Search results for ""Author Gerald Friesen""

Grandmother Andre told stories in front of a campfire. Elizabeth Goudie wrote a memoir in school scribblers. Phyllis Knight taped hours of interviews with her son. Today's families rely on television and video cameras. They are all making history. In a different approach to that old issue, 'the Canadian identity,' Gerald Friesen links the media studies of Harold Innis to the social history of recent decades. The result is a framework for Canadian history as told by ordinary people. Friesen suggests that the common peoples' perceptions of time and space in what is now Canada changed with innovations in the dominant means of communication. He defines four communication-based epochs in Canadian history: the oral-traditional world of pre-contact Aboriginal people; the textual-settler household of immigrants; the print-capitalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the screen-capitalism that has emerged in the last few decades. This analysis of communication is linked to distinctive political economies, each of which incorporates its predecessors in an increasingly complex social order. In each epoch, using the new communication technologies, people struggled to find the political means by which they could ensure that they and their households survived and, if they were lucky, prospered. Canada is the sum of their endeavours. "Citizens and Nation" demonstrates that it is possible to find meaning in the nation's past that will interest, among others, a new, young, and multicultural reading audience.

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Thinkers and Dreamers honours Carl C. Berger, professor of Canadian history at the University of Toronto for more than forty years and author of influential works on Canadian intellectual history. In this collection, Professor Berger's colleagues and former students explore the currents of intellectual life in North America since the mid-nineteenth century. Broad in scope, the essays range in content from a commentary on works in intellectual history to analyses of the development of particular disciplines and distinctive cultural institutions. Several of the contributions provide sharp critiques of historical thought, including a discussion of professional scholarship and an analysis of the field of intellectual history. Others address issues that combine institutional and cultural history, such as an examination of Victorian Canada and a discussion of immigration and citizenship. These varied reflections aptly convey Berger's contributions to the study of Canadian history.

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Over the course of the twentieth century, sequential waves of immigrants from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa settled in the cities of the Canadian Prairies. In Immigrants in Prairie Cities, Royden Loewen and Gerald Friesen analyze the processes of cultural interaction and adaptation that unfolded in these urban centres and describe how this model of diversity has changed over time. The authors argue that intimate Prairie cities fostered a form of social diversity characterized by vibrant ethnic networks, continuously evolving ethnic identities, and boundary zones that facilitated intercultural contact and hybridity. Impressive in scope, Immigrants in Prairie Cities spans the entire twentieth century, and encompasses personal testimonies, government perspectives, and even fictional narratives. This engaging work will appeal to both historians of the Canadian Prairies and those with a general interest in migration, cross-cultural exchange, and urban history.

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