Few published collections of Gaelic song place the songs or their singers and communities in context. Brìgh an Òrain - A Story in Every Song corrects this, showing how the inherited art of a fourth-generation Canadian Gael fits within biographical, social, and historical contexts. It is the first major study of its kind to be undertaken for a Scottish Gaelic singer. The forty-eight songs and nine folktales in the collection are transcribed from field recordings and presented as the singer performed them, with an English translation provided. All the songs are accompanied by musical transcriptions. The book also includes a brief autobiography in Lauchie MacLellan's entertaining narrative style. John Shaw has added extensive notes and references, as well as photos and maps. In an era of growing appreciation of Celtic cultures, Brìgh an Òrain - A Story in Every Song makes an important Gaelic tradition available to the general reader. The materials also serve as a unique, adaptable resource for those with more specialized research or teaching interests in ethnology/folklore, Canadian studies, Gaelic language, ethnomusicology, Celtic studies, anthropology, and social history.

Wherever they settled, immigrants from Ireland and their descendants shaped and reshaped their understanding of being Irish in response to circumstances in both the old and new worlds. In A Land of Dreams, Patrick Mannion analyzes and compares the evolution of Irish identity in three communities on the prow of northeastern North America: St John’s, Newfoundland, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Portland, Maine, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These three port cities, home to diverse Irish populations in different stages of development and in different national contexts, provide a fascinating setting for a study of intergenerational ethnicity. Mannion traces how Irishness could, at certain points, form the basis of a strong, cohesive identity among Catholics of Irish descent, while at other times it faded into the background. Although there was a consistent, often romantic gaze across the Atlantic to the old land, many of the organizations that helped mediate large-scale public engagement with the affairs of Ireland – especially Irish nationalist associations – spread from further west on the North American mainland. Irish ethnicity did not, therefore, develop in isolation, but rather as a result of a complex interplay of local, regional, national, and transnational networks. This volume shows that despite a growing generational distance, Ireland remained “a land of dreams” for many immigrants and their descendants. They were connected to a transnational Irish diaspora well into the twentieth century.

"How Montreal's Yiddish community ensured its lasting cultural importance and influence."--WorldCat.

In the fall of 1831, Mrs McIndoe and her children left Scotland to join her husband, William, a labourer on the Rideau Canal. When they arrived they discovered that William had already moved on, forcing Mrs McIndoe to appeal to the public to help reunite her family. As Elizabeth Jane Errington illustrates, the nineteenth-century world of emigration was hazardous. Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities gives voice to the Irish, Scottish, English, and Welsh women and men who negotiated the complex and often dangerous world of emigration between 1815 and 1845. Using "information wanted" notices that appeared in colonial newspapers as well as emigrants' own accounts, Errington illustrates that emigration was a family affair. Individuals made their decisions within a matrix of kin and community - their experiences shaped by their identities as husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings and cousins. The Atlantic crossing divided families, but it was also the means of reuniting kin and rebuilding old communities. Emigration created its own unique world - a world whose inhabitants remained well aware of the transatlantic community that provided them with a continuing sense of identity, home, and family.

Human migration has reached an unprecedented level, and the numbers are expected to continue growing into the foreseeable future. Host societies and migrants face challenges in ensuring that the benefits of migration accrue to both parties, and that economic and socio-cultural costs are minimized. An insightful comparative examination of the policies and practices that manage and support immigrants, Twenty-First-Century Immigration to North America identifies and addresses issues that arose in the early years of the twenty-first century and considers what to expect in the years ahead. The volume begins with an overview of immigration policies and practices in the United States and Canada, then moves to an investigation of the economic and socio-cultural aspects, and concludes with a dialogue on precarious migration. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the editors include research from the areas of psychology, political science, economics, sociology, and public policy. Underscoring the complicated nature of immigration, this collection aims to foster further discussion and inspire future research in the United States and Canada.

Building Nations from Diversity explores the question of whether the Canadian "mosaic" has differed from the American "melting pot" and provides an informative comparison of both countries' historical and present-day similarities and differences. Garth Stevenson examines the origins of Canada and the United States and their past experiences with incorporating selected immigrant groups, particularly Irish, Chinese, and Jews. Establishing the foundational ways in which they placed new groups within their societies, Stevenson then outlines how the US and Canadian systems developed immigration policy and handled difference, detailing their treatment of "enemy aliens" during both world wars, their experience with minority languages, and recent Islamophobia. He also studies the introduction of multiculturalism into the lexicon and policy of the two countries and presents a nuanced analysis of how its meaning is understood differently on opposite sides of the border. An accessible and illuminating work, Building Nations from Diversity highlights the substantial differences between the US and Canada but ultimately concludes that they are more similar than most realize and are probably becoming more alike.

When the federal government uprooted and interned Japanese Canadians en masse in 1942, Kishizo Kimura saw his life upended along with tens of thousands of others. But his story is also unique: as a member of two controversial committees that oversaw the forced sale of the property of Japanese Canadians in Vancouver during the Second World War, Kimura participated in the dispossession of his own community. In Witness to Loss Kimura's previously unknown memoir – written in the last years of his life – is translated from Japanese to English and published for the first time. This remarkable document chronicles a history of racism in British Columbia, describes the activities of the committees on which Kimura served, and seeks to defend his actions. Diverse reflections of leading historians, sociologists, and a community activist and educator who lived through this history give context to the memoir, inviting readers to grapple with a rich and contentious past. More complex than just hero or villain, oppressor or victim, Kimura raises important questions about the meaning of resistance and collaboration and the constraints faced by an entire generation. Illuminating the difficult, even impossible, circumstances that confronted the victims of racist state action in the mid-twentieth century, Witness to Loss reminds us that the challenge of understanding is greater than that of judgment.

Polish Canadians typically identify themselves as stringent anti-Communists, a label solidified by the legacies of the 1980s Solidarity movement, its founder Lech Walesa, and the widespread anti-Communist riots that helped topple the Communist regime in 1989. Hurrah Revolutionaries challenges this common perception by examining the Polish immigrant community in Canada and the development of radical and traditionally "deviant" ideologies during the interwar period until the end of the Second World War. Patryk Polec unveils a versatile, well-funded, and influential Polish pro-Communist movement with a talented leadership that worked tirelessly to persuade traditionally conservative and religious immigrants to adopt an ideology that was anti-nationalist and atheist. He traces the roots of socialist support in Poland, its transplantation to Canada where the movement enjoyed its greatest support, the challenges the movement faced within an ethnic community influenced by Catholicism, and the complications caused by its links to the Communist International. Polec offers a deeper understanding of the ways in which the Communist Party was able to appeal to certain ethnic groups through cultural outreach as well as its complicated and often counter-productive relationship with the Soviet Union. Grounded in recently declassified Polish consular documents and RCMP surveillance reports, Hurrah Revolutionaries is the first full-length study of Polish Communists in Canada, a group that constituted a substantial portion of the country’s socialist left in the twentieth century.

The South Asian population in Canada, encompassing diverse national, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, has in recent years become the largest visible minority in the country. As this community grows, it encounters challenges in settlement, integration, and development. Accounting for only 1 per cent of the population in Quebec, the South Asian community has received limited attention in comparison with other minority groups. The Invisible Community uses recent data from a variety of fields to explore who these immigrants are and what they and their families require to become members of an inclusive society. Experts from Canadian and international universities and governmental and community agencies describe how South Asian immigrants experience life in French-speaking Canada. They look at how members of the community integrate into the job market, how they manage socially and emotionally, how their religious values are affected, and how their children adapt to French-speaking and English-speaking schools. The Invisible Community shares lived experiences of different subgroups of the South Asian population in Quebec in order to better understand wider social, political, and educational contexts of immigration in Canada.

Following Antonietta and Loris's first kiss in the shadows of the Italian Alps barely a year after the end of the Second World War, the couple was divided by a distance far greater than could ever have been imagined. With Antonietta's family moving to Montreal, migration entered the couple's intimate worlds, stretching the distance between them from the two hundred kilometres separating Ampezzo and Venice to the ocean between Montreal and Venice. Throughout their transatlantic separation, the young lovers fervidly wrote each other until they were reunited in Canada in 1949. With Your Words in My Hands tells a story about love and migration as written and read, idealized and imagined, through daily correspondence. Sonia Cancian recovers a rare complete epistolary record of an immigrant experience defined by love and sustained in writing, translating the letters with deftness and an ear for the immediacy of emotion and longing they embody. Cancian gives context to these exchanges dating from the beginning of the largest migration movement from Italy to Canada, showing how love, frustration, fear, sadness, and empathy were palpable elements that inflected the quotidian – bureaucratic processes, employment, family life – and defined immigrant experience. For the countless couples whose love is fragmented by separation but woven together with envelopes and stamps, or onscreen in today's instant messaging, these letters remind us how the experience of distance and proximity, absence and presence, can be reconfigured within the world of intimate correspondence.