In 1719, James Knight set sail for the Northwest Passage in the ships Albany and Discovery, hoping to access distant gold deposits on the American, not Asian, continent. He died in the North, somewhere in the vicinity of Marble Island, his goals unfulfilled. This article does not continue the investigation into the circumstances of his death but, instead, seeks to clarify the contradictory and ambiguous body of scholarship that has been written about his life. Through a fresh examination of Knight's journals and documents produced by the Hudson's Bay Company (hbc) Committee in London, this article asserts that Knight was motivated in his actions by an explicit desire to prop up the then ailing business of the hbc and that he had the full backing of his superiors in pursuing such a course. It also proposes that, by reframing Knight not as an eccentric outsider but, rather, as an agent enacting the will of a large, chartered corporation, his goals and assumptions can be used as an appropriate point of comparison to those of other significant engagements with the Northwest Passage. The ideologies underpinning the Knight expedition, in contrast to those of later periods, help prove that the Northwest Passage of the early eighteenth century was yet to acquire its more abstract connotations and was instead viewed principally as a simple commercial tool.
The contributors to this forum on "great books" reflect on the impact of Joy Parr's The Gender of Breadwinners on their own research and on the field of Canadian history. Parr's award-winning book focuses on two small industrial towns in southern Ontario: Paris, where most of the wage earners were women, and Hanover, where most workers were men. Informed by feminist theory, it was a path-breaking study that challenged established dichotomies in social theory to make sense of the sexual division of labour and gender and class roles. Contributors, at various career stages, discuss the theoretical and methodological innovations that Parr brought to the historical analysis of waged work, domesticity, migration, labour processes, gender and class identities, and community relations.
This article focuses on how Chinese Canadians actively engaged with their imagined connections to China as both a source of hope and a practical resource to secure their place in Canada. These connections were embodied in the belief that the circumstances of Chinese in Canada were intrinsically linked to the fate of China. On the one hand, they continuously sought support from China to combat institutional racism in Canada; on the other, Canada's anti-Chinese laws were interpreted as stemming from China's weakness. Therefore, the strengthening of China was perceived as being integral to Chinese Canadians' struggle for equal rights in Canada. Importantly, the strategic invocation of ties with China arose from the fact that Canadian institutions remained largely inaccessible to Chinese Canadians in their efforts to challenge anti-Chinese legislation; thus, they looked across the Pacific for support. This orientation differed from nationalism, but it reveals the agency and aspirations of Chinese Canadians to secure their place in Canada through the means available to them. Notably, the significance of imagined ties with China gradually receded after 1947, when Chinese Canadians were finally granted citizenship rights in Canada.
This article investigates the impact of gossip and scandal on the Nationalities Branch, the bureaucracy responsible for Canada’s management of foreign-language groups during the Second World War. To date, scholars have acknowledged the problems plaguing the branch and its personnel, including a dearth of resources and attempted power grabs from other departments. This article turns to the personal life of Tracy Philipps, the branch’s European advisor, to tell this story more comprehensively. I argue that gossip about his relationship with his ex-wife Lubka Kolessa, which was publicized in the pro-communist press by a fellow civil servant, is critical to explaining the branch’s growing ineffectiveness and its eventual restructuring into the Citizenship Division after the war. This bureaucratic transformation profoundly impacted the government’s relationship with the organized Ukrainian Canadian community, for whom Philipps became a conduit for the development of a politics of resentment. This article likewise contributes to methodological discussions about the use of gossip, prejudicial sources, and personal information in historical research. By foregrounding gossip and scandal, it moves beyond a top-down history of the Nationalities Branch to reveal the power struggles, betrayals, and interpersonal conflicts that structured its operations as well as the government’s broader relationship to the Ukrainian Canadian community.
