In 1921 David Ross McCord (1844-1930) founded the McCord Museum of Canadian History, which first opened in the Jessie Joseph House of McGill University. McCord's ancestors had come from Ireland to settle in Canada after the Seven Years War. Although they were initially merchants, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the McCords derived most of their wealth from the management of seigneurial land and from the subdivision of Temple Grove, their mountain estate which covered the area now bounded by Côte des Neiges Road and Cedar Avenue. This record of the McCords and their interest in religion, education and science reflect the intellectual trends of the era. David Ross McCord sought to collect in the broadest and most objective manner, and his pursuit of his dream to create a national museum of Canadian history provides valuable insight into the evolution of Montreal.

Stars of Bravo TV’s The Real Housewives of New York City, Alex McCord and Simon van Kempen, have a hit show and a great book, Little Kids, Big City, a lighthearted and critically acclaimed he-said, she-said rant, about their experiences raising their two young children in the Big Apple. More of a Momoir (and Dadoir) covering the last 10 years of their lives, Alex & Simon write with a unique and humorous insight into the challenges facing parents today. They use their own hard-won experience as a springboard to discuss life before children and their determination not to have any, followed by their journey and eventual change of heart and the rollercoaster ride of having two children in two years in a seemingly non-child-friendly environment. Rather than a preachy, how-to guide, Simon & Alex take the reader on a romp through the indignities and surprises that befell them. Their informative and often hair-raising stories of life in the concrete jungle make Little Kids, Big City a must-read for anyone who has ever had children, hated children or thought they might want to have them someday, as well as for any fan of their hit show.

History has often ignored the influence in modern Quebec of family dynasties, patriarchy, seigneurial land, and traditional institutions. Following the ascent of four generations from two families through eighteenth-century New France to the onset of the First World War, Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec compares the French Catholic Taschereaus and the Anglican and English-speaking McCords. Consulting private, institutional, and legal archives, Brian Young studies eight family patriarchs. Working as merchants or colonial administrators in the first generation, they became seigneurial proprietors, officeholders, and prelates. The heads of both families used marriage arrangements, land stewardship, and judgeships to position their heirs. Young shows how patriarchy was a central force in both domestic and public life, as well as the ways in which Taschereau and McCord family strategies extended into the marrow of Quebec society through moral authority, influence on national identities, and their positions within senior offices in religious, judicial, and university institutions. Through courthouses, cemeteries, belfries, and their own chapels and neoclassical estates, they created encompassing cultural landscapes. Later generations used museums, archives, historian collaborators, photography, and modern print to elevate family achievement to the status of heroic national narratives. Sagas of the monied and entrepreneurial, nationalist imperatives to protect a vulnerable people, and skepticism about the lasting power of great families and historical institutions have relegated the influence of the Taschereaus and McCords to obscurity. Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec resuscitates the central role these elite families played in English and French Quebec.

Named by The Washington Post as one of the 11 Leadership Books to Read in 2018 When it comes to recruiting, motivating, and creating great teams, Patty McCord says most companies have it all wrong. McCord helped create the unique and high-performing culture at Netflix, where she was chief talent officer. In her new book, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, she shares what she learned there and elsewhere in Silicon Valley. McCord advocates practicing radical honesty in the workplace, saying good-bye to employees who don’t fit the company’s emerging needs, and motivating with challenging work, not promises, perks, and bonus plans. McCord argues that the old standbys of corporate HR—annual performance reviews, retention plans, employee empowerment and engagement programs—often end up being a colossal waste of time and resources. Her road-tested advice, offered with humor and irreverence, provides readers a different path for creating a culture of high performance and profitability. Powerful will change how you think about work and the way a business should be run.

Documenting the difficult class relations between women slaveholders and slave women, this study shows how class and race as well as gender shaped women's experiences and determined their identities. Drawing upon massive research in diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral histories, the author argues that the lives of antebellum southern women, enslaved and free, differed fundamentally from those of northern women and that it is not possible to understand antebellum southern women by applying models derived from New England sources.

Negotiating Identities in 19th- and 20th-Century Montreal illuminates the cultural complexity and richness of a modernizing city and its people. The chapters focus on sites where identities were forged and contested over crucial decades in Montreal's history. Readers will discover the links between identity, place, and historical moment as they meet vagrant women, sailors in port, unemployed men of the Great Depression, elite families, shopkeepers, reformers, notaries, and social workers, among others. This is a fascinating study that explores the intersections of state, people, and the voluntary sector to elucidate the processes that took people between homes and cemeteries, between families and shops, and onto the streets. This book will be of interest to a wide range of social and cultural historians, critical geographers, students of gender studies, and those wanting to know more about the fascinating past of one of Canada's most lively cities.

With its focus on sites where identities were forged and contested over crucial decades in Montreal's history, this collection illuminates the cultural complexity and richness of a modernizing city. Readers will discover the links between identity, place, and historical moment as they meet vagrant women, sailors in port, unemployed men of the Great Depression, elite families, shopkeepers, and reformers, among others. This fascinating study explores the intersections of state, people, and the voluntary sector to elucidate the processes that took people between homes and cemeteries, between families and shops, and onto the streets.

Between the 1870s and 1950s collectors vigorously pursued the artifacts of Native American groups. Setting out to preserve what they thought was a vanishing culture, they amassed ethnographic and archaeological collections amounting to well over one million objects and founded museums throughout North America that were meant to educate the public about American Indian skills, practices, and beliefs. In Collecting Native America contributors examine the motivations, intentions, and actions of eleven collectors who devoted substantial parts of their lives and fortunes to acquiring American Indian objects and founding museums. They describe obsessive hobbyists such as George Heye, who, beginning with the purchase of a lice-ridden shirt, built a collection that—still unsurpassed in richness, diversity, and size—today forms the core of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian missionary in Alaska, collected and displayed artifacts as a means of converting Native peoples to Christianity. Clara Endicott Sears used sometimes invented displays and ceremonies at her Indian Museum near Boston to emphasize Native American spirituality. The contributors chart the collectors' diverse attitudes towards Native peoples, showing how their limited contact with American Indian groups resulted in museums that revealed more about assumptions of the wider society than about the cultures being described.

Albums are treasured by families, collected as illustrations of the past by museums of social history, and examined by scholars for what they can reveal about attitudes and sensibilities. Most agree that albums are stories that come to life in the retelling - but when no one is left to tell the tale, the intrigue of the album becomes a puzzle, a suspended conversation. Langford argues that oral consciousness provides the missing key. By correlating photography and orality she shows how albums were designed to work as performances and how we can unlock their mysteries.