This research analyzes the careers, teaching practices, and self-assessments of Ontario college media professors hired in the 1970s and 1980s in three parts of the province. I interviewed nine retired media professors and an academic manager about their professional experiences during the establishment of these programs. My historical account uses a feminist model of closure theory from the neo-Weberian sociology of professions, along with intersectional writing on identity, to explain the gendered and racialized nature of the labour market in these geographically and historcally specific areas during these years. How was hiring influenced by these elements? At the beginning of this period, privileged white middle-class men with connections to education and industry experience founded the programs, eventually hiring privileged white women with relevant post secondary credentials and industry experience. However, not all the women hired in the 1980s began their careers full time, unlike their male colleagues, and those who did faced challenges within the institution.
In the summer of 1964, first-year Alberta College of Art and Design student Roberta Joan Anderson (soon to be Joni Mitchell) dropped out of college and fled to Canada’s most cosmopolitan city: Toronto. Twenty years old, pregnant, unwed, and utterly terrified, Mitchell was still a perennial pragmatist. She envisioned Toronto as an environment more hospitable to the life she wanted to lead—a life that deviated from normative Canadian cultural values and saw her becoming both a single mother and a female singer-songwriter. This article examines an understudied period in the life of musical legend Joni Mitchell. It expands on existing studies of Mitchell’s early career and on the experiences of unwed mothers living in 1960s Toronto. In it, I illuminate the context-specific considerations that led to Mitchell’s decision to leave Alberta and interrogate what normative expectations of motherhood looked like in the Canadian Prairies versus postwar Ontario. After being turned away from the Salvation Army’s Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers, Mitchell gave birth alone to her daughter on February 19, 1965. She left the hospital the next day, her daughter placed into foster care. Mitchell is one of thousands of Canadian women whose lives were irrevocably impacted by Canada’s postwar adoption mandate programs. As a public figure who has gone on record about the mistreatment she suffered while pregnant and unwed, Mitchell grants us access to a domain of Canadian history where voices are notoriously difficult to find, given the shame and stigma surrounding unwed motherhood. Mitchell becomes a totem through which to discuss the enduring legacy of Canada’s postwar adoption mandate for single mothers and the climate of hostility that unwed Canadian mothers in 1960s Ontario were forced to navigate.
Between 1946 and 1962, over 2.1 million newcomers came to the safe haven of Canada. Many of these immigrants successfully integrated into the host society. This paper will provide an intimate look into the experiences of seven families who emigrated from Germany to Sault Ste. Marie in the postwar period. In “the Soo,” cultural clubs and families of various ethnicities often banded together to help each other adapt, start over, and rebuild their lives. The resident Saultites demonstrated curiosity, but also varying degrees of acceptance of these immigrants, even though some of them had come from countries against which Canadians had fought. German newcomers to the Soo were consequently able to retain their heritage while becoming part of Canadian society. They created new identities as German-Canadians while participating in the acculturation process.
In 1850, the number of Canadians in each Old Northwest state in the United States varied considerably, partly due to differences in total population (Ohio had nearly two million people and Wisconsin about 305,000), and partly due to differences in settlement preferences. Indiana’s total population was nearly triple that of Michigan, but Michigan housed over seven times as many Canadians. The residential locations of the Old Northwest’s British American immigrants can be examined at two levels. First, generally, by considering each state’s number of Canadians and their proportions compared to all immigrants (domestic and foreign), only foreign immigrants, and within the total of British Americans. Second, more granularly, by analyzing their county-by-county residential locations. Since published census tables do not include county-level nativity data, this information was extracted from the microfilmed schedules through individual-by-individual counting and data analysis. The 1850 manuscript census also provides a window into the origins of immigrants to the Old Northwest within British America. Census records reveal that British American immigrants lived in nearly every county of the Old Northwest in 1850, and in many Michigan, Wisconsin, and northern Illinois counties, they represented a significant proportion. Yet they are scarcely examined in the historical literature. Perhaps this article can point researchers towards places where local histories and genealogical information can be examined to construct a deeper understanding of the presence and role of mid-nineteenth century Canadian immigrants to the Old Northwest.
As a case study set within the Sault Ste. Marie-Baawating region, this paper seeks to address the development and implementation of residency requirements to maintain treaty rights in British Canada. Following the conclusion of the War of 1812, British Canada began imposing both unofficial and official decisions relating to receiving gifts, annuities, land rights, and various forms of government assistance. Beginning by limiting gifts to British resident Indians between 1840–1858, the practice evolved into a legislated section of the Indian Act from 1876 to 1951 that removed individuals from Band lists for residing in a foreign country for five consecutive years. Garden River First Nation, a Band within the Baawating region, lost members prior to 1876 based on U.S. residency and acceptance of American annuities, lands, or government assistance. From 1876 to 1951 the Band and its membership continued to be negatively affected by the residency rule. Regardless, the Band continued to contest removals and seek reinstatement of members through calls to treaty rights and understandings of the five-year rule—residency on the reserve or their non-consecutive residence in the U.S. As such, this article explores an understudied aspect of enfranchisement policies within the Indian Act, from their development to formal implementation, Anishinaabeg contestation of these policies, and briefly addresses the ongoing contemporaneous existence of these policies.
There are engravings on a large rock in Awenda Provincial Park near southern Ontario’s Georgian Bay that suggest they date to the Penetanguishene Purchase of 1795. Thus, someone viewing the inscriptions might think they are significant in the history of Anishinabe-Crown relations. They are not. The engravings are deceitful modern fakes of no value for understanding Crown-Indigenous relations in the late 1700s. Sadly, people have accepted them as genuine. This has corrupted understanding of the region’s history and led Indigenous protesters to occupy the site under the false impression that the location is historically important because of the engravings. This article exposes the fraud, assesses its impact, considers issues of failing to evaluate our physical heritage accurately, and notes how falling victim to deceptions undermines efforts to achieve truth and reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and the broader Canadian population.
This article offers the first published account of the origins of the Flag of Ontario. Proclaimed in May 1965, the Ontario provincial flag (like that of Manitoba) was a consequence of the preceding national flag debate. Sometimes dismissed as an act of rebellion against the new Canadian flag, the new provincial flag was largely welcomed by a receptive Ontario public. The loss of the Canadian Red Ensign, a long-respected and familiar symbol for much of English Canada, was deeply felt by many. Much of Ontario was ambivalent about changing the national flag and the adoption of a provincial Red Ensign was held by some to be an act of compromise, easing the acceptance of the new Flag of Canada after a divisive national debate. This article also brings to light several less well-known, ultimately unsuccessful flag proposals for Ontario that arose in the early 1960s.
This article considers how a semi-skilled Scottish stonecutter could rise to become one of Upper Canada’s most accomplished businessmen over the course of a few decades in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although largely unremarked, the man who modestly styled himself “John Brown, Contractor” contributed significantly to the development of his adopted country’s industrial and commercial infrastructure until his unexpected death in 1876. Based in the Niagara region, he became the country’s pre-eminent contractor cum civil engineer: he established the first hydraulic cement mill in British North America in Thorold in 1841, and his professional acumen was instrumental in ensuring the success of major public works, from the Second and Third Welland Canals to the Imperial Tower lighthouses. The manager “loved by his men” and the “fair boss” who advocated for labour rights was overseeing an estimated 500 men on a myriad of contracts throughout Ontario when he died. Brown was also a shrewd real estate speculator whose extensive land and quarry holdings helped to shape Niagara’s economic landscape.
