From fur coats to nude paintings, and from sports to beauty contests, the body has been central to the literal and figurative fashioning of ourselves as individuals and as a nation. In this first collection on the history of the body in Canada, an interdisciplinary group of scholars explores the multiple ways the body has served as a site of contestation in Canadian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Showcasing a variety of methodological approaches, Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History includes essays on many themes that engage with the larger historical relationship between the body and nation: medicine and health, fashion and consumer culture, citizenship and work, and more. The contributors reflect on the intersections of bodies with the concept of nationhood, as well as how understandings of the body are historically contingent. The volume is capped off with a critical introductory chapter by the editors on the history of bodies and the development of the body as a category of analysis.

In this first collection on the history of the body in Canada, an interdisciplinary group of scholars explores the multiple ways the body has served as a site of contestation in Canadian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As modern versions of the settler nation took root in twentieth-century Canada, beauty emerged as a business. Queen of the Maple Leaf deftly uncovers the codes of femininity, class, sexuality, and race that beauty pageants exemplified, whether they took place on local or national stages. A union-organized pageant such as Queen of the Dressmakers, for example, might uplift working-class women, but immigrant women need not apply. Patrizia Gentile demonstrates how beauty contests connected female bodies to white, wholesome, respectable, middle-class femininity, locating their longevity squarely within their capacity to reassert the white heteropatriarchy at the heart of settler societies.

In Canadian Carnival Freaks and the Extraordinary Body, 1900-1970s, Nicholas offers a sophisticated analysis of the place of the freak show in twentieth-century culture

While the statistics for obesity have been alarming in the twenty-first century, concern about fatness has a history. In Fighting Fat, Wendy Mitchinson discusses the history of obesity and fatness from 1920 to 1980 in Canada. Through the context of body, medicine, weight measurement, food studies, fat studies, and the identity of those who were fat, Mitchinson examines the attitudes and practices of medical practitioners, nutritionists, educators, and those who see themselves as fat. Fighting Fat analyzes a number of sources to expose our culture’s obsession with body image. Mitchinson looks at medical journals, both their articles and the advertisements for drugs for obesity, as well as magazine articles and advertisements, including popular "before and after" weight loss stories. Promotional advertisements reveal how the media encourages negative attitudes towards body fat. The book also includes over 30 interviews with Canadians who defined themselves as fat, highlighting the emotional toll caused by the stigmatizing of fatness.

With her short skirt, bobbed hair, and penchant for smoking, drinking, dancing, and jazz, the “Modern Girl” was a fixture of 1920s Canadian consumer culture. She appeared in art, film, fashion, and advertising, as well as on the streets of towns from coast to coast. In The Modern Girl, Jane Nicholas argues that this feminine image was central to the creation of what it meant to be modern and female in Canada. Using a wide range of visual and textual evidence, Nicholas illuminates both the frequent public debates about female appearance and the realities of feminine self-presentation. She argues that women played an active and thoughtful role in their embrace of modern consumer culture, even when it was at the risk of serious social, economic, and cultural penalties. The first book to fully examine the “Modern Girl”’s place in Canadian culture, The Modern Girl will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of gender, sexuality, and the body in the modern world.

This introduction to contemporary historical theory and practice shows how issues of identity have shaped how we write history. Stefan Berger charts how a new self-reflexivity about what is involved in the process of writing history entered the historical profession and the part that historians have played in debates about the past and its meaningfulness for the present. He introduces key trends in the theory of history such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, constructivism, narrativism and the linguistic turn and reveals, in turn, the ways in which they have transformed how historians have written history over the last four decades. The book ranges widely from more traditional forms of history writing, such as political, social, economic, labour and cultural history, to the emergence of more recent fields, including gender history, historical anthropology, the history of memory, visual history, the history of material culture, and comparative, transnational and global history.

Art is continuously subjected to insidious forms of censorship. This may be by the Church to guard against moral degeneration, by the State to promote a specific political agenda or by the art market, to elevate one artist above another. Now, and in the last century, artwork that touches on ethnic, religious, sexual, national or institutional sensitivities is liable to be destroyed or hidden away, ignored or side-lined. Drawing from new research into historical and contemporary case-studies, Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork provides diverse ways of understanding the purpose and mechanisms of art censorship across distinct geopolitical and cultural contexts from Iran, Japan, and Uzbekistan to Britain, Ireland, Canada, Macedonia, Soviet Russia, and Cyprus. Its contributions uncover the impact of this silent control of the production and exhibition of art and consider how censorship has affected art practice and public perceptions of artworks.

In The Vigilant Eye, Greg Marquis combines the narrative and chronological approach of traditional institutional history with the critical approaches of social history, legal history and criminology. The book begins with the English and Irish roots of nineteenth-century British North American policing and traces the development of the three models of law enforcement that would shape the future: the local rural constable, the municipal police department and the paramilitary territorial constabulary. Marquis examines the development of provincial police services, whose expansion coincided with the rise of mass automobile ownership and controversies over alcohol prohibition and control, and their eventual absorption into the RCMP. In terms of political policing, the vigilant eye has monitored, harassed and disrupted various social and political movements ranging from Fenians to communists, to Quebec separatists and environmentalists. Marquis argues that the style of community policing in vogue during the 1970s and 1980s lacked confidence and had a limited impact. Canada’s simplistic crime-fighting model undermines genuine reform, including curbs on the use of deadly force on citizens, and justifies the increased militarization of policing. Marquis argues that it is time for citizens to turn their vigilant eye towards police and policing in their own communities.

Spanning more than two hundred years of history, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, Sisters or Strangers? explores the complex lives of immigrant, ethnic, and racialized women in Canada. Among the themes examined in this new edition are the intersection of race, crime, and justice, the creation of white settler societies, letters and oral histories, domestic labour, the body, political activism, food studies, gender and ethnic identity, and trauma, violence, and memory. The second edition of this influential essay collection expands its chronological and conceptual scope with fifteen new essays that reflect the latest cutting-edge research in Canadian women’s history. Introductions to each thematic section include discussion questions and suggestions for further reading, making the book an even more valuable classroom resource than before.