Ecclesiastical Metropolitanism and the Evolution of the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto

Until 1850 the Catholic Church in the Diocese of Toronto was a mission-like entity, lacking priests, institutions and a communication system to unify it. Subsequently it underwent rapid change, adopting the traditional metropolitan form of Church government. Two major factors precipitated the change. The sudden influx of Famine Irish immigrants drastically increased the size of the urban Catholic laity, but required immediate aid and direction if it were to be retained. Through his organizational ability Bishop Charbonnel utilized the Church's ancient, external communication network, drawing upon it for funds, personnel and ideas to assist the laity. Thereby the Church was strengthened and the Irish preserved as the Victorian Catholic laity. Manquant de prêtres, d’institutions et de communications appropriées, l’Église catholique dans le diocèse de Toronto ressembla à une mission jusqu’en 1850. Elle connut par la suite de rapides transformations conduisant à l’établissement de structures métropolitaines de type classique. Ces transformations furent accélérées d’abord par la venue soudaine d’immigrants irlandais fuyant la grande famine, qui exigèrent un encadrement immédiat. En second lieu, l’évêque Charbonnel utilisa ses talents d’administrateur et les structures établies de l’Église pour lever des fonds et recruter du personnel. Ainsi, l’Église se raffermit et les Irlandais catholiques furent maintenus en son sein

Reweaving urban fabrics : Urbanisation, industrialisation and regeneration in Southwest Montréal =

In the pages that follow, this thesis examines the urbanisation, industrialisation, and regeneration processes that have shaped the built landscape along Montréal's Lachine Canal. Adopting an approach that sees urban tissue as more than the simple result of agents' interventions, that is to say as a structuring influence itself, the thesis critically examines the history and geography of urban industrialisation, particularly in relation to Montréal, and takes a look at contemporary redevelopment paradigms. After putting forward a morphological methodology and offering a short history of the Canal, the thesis presents the results of an in-depth analysis of urban tissues in adjacent industrial sectors. Proposing a typology of industrial complexes and sectors rooted in the degree of differentiation between industrial elements and the surrounding urban tissue, this thesis argues that urbanisation, industrialisation, and regeneration are diffuse, incremental processes that dialectically engage with the landscapes left by the past. The thesis wraps up with a discussion of the historiographical and practical implications of such a perspective

Searching for Sakitawak: Place and People in Northern Saskatchewan\u27s Île-à-la-Crosse

This presentation is a history of a small community, Île-à-la-Crosse, located in an area now part of Saskatchewan, Canada. With an historic reputation for cooperation and enviable trading circumstances, its residents traditionally have determined that protection of the community ensured the best opportunities for the advancement and security of individuals. As a result of this belief, residents reinforced their own understandings of sustainability as a means to ensure personal success. The community’s fame for hosting such a set of norms grew, particularly from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and outsiders often visited to improve their own efforts as a result of this reputation. Given the belief that community longevity assured individual concerns, many visitors quickly decided to adopt local processes even if those functions contrasted sharply from their own original beliefs. Based on these decisions, the visitors’ institutions experienced changes as well. Through this social cooperation to better ensure personal success, a culture began to develop, and so the village’s distinctive administrative and economic processes were continued through family and neighbourly ties. Some characteristics, such as multiculturalism, shared land use, complex trading activities, and sustainability, further distinguished Île-à-la-Crosse as a result. Though well aware of the village a number of parties (such as the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Canadian government), still regularly excluded the community from their deliberations because of its unique ability to supposedly need less intervention considered necessary elsewhere. These various corporate and political authorities, concerned with their own existence, instead emphasised the conditions of communities that demonstrated social hostility, monetary difficulties, and other forms of disparity. As these historic parties failing to appreciate the village’s positive components in their fullest form, historians also did not integrate the village into their narratives since they almost always focused on conflict and change in their investigations. Because of this missing analysis about Île-à-la-Crosse, historical accounts have created lacunae in our understanding and awareness not just of local but also of provincial and national issues pertaining to “development.” Today, the lack of historic and historical awareness has as well directly impacted a modern day Indigenous “land claim”. Particularly when examining “absence” and “overlap” in a space’s natural and social form, Île-à-la-Crosse’s story from its earliest existence to its present shape can finally remind us how local conditions –even before humans started living in those circumstances – can teach us about how to survive and succeed today as individuals and as part of a larger community and country. It also reminds us how we should pay more attention to peace, cooperation and interaction in both intellectual and social circles

One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests

This eclectic and carefully organized range of essays—from women’s history and settler societies to colonialism and borderlands studies—is the first collection of comparative and transnational work on women in the Canadian and U.S. Wests. It explores, expands, and advances the aspects of women's history that cross national borders. Out of the talks presented at the 2002 “Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women’s History,” Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus have edited a foundational text with a wide, inclusive perspective on our western past

Peace, progress and prosperity : a biography of the Hon. Walter Scott

This thesis is a biography of Walter Scott, first Premier of Saskatchewan. He was a populist and had a vision for the new province, the fastest growing province in the Dominion. Agricultural and educational institutions were created to serve this growing population. Walter Scott combined his ability to collect strong people around him with his talent to sense the public mood. Scott was a newspaperman, entrepreneur, land speculator, and distributor of federal Liberal patronage in the North-West before being elected to the House of Commons in 1900. By 1905, Scott became leader of the Saskatchewan Liberal Party and Premier. Contrary to currently held beliefs, this thesis argues that the four months between when Scott became Premier and the first election, the government was neither restructured nor was it rife with patronage. This was a time for campaigning. The political machine was built much later. After the 1905 election, the Scott government embarked on a program to build the new province's infrastructuresuch as the Legislative Building and the University of Saskatchewan. For Scott and his government, agriculture was the vital component in the fabric of Saskatchewan life. By including farm leadership in cabinet and creating a political climate founded on agriculture, Walter Scott built a power base that withstood the United Farmers' Movement that unseated governments in neighbouring provinces. During the First World War, which created a climate of social change in Saskatchewan, the Scott Government banned the bar and established female suffrage. This thesis also examines when Walter Scott first exhibited signs of mental illness. His health became a primary focus as he searched for a cure for depression. It will be argued that it was the battle with Rev. Murdock MacKinnon over minority rights in the school system that brought Scott's mental health to the point that he had to resign. After his death, the memory of Walter Scott faded. Yet his legacy of democracy, education and agriculture continue until today. The fruits of Walter Scott's labours continue to be harvested in Saskatchewan but few remember who planted the original seeds

The eccentric domain : Wordsworth, the Lake District and the early Victorian industrial novel.

The first half of the 19th century saw the emergence of the world's first modern industrial nation, and the transformation of England from a rural and agrarian to an urban and industrial economy. These changes were accompanied by an alteration in the relations between the artist and society. Artistic activity of all kinds comes to be regarded as apart from, and fundamentally opposed to, the material and spiritual characteristics of the new order. The so-called Industrial Novels of the 1840s and '50s, along with some other closely related works, reflect this displacement of the artist from the central economic endeavour of the na tion , offering ideologically cautious, but imaginatively highly charged statements of dissent from its perceived drift. In thus orienting themselves the authors of these novels drew decisive inspiration from Wordsworth. His Lyrical Ballads Preface is an early and influential manifesto of political and cultural eccentricity, offering a provisional analysis of the disparate phenomena which consti tute the centre, or metropolis, in English life. Many poems in the collection originate novel strategies for circumscribing its hegemony. This thesis aims to isolate Wordsworth's contribution to this field, and to trace his influence on three mid-19th-century novelists who address similar issues: Mrs Gaskell, Emily Bronte and Charles Dickens. The Introduction begins by examining the critical reception of the Industrial Novels, and the wider question of Wordsworth's reception by the Victorians. It elaborates a spatial model of centricity and eccentricity applicable both to Wordsworth and to the novelists in question, pointing to the long historical tradition of dissent locating itself in geographic and economic margins. Finally, it focuses on the Lake District, by far the most culturally significant of these margins in the 19th century, recounting the stages whereby its bearing on the problems of the new urban-industrial society came to be widely acknowledged along lines first proposed by Wordsworth. Chapter 1 looks first at Wordsworth's carefully crafted relationship with his society, and the extent to which, in situating himself in the Lake District, he was building on an eccentric focus already in existence. It examines the factors which induced him to adopt this stance, and the ways in which he sought to appropriate, and sustain imaginatively, his own "eccentric domain". In particular, it seeks to distinguish two contradictory trajectories - inward and outward - and the manoeuvres to which each gives rise. It then looks closely at a number of shorter poems, illustrative of th7 variety of what I term "topographical strategies", wh1ch Wordsworth evolves in order both to defend this domain against incursions from an aggrandising centre, and to combat the centre on its own terrain. I end by looking briefly a t certain factors including his supposed apostasy which complicate the Victorian reception of Wordsworth, and which go some way towards explaining the characteristically oblique homage of Dickens and Emily Bronte. Mrs Gaskell, the subject of Chapter 2, represents a remarkably pure, if occasionally sentimental version of the Victorian Wordsworth, carrying his enterprise into the heart of the industrial city. In Mary Barton she elaborates on Wordsworthian hints of the transfiguring power of the imagination, to create in Alice Wilson a memorable characterisation of eccentric virtue, an alternative moral centre. By furnishing genealogies for her characters she maps out an underlying geography which subverts the symbolic and ideological centricity of Victorian Manchester. Chapter 3 goes on to examine Wuthering Heights, which also has an underlying genealogical structure, and establishes the close kinship between its landscape and the Lake District. Emily Bronte memorably abstracts and intensifies the eccentric domain, internalising it (the familiar inward trajectory), but investing it with such energy that it acquires a quasi-revolutionary potential. In spite of major differences of temperament and social affiliation, Dickens, the subject of Chapter 4, shares with Wordsworth an underlying hostility to the 'driven impetus' of his society. Thus the specifically metropolitan sources of his inspiration are properly interpreted as celebrations of eccentricity. He reproduces both the inward and outward trajectories embodied in Wordsworth's eccentric enterprise, but remains reluctant to acknowledge their provenance. The chapter concludes wi th an account of Hard Times, his most forthright engagement with the new indliBtrial forces of the centre. Here problems of serial publication provoked an uncomfortable identification, as artist, with the Coketown operatives, both drawn into unwilling collaboration with alien forces. A necessary release, negotiated through Stephen Blackpool's Wordsworthian death, appears to capitulate to the inward trajectory, but is transformed by Dickens's metropolitan insights into a much more positive reassertion of the eccentric domain