National Network for Equitable Library Service

The book is an account of how the Spanish flu pandemic affected several communities in Labrador. Although several populations were nearly wiped out, the Innu people of Labrador are barely present in the written record, and when included, their experience is often misunderstood. Budgell has scoured diaries, letters, medical records, shipping logs, and first-hand accounts of the period to redress this exclusion and shed light on the tragic loss of life that occurred 100 years ago.

Shaped by Silence brings together the powerful and devastating stories of five women from Ireland, Canada, and Australia whose lives were shaped by forced confinement in Magdalene laundries and related reform "schools" operated by the Roman Catholic Order of Sisters of the Good Shepherd. Their narratives include one teenager's experience in a Good Shepherd training school in Toronto, Canada; one story of a child born into a Canadian Good Shepherd laundry; and three accounts of adolescent girls incarcerated in Good Shepherd Magdalene laundries in Ireland and Australia.

In this third volume of In Those Days, Harper shares stories of the rise and fall of the whaling industry in the Eastern Canadian Arctic. At the turn of the nineteenth century, whale baleen and blubber were extremely valuable commodities, and so sailors braved the treacherous Arctic waters, risking starvation, scurvy, and death, to bring home the bounty of the North. The presence of these whalemen in the North would irrevocably alter the lives of Inuit.

Kenn Harper shares the tales of murderers, thieves, and fraudsters--as well as the wrongfully accused--in the early days of Northern colonization. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, settler and Inuit ideas of justice clashed, leading to some of the most unusual trials and punishments in history.

Arctic historian Kenn Harper gathers the best of his columns about Inuit history, which appear weekly in Nunatsiaq News, in this exciting new series of books. Each installment of In Those Days: Collected Columns on Arctic History will cover a particularly fascinating aspect of traditional Inuit life. In volume one, "Inuit Biographies," Harper shares the unique challenges and life histories of several Inuit living in pre-contact times.

In 1964-65, an international team of thirty-eight scientists and assistants, led by Montreal physician Stanley Skoryna, sailed to the mysterious Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to conduct an unprecedented survey of its biosphere. Born of Cold War concerns about pollution, overpopulation, and conflict, and initially conceived as the first of two trips, the project was designed to document the island's status before a proposed airport would link the one thousand people living in humanity's remotest community to the rest of the world - its germs, genes, culture, and economy.

In 1914, the SS Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver Harbour and was detained for two months. Most of its 376 passengers were then forcibly returned to India. Unmooring the Komagata Maru challenges conventional Canadian historical accounts by drawing from multiple disciplines and fields to consider the international and colonial dimensions of the voyage. By situating South Asian Canadian history within a global-imperial context, the contributors offer a critical reading of Canadian multiculturalism through past events and their commemoration.

As a commercial fisher in Nova Scotia in the early 1990s, Raymond Rogers experienced the collapse of Canada's East Coast fishery first-hand. Afterward, while preparing to leave the province to find work elsewhere, Rogers noticed a lone gravestone across the road from his home in Shelburne County that commemorates the life of Donald McDonald, a crofter from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, who "departed this life" in 1881.

The Modern Chinese Folklore Movement coalesced at National Peking University between 1918 and 1926. A group of academics, inspired by Western thought, tried to revitalize the study of folklore to stave off postwar disillusionment with Chinese elite culture. By documenting this phenomenon's origins and evolution, Jie Gao opens a new chapter in the world history of the Folklore Movement. Largely unknown in the West and underappreciated in China, the Chinese branch failed to achieve its goal of reinvigorating the nation.

The name Sri Lanka conjures two images. One is of an island of incredible beauty, a tropical paradise of golden beaches, mist-shrouded mountains carpeted with tea fields, and 2000-year-old cities and archaeological monuments, a land of apparent peace and tranquility. The other is of a brutal thirty-year civil war, an island riven with death, destruction, and racial divides. Here is a story that belongs to neither of those images, a story of a boy growing up in Sri Lanka in the midst of all that beauty and in the run-up to those bitter times.