National Network for Equitable Library Service

Along the Shore examines the Toronto waterfront, past and present, through the lens of four lakefront communities and districts — the Scarborough shore (including the Bluffs), the Beach, the Island, and the Lakeshore (New Toronto, Mimico, Humber Bay, and Long Branch). Each retains a direct and immediate connection with Lake Ontario and the natural world. Exploring the history, landscape, geography, and people of each of these waterfront areas reveals a rich heritage that has gone largely unrecognized and is for the most part forgotten.

“The terrified yell of my comrades makes me stop. I drop the potatoes into the grass and turn around. He has pulled out the pistol and is taking aim. Slowly I come back.” Surviving the Gulag is the first-person account of a resourceful woman who survived five grueling years in Russian prison camps: starved, traumatized, and worked nearly to death. A story like Ilse Johansen’s is rarely told—of a woman caught in the web of fascism and communism at the end of the Second World War and beginning of the Cold War.

In 1914, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound—the founders of vorticism—undertook an unprecedented analysis of the present, its technologies, communication, politics, and architecture. The essays in Counterblasting Canada trace the influence of vorticism on Marshall McLuhan and Canadian Modernism.

Stefan Epp-Koop’s "We’re Going to Run This City: Winnipeg’s Political Left After the General Strike" explores the dynamic political movement that came out of the largest labour protest in Canadian history and the ramifications for Winnipeg throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Few have studied the political Left at the municipal level—even though it is at this grassroots level that many people participate in political activity. Winnipeg was a deeply divided city.

During the early Cold War, thousands of Canadians attended events organized by the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Society (CSFS) and subscribed to its publications. The CSFS aimed its message at progressive Canadians, hoping to convince them that the USSR was an egalitarian and enlightened state. Attempting to soften, define and redirect the antagonistic narratives of the day, the CSFS story is one of propaganda and persuasion in Cold War Canada. The CSFS was linked to other groups on the Canadian political left and was consistently lead by Canadian communists.

“My name is Weetaltuk; Eddy Weetaltuk. My Eskimo tag name is E9-422.” So begins From the "Tundra to the Trenches." Weetaltuk means “innocent eyes” in Inuktitut, but to the Canadian government, he was known as E9-422: E for Eskimo, 9 for his community, 422 to identify Eddy. In 1951, Eddy decided to leave James Bay. Because Inuit weren’t allowed to leave the North, he changed his name and used this new identity to enlist in the Canadian Forces: Edward Weetaltuk, E9-422, became Eddy Vital, SC-17515, and headed off to fight in the Korean War.

"Defining Métis" examines categories used in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Catholic missionaries to describe Indigenous people in what is now northwestern Saskatchewan. It argues that the construction and evolution of these categories reflected missionaries’changing interests and agendas. "Defining Métis" sheds light on the earliest phases of Catholic missionary work among Indigenous peoples in western and northern Canada.

Life Among the Qallunaat is the story of Mini Aodla Freeman’s experiences growing up in the Inuit communities of James Bay and her journey in the 1950s from her home to the strange land and stranger customs of the Qallunaat, those living south of the Arctic. Her extraordinary story, sometimes humourous and sometimes heartbreaking, illustrates an Inuit woman’s movement between worlds and ways of understanding. It also provides a clear-eyed record of the changes that swept through Inuit communities in the 1940s and 1950s. Mini Aodla Freeman was born in 1936 on Cape Hope Island in James Bay.

The laws of Medieval Iceland provide detailed and fascinating insight into the society that produced the Icelandic sagas. Known collectively as Gragas (Greygoose), this great legal code offers a wealth of information about early European legal systems and the society of the Middles Ages. This first translation of Gragas is in two volumes.

Between 1973 and 1978, six thousand Chileans leftists took refuge in central Canada after the Pinochet coup d’état. Once resettled at the northern extreme of the Americas, these political exiles had to find ways of coping with an abrupt and violent separation from their homeland that had deep material and emotional repercussions. In Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable, Francis Peddie documents the experiences of twenty-one Chileans as they navigate their newfound identity as exiles.