Drawing on family correspondence, Jean Barman offers a new interpretation of early settlement across Canada in the stories of two young sisters from Pictou County, Nova Scotia, who took the train west to British Columbia in 1886.

British Columbia is at the forefront of a secularizing movement in the English-speaking world. Nearly half its residents claim no religious affiliation, and the province has the highest rate of unbelief or religious indifference in Canada. Infidels and the Damn Churches explores the historical roots of this phenomenon from the 1880s to the First World War. Lynne Marks reveals that class and racial tensions fuelled irreligion in a world populated by embattled ministers, militant atheists, turn-of-the-century New Agers, rough-living miners, Asian immigrants, and church-going settler women. White, working-class men often arrived in the province alone and identified the church with their exploitative employers. At the same time, BC’s anti-Asian and anti-Indigenous racism meant that their “whiteness” alone could define them as respectable, without the need for church affiliation. Consequently, although Christianity retained major social power elsewhere, many people in BC found the freedom to forgo church attendance or espouse atheist views. This nuanced study of mobility, gender, masculinity, and family in settler BC offers new insights into BC’s distinctive culture and into the beginnings of what has become an increasingly dominant secular worldview across Canada.

An exploration of two centuries of formal education in Canada in which the accomodation of minority needs and local versus central control are recurring themes.

A unique blend of descriptive and detailed poems mixeded with riddles of every day observations in nature to expressions from personal relationships, twisted into deeper intrigues of politics and unspoken longings of the heart. If eyes are windows to the soul and I tell you what I see through them, am I not letting you peer inside?

A captivating account of the lives of Laura, Christine, and Caroline Lindhard, three sisters who left their home in Stege, Denmark, in 1870 due to war, political turmoil, and limited opportunities, and sought out new lives in the Cariboo region of British Columbia. There are few stories of entrepreneurial, business class women in nineteenth century BC. They didn’t keep diaries or save letters like the ruling class women often did, and they were usually overlooked in newspaper reports. Yet many came into British Columbia in the early years of the gold rush and helped build and sustain the developing communities. This book tells the stories of three sisters—Laura, Christine, and Caroline Lindhard—who arrived in BC from Denmark in the 1870s. Coming of age in Europe, the Lindhard sisters had aspirations that were restricted by societal norms about what women could and should be and do. This is a story of how each of the sisters made a life for themselves: marrying and having children, becoming single parents at an early age, marrying again or not, working together, providing for their children, and making choices that set them on different paths. While their lives diverged at various points, their commitments to each other and the next generation remained strong. The sisters’ stories illustrate the importance of family and community relationships as support structures for women entrepreneurs who combine family responsibilities with earning a living. While they were not heroic in the traditional, patriarchal sense of the word, the Lindhard sisters were powerful, influential members of their families and their community, and their lives reveal much about the complex social fabric of early British Columbia and the unsung contributions of women.

This A-Z reference work provides the first comprehensive reference guide to the wide range of historical writing with which women have been involved, particularly since the Renaissance. The Companion covers biographical writing, travelogue and historical fictions, broadening the concept of history to include the forms of writing with which women have historically engaged. The focus is on women writing in English internationally, but historical and historiographical traditions from beyond the English-speaking world are also examined. Brief biographies of individual writers are included.

Jean Barman was the recipient of the 2014 George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. In French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest, Jean Barman rewrites the history of the Pacific Northwest from the perspective of French Canadians attracted by the fur economy, the indigenous women whose presence in their lives encouraged them to stay, and their descendants. Joined in this distant setting by Quebec paternal origins, the French language, and Catholicism, French Canadians comprised Canadiens from Quebec, Iroquois from the Montreal area, and métis combining Canadien and indigenous descent. For half a century, French Canadians were the largest group of newcomers to this region extending from Oregon and Washington east into Montana and north through British Columbia. Here, they facilitated the early overland crossings, drove the fur economy, initiated non-wholly-indigenous agricultural settlement, eased relations with indigenous peoples, and ensured that, when the region was divided in 1846, the northern half would go to Britain, giving today’s Canada its Pacific shoreline.

In the late 1970s, feminists urged us to "rethink" Canada by placing women's experiences at the centre of historical analysis. Forty years later, women's and gender historians continue to take up the challenge, not only to interrogate the idea of nation but also to place their work in a global perspective. This volume showcases the work of scholars who draw on critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and transnational history to re-examine familiar topics such as biography and oral history, paid and unpaid work, marriage and family, and women's political action. Taken together, these exciting new essays demonstrate the continued relevance of history informed by feminist perspectives.

Throughout history, Western women have inhabited a conceptual space divorced from the world of business. But women have always engaged in business. Who were these women, and how were they able to justify their work outside the home? The Business of Women explores the world of those women who embraced British Columbia’s frontier ethos in the early twentieth-century. In this detailed examination of case studies and quantitative sources, Buddle reveals that, contrary to expectation, the typical businesswoman was not unmarried or particularly rebellious, but a woman reconciling her entrepreneurship with her identity as a wife, mother, or widow. This groundbreaking study not only incorporates women into the history of business, it challenges commonly held beliefs about women, business, and the marriage between the two.

The Joan Jensen-Darlis Miller Prize recognizes outstanding scholarship on gender and women's history in the West. The winning essays are collected here for the first time in one volume.