National Network for Equitable Library Service

What did happen to the body of Thomas Scott? The disposal of the body of Canadian history’s most famous political victim is the starting point for historian J.M. Bumsted’s new look at some of the most fascinating events and personalities of Manitoba’s Red River Settlement. To outsiders, 19th-century Red River seemed like a remote community precariously poised on the edge of the frontier. Small and isolated though it may have been, Red River society was also lively, well educated, multicultural and often contentious.

New ways of thinking about literature and history have radically changed how we think about or even “define” a region like the Prairie West. In fact, the very concept of “defining” has come into question by new theoretical approaches and it may now seem a hopeless endeavour. But the process of defining can be just as important as the actual production of a definition. Toward Defining the Prairies highlights recent approaches to thinking about the Prairie West.

Imagined Homes examines two migrations of similar groups of ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union during the Cold War period. One group came to Canada in the late 1940s and early, 1950s, the other went to West Germany in the early 1970s. Each group's process of integration into new urban environments was influenced by their different expectations. Those who came to Winnipeg, Canada, assumed they would be adapting to a foreign society and prepared to enter a new language and culture.

Based on hundreds of interviews with Manitoba farm men and women, Making Ends Meet reconstructs the common history shared by modern farm women as well as by their mothers and grandmothers. It explores women's changing roles on the farm, from the early days of the Red River settlement to the twentieth-century farm community. The women's own stories reveal their ingenuity and tenacity in "making ends meet" through economies, shared labour, and generation of new sources of income as varied as raising poultry and custom woodworking.

At the close of WW II, politicians throughout western Canada were concerned about how small prairie towns would adapt to the new technologies and society of the post-war era. In Manitoba, Premier Stuart Garson appointed a Royal Commission to investigate the resources available to rural communities." "One of the commission's researchers was Jim Giffen, a young student of Innis's who would later become a prominent sociologist. Giffen did field research in three towns in southwestern Manitoba: Carman, Rossburn, and Elgin.

In the 1870s, approximately 18,000 Mennonites migrated from the southern steppes of Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine) to the North American grasslands. They brought with them an array of cultural and institutional features that indicated they were a “transplanted” people. What is less frequently noted, however, is that they created in their everyday lives a world that ensured their cultural longevity and social cohesiveness in a new land.

In this volume, Nelson Wiseman skilfully describes the history of the New Democratic Party in Manitoba, tracing the roots of the social democratic movement to the years of mass immigration and social unrest that preceded the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919.

Italians in Winnipeg offers an overview of the Italian-Canadian experience in Winnipeg based on general social history and the stories of families and individuals. The book’s six chapters cover several historical periods, as well as the world of work and the Italian home. Black-and-white photos are interspersed throughout the text, and an “Album” of images is found in the 30-page appendix.

North American Icelandic evolved mainly in Icelandic settlements in Manitoba and North Dakota and is the only version of Icelandic that is not spoken in Iceland. But North American Icelandic is a dying language with few left who speak it. North American Icelandic is the only book about the nature and development of this variety of Icelandic. It details the social and linguistic constraints of one specific feature of North American Icelandic phonology undergoing change, namely Flámæli, which is the merger of two sets of front vowels.

Mott’s and Allardyce’s Curling Capital details through four chronologically based chapters of approximately thirty years each, the emergence and evolution of curling in Winnipeg from its beginnings through to 1988. Their work confirms and documents what most Winnipeg curlers already knew—that Winnipeggers invented, developed, and were the first to excel at the game of curling as we know it today.