En sollicitant le soutien de leurs « frères » au sud de la frontière, les rebelles ont poussé les autorités des États-Unis à coopérer activement avec l’Empire britannique, dans un dénigrement surprenant de leurs racines révolutionnaires et antibritanniques. Initialement favorables à l’annexion des Canadas aux États-Unis, les patriotes ont dû repenser leur avenir en dehors d’une république qui affichait ses faiblesses. Ils ont envisagé de fonder leur propre république à « deux étoiles », avec l’espoir de régénérer la démocratisation en Amérique et de teinter la transition au capitalisme moderne de morale, de responsabilité sociale et de bienveillance envers les travailleurs manuels. Le livre explore cette guerre singulière en se penchant sur un large éventail d’acteurs, de faits et de questions historiques, comme le nationalisme, les rapports de force politiques ou encore les idéaux des « droits égaux » et du « laissez-nous faire ».

En proposant un regard novateur et informé sur un évènement que nous pensions bien connaître, La guerre d’indépendance des Canadas suscitera la discussion pendant de nombreuses années.

Deindustrializing Montreal challenges the deepening divergence of class and race analysis by recognizing the intimate relationship between capitalism, class struggles, and racial inequality in historically white Point Saint-Charles, and multiracial Little Burgundy, home to the city’s English-speaking Black community.

A revealing analysis of money and politics in the Canadian colonial project.

A historical perspective on public life and popular politics in the streets of Montreal.

Histoire de la culture gaie et lesbienne à Montréal au tournant du XXe siècle.

Une étude sans précédent de la relation qui unissait l'Église et l'État au Québec avant la Révolution tranquille.

Une reconstitution minutieuse des périls juridiques, financiers et domestiques qui guettaient les épouses de l'élite à l'aube du 20e siècle.

Making sense of why Quebec changed its tourism marketing brands leading up to Expo 67 and shifting travel writers' reactions to the province.

A pioneering study of twentieth-century Quebec missionary work as an experience of intercultural encounter.

A richly drawn portrait of Haiti in Quebec, of Quebec through Haiti, and the ways in which migrants transform societies.

A social history exploring the intersections between those accused of prostitution, their neighbours, families, clients, and criminal justice.

A new analysis of the factors and human choice at the heart of industrialization and social change.

How experts, businessmen, and volunteers reorganized Catholic charities in twentieth-century Quebec.

A study of foodways and food advice in a modernizing Quebec.

A political and social history of suburban governance on the island of Montreal.

An analysis of two elite families in the shaping of English and French Quebec.

An examination of the effects of dams on the environment, Aboriginal peoples, and the war effort.

A compelling study of the global dimensions and local particularities of political activism in Sixties Montreal.

Cet ouvrage revisite l'histoire intellectuelle et politique canadienne entre la révolution américaine et les rébellions de 1837-1838 au Haut et au Bas-Canada en la réintégrant dans le cadre des Révolutions atlantiques qui ont secoué l'Europe et l'Amérique entre 1776 et 1838. Reposant sur un cadre théorique inspiré des travaux des historiens intellectuels du monde atlantique, il traite plus particulièrement de l'importance du concept de liberté dans le développement de l'État dans les deux colonies. Il démontre que ces dernières se sont développés dès 1791 en suivant un idéal de liberté qui, tout en étant différent de la liberté à l'oeuvre au sein des mouvements révolutionnaires de la fin du XVIIIe siècle, n'en était pas moins issu des Lumières. Il présente également les rébellions de 1837-1838 comme étant en partie le résultat d'un affrontement entre deux concepts très différents de liberté.

Did slavery exist in Montreal, and if so what did it look like? Frank Mackey grapples with this question in Done with Slavery, a study of black Montrealers in the eighty years between the British Conquest and the union of Lower and Upper Canada.

Through close examination of archival and contemporary sources, Mackey uncovers largely unknown aspects of the black transition from slavery to freedom. While he considers the changing legal status of slavery, much of the book provides a detailed and nuanced reconstruction of the circumstances of black Montrealers and their lived experience. The resulting picture is remarkably complex, showing the variety of occupations held by blacks, the relationships they had with those they served, their encounters with the judicial and political systems, and the racial mingling that came with intermarriage and apprenticeships. Done with Slavery casts the categories of blackness and slavery in a new light, showing that broad histories of the phenomenon must begin to take into account the specifics of the lives of "marginal" black populations.

Done with Slavery is an invitation to look at a colonial society through the prism of documented black experience, revealing that the roots of the present are neither as wholesome as some would hope nor as bitter as others might suppose.

Vivre avec un individu alcoolique, dérangé dans son esprit ou dépensier à l’excès pouvait s’avérer désastreux pour les familles montréalaises forcées de s’adapter aux exigences et aux risques du capitalisme industriel. Craignant de perdre leur statut social et leur respectabilité, plusieurs d’entre elles ont requis l’interdiction judiciaire d’un de leurs membres, en vue de lui retirer sa capacité civile. L’enfermement des personnes jugées anormales connut aussi un succès grandissant au fil du dix-neuvième siècle.

La Nouvelle-France offre-t-elle aux femmes un champ d'action élargi, comme le voudrait une certaine conception de l'histoire coloniale? Ce n'est pas ce que révèle l'analyse du partage des droits et des responsabilités entre époux, des secondes noces et des stratégies de survie économique des personnes veuves. « Maîtres et seigneurs » chez eux, selon le vœu de l'État, de l'Église et de la loi, les maris assument formellement l'essentiel des responsabilités professionnelles et patrimoniales du ménage. Lorsqu'ils meurent, leurs veuves doivent pour survivre apprendre à profiter de leur nouvelle capacité juridique, d'une certaine flexibilité des rôles féminins, de leur expérience professionnelle ou de leur douaire, qu'elles mettent en valeur seules ou avec l'aide de la parenté. Les veufs, souvent parents de jeunes orphelins et contraints par les normes de la masculinité, se remarient rapidement. Ils retiennent moins l'attention des autorités que les veuves, nombreuses, dom la figure tantôt attendrissante et tantôt suspecte se trouve parfois directement mêlée aux rapports de pouvoir entre la métropole et ses colonies nord-américaines.

A social and cultural history of the rise of the cigarette and the way smoking rituals in Montreal were shaped by gender, class, and race.

Le quartier chaud de Montréal a fait couler beaucoup d'encre, mais sa culture de cabaret n'a jamais été examinée dans la perspective des artistes transsexuelles et travesties qui l'ont rendu si populaire. Par le biais des récits provenant des danseuses elles-mêmes, Viviane Namaste peint un portrait honnête de quatorze transsexuelles - danseuses, chanteuses, magiciennes ou effeuilleuses - et jette un regard dans les coulisses du monde dans lequel vivent et travaillent ces hommes devenus femmes.

A study of the local school board as a key political and social institution in Protestant communities in Quebec.

Between 1891 and 1930 Montreal was a bilingual and increasingly multicultural city. Its "two majorities" struggled to negotiate and commemorate their respective memories in the public spaces of the city, using historic monuments to stake a claim to specific places, streets, and neighbourhoods. In Making Public Pasts Alan Gordon argues that the contest was fundamentally ideological, a competition between major social groups to shape perceptions of history and frame the historical consciousness of individuals.

At the turn of the century American industrialist J.B. Duke set his sights on one of North America's greatest and most spectacular rivers - the Saguenay. In Amassing Power David Massell chronicles thirty years of international intrigue as Duke manoeuvred to gain access to, develop, and sell the tremendous hydro-electric potential of a remote river in Quebec.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries French settlers radically transformed the landscape of the St Lawrence river, creating strong local communities that became the crucibles of a New World nationalism. Drawing on the insights and methods of cultural history, Colin Coates examines the seigneuries of Batiscan and Sainte-Anne de la Pérade, recreating the social relations between individuals and ethnic groups that inhabited the area. He shows that successive waves of immigrants sought to appropriate the landscape of the New World and replace it with a physical and cultural reality much closer to their European roots and traditions.

Economic and social conditions in Saint-Hyacinthe changed dramatically in the later nineteenth century with the arrival of the railway and the emergence of manufacturing industry. In Families in Transition Peter Gossage shows how the rise of industrial capitalism transformed the lives of the town's French-speaking, Catholic families.

By looking in detail at the attitudes and activities of university students in Quebec from 1950 to 1958, Nicole Neatby provides an important new perspective on social and intellectual transformations during the turbulent fifties. Focusing on a particular group of people - including Hubert Aquin, Robert Bourassa, Denis Lazure, and Jacques-Yvan Morin - Neatby makes us aware of the attitudes and initiatives of the young people who became the active participants of the Quiet Revolution.

In Les récoltes des forêts publiques au Québec et Ontario, Guy Gaudreau, the son and grandson of forest industry workers, provides the first comprehensive and systematic analysis of one of the industries that laid the foundations of Canadian economic development throughout the nineteenth century

This collection of essays commemorates the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Louise Dechêne's landmark book Habitants et marchands de Montréal au XVIIe siècle, which ushered in a new phase in the study of the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Canada. In Habitants et marchands, Twenty Years Later leading scholars assess the innovative nature and influence of Dechêne's important work and contribute in their own right to the historiography of the period.

Examining the process of state formation as it occurred in the Eastern Townships of Quebec following the unification of Upper and Lower Canada, J.I. Little argues that institutional reform was not simply imposed by the government but the result of a complex process of interaction between the state and the local community. While past studies look at state formation in the post-Rebellion period largely from the perspective of the central government, State and Society in Transition focuses on the significant role the local population played in shaping institutional reforms.

Founded in 1925, the town of Arvida was established to provide labour for Alcan's plant on the Saguenay River. With the arrival of big business in the rural Quebec countryside, two cultures collided -- the modern industrial culture of English North America and the traditional rural culture of French Quebec. Written in French, Arvida au Saguenay is an exploration of the interaction and eventual integration of these two cultures.

In this study of a pivotal event in the evolution of Quebec's legal culture, Brian Young shows that codification of the Civil law was an intensely political act as well as a legal phenomenon.

La Prairie, under the French régime, was one of the earliest and most populous seigneuries of the Montreal district. Written and published in French, Louis Lavallée's study of peasant society in La Prairie begins in 1647 when the seigneury was conceded to the Jesuits, the most important landowners in New France, and ends with the Conquest. Lavallée discusses La Prairie's status as a frontier and way-station, its remarkable demographic growth -- the population had reached nearly two thousand in 1760 -- and the importance of the seigneurial and parochial frameworks in its development. These last bounded people's lives, giving the inhabitants of La Prairie a sense of financial and domestic structure. The second part of the book covers sociability, inheritance practices, the fur trade, and the form of stratification which prevailed in this traditional society.

In The Christie Seigneuries, Françoise Noël provides a detailed case study of the Christie Seigneuries in the Upper Richelieu Valley (in what is now Quebec) during the period from the French surrender to the British in 1760 to the commutation act of 1854 ending seigneurial tenure. While most seigneurial studies have focused on the censitaires, Noël examines the administrative practices of the seigneurs themselves. She reveals that management practices of seigneuries were influenced more by the personality of the seigneur and his family circumstances, as well as changing economic conditions, than by the judicial rights of the seigneur.

In Crofters and Habitants, J.I. Little examines the ways in which two highly distinct social groups -- Gælic-speaking crofters from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides and French-speaking habitants from south of Quebec City -- adapted to a common physical environment in the rugged Appalachian plateau of south-eastern Quebec.

Louise Dechêne uses the island of Montreal in the seventeenth century as a case study for an analysis of the establishment of colonial society, placing her findings in a broad historiographical context that also takes account of developments in Europe and