"Kaszuby" is a region in Renfrew County settled by Polish immigrants (Kashubes) from the Kaszuby region in the Gdańsk district of Poland.

In recent years, over one million Canadians have claimed Polish heritage - a significant population increase since the first group of Poles came from Prussian-occupied Poland and settled in Wilno, Ontario, west of Ottawa in 1858. For over a century, descendants from this community thought of themselves as Polish, but this began to change in the 1980s due to the work of a descendant priest who emphasized the community’s origins in Poland’s Kashubia region. What resulted was the reinvention of ethnicity concurrent with a similar movement in northern Poland. Creating Kashubia chronicles more than one hundred and fifty years of history, identity, and memory and challenges the historiography of migration and settlement in the region. For decades, authors from outside Wilno, as well as community insiders, have written histories without using the other’s stores of knowledge. Joshua Blank combines primary archival material and oral history with national narratives and a rich secondary literature to reimagine the period. He examines the socio-political and religious forces in Prussia, delves into the world of emigrant recruitment, and analyzes the trans-Atlantic voyage. In doing so, Blank challenges old narratives and traces the refashioning of the community’s ethnic identity from Polish to Kashubian. An illuminating study, Creating Kashubia shows how changing identities and the politics of ethnic memory are locally situated yet transnationally influenced.

A significant number of Canadian-raised children from post-1970s immigrant families have reached adulthood over the past decade. As a result, the demographics of religious affiliation are changing across Canada. Growing Up Canadian is the first comparative study of religion among young adults of Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist immigrant families. Contributors consider how relating to religion varies significantly depending on which faith is in question, how men and women have different views on the role of religion in their lives, and how the possibilities of being religiously different are greater in larger urban centres than in surrounding rural communities. Interviews with over two hundred individuals, aged 18 to 26, reveal that few are drawn to militant, politicized religious extremes, how almost all second generation young adults take personal responsibility for their religion, and want to understand the reasons for their beliefs and practices. The first major study of religion among this generation in Canada, Growing Up Canadian is an important contribution to understanding religious diversity and multiculturalism in the twenty-first century. Contributors include Peter Beyer, Kathryn Carrière, Wendy Martin, and Lori Beaman (University of Ottawa), Rubina Ramji (Cape Breton University), Nancy Nason-Clark and Cathy Holtmann (University of New Brunswick), Shandip Saha (Athabasca University), John H. Simpson (University of Toronto), and Marie-Paule Martel-Reny (Concordia University)

Focusing on these and other thematic issues, Bohdan Kordan assesses the policy and practice of civilian internment in Canada during the Great War and provides a clear yet critical statement about the complex and troubling nature of this experience. Period photographs and first person accounts augment the text, helping to communicate not only the layered and textured character of the experience but the human drama of the story as well. A comprehensive roster identifying those interned in the frontier camps of the Rocky Mountains is also included.

In A Kingdom of the Mind ethnographers, material culture specialists, and contributors from a wide variety of disciplines explore the impact of the Scots on Canadian life, showing how the Scots' image of their homeland and themselves played an important role in the emerging definition of what it meant to be Canadian.

Language policies are political. They have political consequences as well as political origins. In State Traditions and Language Regimes, scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America shift focus from the consequences of language policies to how and why states make language policy choices. This shift, theorized through the concept of "language regime," inserts an urgently needed political science perspective into the current dialogue between sociolinguists, who research the societal effects of language policies, and political theorists of language rights, who analyze the normative implications of policies. New analytical tools drawn from comparative politics are showcased to analyze paths taken by different states in establishing language regimes, at times disrupted and redirected at critical junctures. Contributions to the volume include analyses of Canada's increasingly court-driven language policies, the United States’ bifurcated language regime in the aftermath of 9/11, Ireland’s conflicted protection of the Irish language, France's linguistic Jacobin tradition disrupted by Europeanization, the role of political parties and coalitions in language regime stability and change in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, Poland's war-torn history informing policy toward regional languages, and the role of English in international peace-building. While other books look at the political and societal effects of language policy, none seeks to employ a historical institutionalism approach which sets language policy choice in the context of power relations embedded in state traditions. State Traditions and Language Regimes offers a comparative politics perspective, one that enriches interdisciplinary debate on language policy.

By examining Social Credit's anti-Semitic propaganda and the reaction of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Stingel details their mutual antagonism and explores why Congress was unable to stop Social Credit's blatant defamation. She argues that Congress's ineffective response was part of a broader problem in which passivity and a belief in "quiet diplomacy" undermined many of its efforts to combat intolerance. Stingel shows that both Social Credit and Congress changed considerably in the post-war period, as Social Credit abandoned its anti-Semitic trappings and Congress gradually adopted an assertive and pugnacious public relations philosophy that made it a champion of human rights in Canada. Social Discredit offers a fresh perspective on both the Social Credit movement and the Canadian Jewish Congress, substantively revising Social Credit historiography and providing a valuable addition to Canadian Jewish studies.

This is the first volume entirely dedicated to contested languages. While generally listed in international language atlases, contested languages usually fall through the cracks of research: excluded from the literature on minority languages and treated as mere ensembles of geographically defined varieties by traditional dialectology. This volume investigates the nature of contested languages, the role language ideologies play in the perception of these languages, the contribution of academic discourse to the formation and perpetuation of language contestedness, and the damage contestedness causes to linguistic communities and ultimately to linguistic diversity. Various situations and degrees of language contestedness are presented and analysed, along with theoretical considerations, exploring potential roads to recognition and issues in language planning that arise from language contestedness. Addressing the “language vs dialect” question head on, the volume opens up new perspectives that are relevant to all students and researchers interested in the maintenance of linguistic diversity.