Creating Postwar Canada showcases new research on this complex period, exploring postwar Canada's diverse symbols and battlegrounds. Contributors to the first half of the collection consider evolving definitions of the nation, examining the ways in which Canada was reimagined to include both the Canadian North and landscapes structured by trade and commerce. The essays in the latter half analyze debates on shopping hours, professional striptease, the "provider" role of fathers, interracial adoption, sexuality on campus, and illegal drug use, issues that shaped how the country defined itself in sociocultural and political terms. This collection contributes to the historiography of nationalism, gender and the family, consumer cultures, and countercultures.

In the 1950s and 1960s, immigration bureaucrats in the Department of Citizenship and Immigration played an important yet unacknowledged role in transforming Canada’s immigration policy. In response to external economic and political pressures for change, high-level bureaucrats developed new admissions criteria gradually and experimentally while personally processing thousands of individual immigration cases per year. Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism shows how bureaucrats’ perceptions and judgements about the admissibility of individuals – in socioeconomic, racial, and moral terms – influenced the creation of formal admissions criteria for skilled workers and family immigrants that continue to shape immigration to Canada. A qualitative content analysis of archival documents, conducted through the theoretical lens of a cultural sociology of immigration policy, reveals that bureaucrats’ interpretations of immigration files generated selection criteria emphasizing not just economic utility, but also middle-class traits and values such as wealth accumulation, educational attainment, entrepreneurial spirit, resourcefulness, and a strong work ethic. By making "middle-class multiculturalism" a demographic reality and basis of nation-building in Canada, these state actors created a much-admired approach to managing racial diversity that has nevertheless generated significant social inequalities.

The Manly Modern, the first major book on the history of masculinity in Canada, traces the history of what happened when men's supposed modernity became one of their defining features. Through a series of case studies covering such diverse subjects as car culture, mountaineering, war veterans, murder trials, and a bridge collapse, Christopher Dummitt argues that the very idea of what it meant to be modern was gendered. A strong current of anti-modernist sentiment bubbled just beneath the surface of postwar masculinity, creating rumblings about the state of modern manhood that, ironically, mirrored the tensions that burst forth in 1960s gender radicalism.

Our image of Canada’s postwar foreign policy is dominated by the Cold War, while the story of Canada’s response to decolonization in the Global South is less well known. This book explores Canadian-Indonesian relations to determine whether Canada’s postwar foreign policy was guided by an overarching set of altruistic principles. It shows that Canada remained a loyal member of the Western alliance. Canada wanted developing countries to follow its own non-revolutionary model of decolonization and paid little attention to violations of human rights. Webster’s reassessment of Canada’s foreign-policy objectives in Indonesia, and of its own national image, will appeal to students of diplomatic history interested in Asia and the developing world.

During the Second World War, Canadian factories produced mountains of munitions and supplies, including some 800 ships, 16,000 aircraft, 800,000 vehicles, and over 4.6 billion rounds of ammunition and artillery shells. Although they were crucial to winning the war, these assets turned into peacetime liabilities when hostilities ended in 1945. Drawing on comprehensive archival research, Alex Souchen provides a definitive account of the disposal crisis triggered by Allied victory and shows how policymakers implemented a disposal strategy that facilitated postwar reconstruction. Canadians responded to the unprecedented divestment of public property by reusing and recycling military surpluses to improve their postwar lives. War Junk recounts the complex political, economic, social, and environmental legacies of munitions disposal in Canada by revealing how the tools of war became integral to the making of postwar Canada.

“Why don’t they just move?” This reductive question is asked whenever reports surface of the all-too-common lack of social services and economic opportunities in Canada’s rural and urban communities. But why are certain people and places vulnerable? And who is responsible for a remedy? From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Canadian government relocated people, often against their will, in order to improve their lives. Moved by the State offers a completely new interpretation of this undertaking, seeing it as part of a larger project of development and focusing on the bureaucrats and academics who designed, implemented, and monitored the relocations rather than on those who were uprooted. In this finely crafted history, Tina Loo explores the contradiction between intention and consequence as diverse communities across Canada were resettled. In the process, she reveals the optimistic belief underpinning postwar relocations: the power of the interventionist state to do good.

Part history and part social commentary, this book examines the repatriation of Canada's WWII veterans with a collection of essays by 11 historians. Topics include the administration of the return of Canadian soldiers from Europe after VE--Day, the philosophy and benefits of the Veterans Charter, veterans' rights, educational opportunities for returning vets, and the rehabilitation of veterans with disabilities. Includes bandw photographs. Appends the complete text of Back to Civil Life, a 1946 repatriation manual. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"This volume uncovers and substantiates evidence of the mandate in Canada, interrogates social work policies and practices, revisits the semi-incarceral "homes for unwed mothers," and quantifies the mandate through an extensive review of provincial reports; ultimately finding that approximately 300,000 unmarried mothers in Canada were impacted by illegal and unethical adoption practices, human rights abuses, and violence against the maternal body."--

Cultures of Citizenship in Post-war Canada, 1940-1955 argues that we need a new view of this period, one that recognizes its considerable cultural and ideological diversity. The authors explore the quest for cultural reconstruction; the emergence of new definitions of elitism, mass culture, and the relationship between the state and the individual; the changing imperatives underlying organized labour's response to the demands of economic reconstruction; federal-provincial tensions over the shape of welfare policy; the recasting of youth identities by adult authorities and among middle-class university youth; and changing structures of authority within the family under the impact of new psychological expertise. viewed as an era of political and social consensus made possible by widely diffused prosperity, creeping Americanization and fears of radical subversion, and a dominant culture challenged periodically by the claims of marginal groups. By exploring what were actually the mainstream ideologies and cultural practices of the period, the authors argue that the postwar consensus was itself a precarious cultural ideal that was characterized by internal tensions and, while containing elements of conservatism, reflected considerable diversity in the way in which citizenship identities were defined.

What has it meant to be a man in Canada? Alexander Ross, fur trader; Percy Nobbs, architect, fisherman, fencer; Andy Paull, residential school survivor and athlete; Yves Charbonneau, jazz musician and commune member; “James,” black and gay in postwar Windsor. Who were these men, and how did they identify as masculine? Populated with figures both well known and unknown, Making Men, Making History frames masculinity as a socially and historically constructed category of identity, susceptible to variation across time, place, and social context. This examination of historical Canadian masculinities reveals the dissonance between hegemonic ideals of manhood and masculinity and the everyday lives of men and boys. The volume showcases some of the best new work in masculinity studies. With an introduction that contextualizes the international origins of the field, Making Men, Making History is the first book to explore these themes entirely in Canadian historica settings.