An important kind of digital-based research – the use of quantitative sources and analysis – expanded in Canadian history journals during the 1970s and 1980s, declined in the 1990s, and then has increased again since the early years of the new millennium. A wide variety of sources are being digitized and used for historical research that is wholly or, more commonly, partially quantitative in nature. The Canadian census is the most widely used of these sources. Access to census resources will improve considerably with the completion of a project currently in progress, which is entitled The Canadian Peoples/Les populations canadiennes, https://thecanadianpeoples. com.

Introduction The Canadian settlement of the west, via granting free homesteads, is perhaps one of the largest public policy undertakings in the nation's history. However, little is known about the homesteaders themselves, where they came from, how long they stayed and the settlement environment that was created at the time. Objectives and Approach This research adopts a detailed population analysis of the settlement movement in Western Canada. In addition to outlining the social and economic characteristics of the homesteaders, the project answers the following central question: Did it create a stable society of settlers or did it create a field for speculative investment? The data consist of machine readable individual level databases containing detailed information on and stories from circa 170,000 Alberta homesteaders. These homesteaders will be individually linked to three twentieth century Canadian censuses and the Canadian Pacific Railway's land records to provide an unprecedented holistic analysis of Alberta's early European population. Results We report on the linkage methodology used to integrate all these data sources. In addition, we discuss any particular issues we encountered given the nature of the historical data. We describe the data cleaning and standardization that was undertaken to facilitate the linkage process. We present and discuss the linkage results obtained, how much of the population was linked and what are the characteristics of those we couldn’t link. We expect that this research will shed new light on persistence rates, trajectories of family composition, nature of labour market adjustment, degrees of social/gender inequality and impacts on regional development. The results will challenge many myths concerning homesteaders and their impact on western Canada and in the process provoke renewed discussion of western Canadian history. Conclusion/Implications The research will inform and be informed by work currently being undertaken on migration patterns at the international level. Finally the research has implications for understanding the legacies of rapid population movements, state formation, public policy and national identities in the present.

For almost two centuries social theorists have argued that the fundamental difference in social structure between Europe and North America arises from greater economic and geographic mobility in North America. We study social mobility in three countries across two generations using machine learning techniques to create panels of individuals linked between censuses thirty years apart (1850-1880, 1880-1910). This paper reports on a preliminary analysis of social mobility between 1850 and 1880, finding that mobility was markedly higher in the United States and Canada, compared to Great Britain.

Reviewed by: The Ordinary People of Essex: Environment, Culture, and Economy on the Frontier of Upper Canada Peter Baskerville The Ordinary People of Essex: Environment, Culture, and Economy on the Frontier of Upper Canada. John Clarke. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. Pp. 776, $135.00 A reviewer of Clarke’s first ‘monumental work’ on Essex County, Land, Power and Economics on the Frontier of Upper Canada, can be forgiven for thinking that that work brought ‘together over thirty-five years of research . . . on the southwesterly tip of Ontario.’ In fact, the book encapsulated some of that research, but not all of it. In Ordinary People, the author’s second detailed and meticulously researched tome on Essex County, Clarke, a historical geographer, shifts his view from the broad context – political, economic, and social – within which rural settlers lived to their actual lived experience, or at least as actual as a forensic analysis of the agricultural and nominal level returns extant in the 1851–2 Canadian census will allow. In a prodigious research effort, Clarke hand-linked those returns to each other and, where feasible, to modern soil surveys, historical land records, and a series of tax assessment rolls in an attempt to explore the relationship between agricultural behaviour and cultural origin. From the perspective of that goal, studying Essex is a good choice: its population was diverse – 38 per cent of the county’s families were headed by French Canadians, 18 per cent by American born, 15 per cent by English Canadians, 14 per cent by those of English origin, 11 per cent by Irish origin, 3 per cent by Scottish origin, and a scattering of others. While Clarke refers throughout to Essex as a frontier area, in fact by 1851–2 the county was very much a long-settled and well-developed agricultural region, ranking in the top 15 per cent of Ontario counties in terms of land occupied and in the top 22 per cent in terms of land cultivated and cropped. These characteristics – maturity and diversity, rather than any claim to representivity – underlay Clarke’s decision to study Essex. Indeed, throughout the book he [End Page 495] emphasizes the need for similar studies of other counties in order to determine degrees of representivity. Clarke uses his rich data to test a number of dominant themes in Ontario’s social and agricultural historiography. Clarke points to Essex as ‘the prototype of the ethnic mosaic’ in terms of distinctive territorial ethnic groupings, few cross-ethnic marriages, and a concentration of land business within ethnic pockets. ‘There was no real mixing,’ he concludes (113). Did wheat dominate? While Clarke’s answer to this question clearly supports the McCalla/McInnis observation that wheat was less than king, the evidence he brings to support this observation is at times confusing. At one point we are told that 40 per cent of the county’s farms with cultivated acres grew one or more acres of wheat in 1851, compared to McInnis’s figure of 92 per cent for 1861 (174). Yet later we are told that 69 per cent of Essex properties with ‘land in crop’ produced wheat, and again this is compared to McInnis’s 92 per cent figure (206). Which is the appropriate comparison? Clarke carefully explores the relationship of French Canadians to agriculture – an often charged theme within central Canadian agricultural historiography – and concludes that the relationship remains an ‘enigma.’ Available evidence points to ’backwardness,’ but, Clarke notes, this has to be tempered by the fact that the bulk of French Canadians in the county lived on the ‘least sustainable soils’ (294). Clarke also looks closely at the behaviour of Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants as farmers and observes that Irish Catholics acquired a great deal of land but produced relatively smaller amounts of crops. Irish Protestants were better producers and from Clarke‘s perspective, somewhat surprisingly, concentrated on corn production – a crop almost unknown to them in Ireland. He points to this as an example of a culture adapting to changed environments. More broadly, Clarke notes that there was a significant difference in agricultural behaviour between those born in North America and those who were immigrants...

In this article we explore what the exploding world of humanities and social science research infrastructures might mean for teaching and research in the discipline of history. We focus closely on one example, that of the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure Project (ccri ). This interdisciplinary and multi-university project has constructed an infrastructure composed of microdata from the nominallevel Canadian censuses from 1911 through 1951. In addition to compiling information on approximately 2 million individuals, the ccri created a database of contextual data and a gis database. The combination of these three levels makes this infrastructure unique in the world. The ccri can be used in conjunction with Canadian census databases now being constructed or already completed for Canada from 1851 to 2001. As well, the ccri has been constructed in ways that will facilitate cross-national explorations with the United States, the United Kingdom, and several other North Atlantic countries. We suggest that the ccri can best be appreciated when situated within the current proliferation of research infrastructures across the humanities and the social sciences. We argue that these infrastructures are liberating for historians and, collectively, represent new horizons for professional activity. It would be a disservice to themselves, their students, and their profession if historians ignored these expanding horizons. Dans le présent article, nous analysons ce que pourraient être les retombées de l’éclatement de l’infrastructure dans le milieu de la recherche en sciences humaines et en sciences sociales en ce qui a trait à l’enseignement et la recherche en histoire. Nous prêtons une attention plus particulière au projet sur l’Infrastructure de recherche sur le Canada (CCRI). Ce projet interdisciplinaire et multi-institutionnel a construit une infrastructure composée de microdonnées des recensements canadiens de niveau nominal de 1911 à 1951. En plus de compiler des renseignements sur prês de deux millions de personnes, le CCRI a créé une base de données contextuelles et une base de données SIG. La combinaison de ces trois niveaux rend cette infrastructure tout à fait unique au monde. La CCRI peut être utilisée en conjonction avec les bases de données du recensement canadien en cours de construction ou déjà complétées pour le Canada de 1851 à 2001. De même, le CCRI a été construit de manière à faciliter les analyses transnationales avec les États-Unis, le Royaume-Uni, et plusieurs autres pays de l’Atlantique du Nord. Nous suggérons que le CCRI peut être le mieux apprécié lorsqu’il se situe dans la prolifération actuelle des infrastructures de recherche en sciences humaines et en sciences sociales. Nous faisons valoir que ces infrastructures sont libératrices pour les historiens et qu’elles ouvrent ensemble de nouveaux horizons pour l’activité professionnelle. Les historiens rendraient un bien mauvais service à leurs étudiants, à leur profession, et à eux-mêmes, s’ils ne tenaient pas compte de ces horizons é largis.

Abstract: In this article we explore what the exploding world of humanities and social science research infrastructures might mean for teaching and research in the discipline of history. We focus closely on one example, that of the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure Project (ccri). This interdisciplinary and multi-university project has constructed an infrastructure composed of microdata from the nominal-level Canadian censuses from 1911 through 1951. In addition to compiling information on approximately 2 million individuals, the ccri created a database of contextual data and a gis database. The combination of these three levels makes this infrastructure unique in the world. The ccri can be used in conjunction with Canadian census databases now being constructed or already completed for Canada from 1851 to 2001. As well, the ccri has been constructed in ways that will facilitate cross-national explorations with the United States, the United Kingdom, and several other North Atlantic countries. We suggest that the ccri can best be appreciated when situated within the current proliferation of research infrastructures across the humanities and the social sciences. We argue that these infrastructures are liberating for historians and, collectively, represent new horizons for professional activity. It would be a disservice to themselves, their students, and their profession if historians ignored these expanding horizons.

This paper describes a recently developed linkage system for historical Canadian censuses and its application to linking people from 1871 to 1881. The record linkage system incorporates a supervised learning module for classifying pairs of records as matches or non-matches. The classification module was trained using a set of true links that were created by human experts. We evaluate the first results and provide a road map for further experimentation. ∗

Reviewed by: The Shady Side of Fifty: Age and Old Age in Late Victorian Canada and the United States Peter Baskerville (bio) Lisa Dillon . The Shady Side of Fifty: Age and Old Age in Late Victorian Canada and the United States. McGill-Queen's University Press. xiv, 338. $75.00 Employing the tools of discourse analysis and gender and quantitative history, Lisa Dillon sheds much light on the lives of men and women who reached old age in late Victorian North America. Her main sources are the censuses of 1870/71 and 1900/01 for Canada and the United States. Dillon is the first person to attempt a large-scale comparative analysis using the Public Use Samples that now exist for these censuses and, as she notes, harmonizing the data was 'a hell of a job.' In this pioneering effort, Dillon teases out the rich diversity of the lives of the [End Page 577] aged and traces changes in their lives over the late nineteenth century. She sets the stage by commenting on how attitudes to the aged conditioned the nature of census questions and the responses given to those questions. She concludes that the United States collected richer age-based data than did Canada, primarily because of their interest in analyzing the social and economic effects of increased immigration. In Canada such immigration did not occur until the early twentieth century, and as a result Canadian authorities focused on more personal issues such as marital status, health, and causes of death. Neither country, she notes, spent any time trying to understand the familial context of the lives of the aged, a primary focus of Dillon's book. One challenge in using the data was the tendency of respondents to round off their ages in multiples of five. Dillon discovers that this tendency increased in both countries as men and women approached the age of sixty and suggests that many individuals for psychological and practical economic reasons - keeping a job - claimed they were younger than they actually were. She also discovered that people who were in the old age categories often inflated their ages in order to, at times, go on lecture tours and make money as historical curiosities or perhaps as experts on how to live a long life. In 1871 Canadian census authorities actually engaged in an intensive analysis of the ages of those close to 100 in order to expose fraudulent claims! Via a close reconstruction of familial position, Dillon is able to comment on agency and dependency in the lives of the aged. Only a brief summary of her comprehensive analysis is possible here. Perhaps most importantly, she points to a trend for women in both countries in the late nineteenth century to live apart from other family members, a trend she claims presaged 'more significant shifts toward non-family living arrangements during the twentieth century.' Throughout the analysis Dillon remains attentive to cross-border differences and is therefore able to underline context for change very effectively. Thus she can conclude that Canadian women tended more than their American counterparts to live in positions of household dependence because of the relative agrarian nature of the Canadian economy. In the United States more women lived in urban areas and as a result more were able to take advantage of wage-earning opportunities. For men, Dillon establishes several stages in old age, perhaps most notably how in both countries the work-participation rates of men fell sharply only after age seventy and how, in Canada, the tendency of men to live with dependent children also declined dramatically after age seventy. Nor does she ignore the existence of grandparents. Here the most important finding is that the presence of a grandparent had little effect on the chances of a child going to school but did have a positive effect on the chances of a widowed mother entering the labour force. [End Page 578] On balance, Dillon provides a richly detailed reconstruction of the lives of the aged in North America during a period of differential change in both countries. Her attention to comparative contexts and the gendered and racial positions of the elderly throughout various stages of old age...

Susan Ingalls Lewis. Unexceptional Women: Female Proprietors in Mid-Nineteenth Century Albany, New York, 1830–1885. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009. xx + 203 pp. ISBN 978-0-8142-0398-9, $44.95 (cloth). - Volume 10 Issue 4