In Crofters and Habitants, J.I. Little examines the ways in which two highly distinct social groups -- Gælic-speaking crofters from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides and French-speaking habitants from south of Quebec City -- adapted to a common physical environment in the rugged Appalachian plateau of south-eastern Quebec.

Point Saint-Charles, a historically white working-class neighbourhood with a strong Irish and French presence, and Little Burgundy, a multiracial neighbourhood that is home to the city’s English-speaking Black community, face each other across Montreal’s Lachine Canal, once an artery around which work and industry in Montreal were clustered and by which these two communities were formed and divided. Deindustrializing Montreal challenges the deepening divergence of class and race analysis by recognizing the intimate relationship between capitalism, class struggles, and racial inequality. Fundamentally, deindustrialization is a process of physical and social ruination as well as part of a wider political project that leaves working-class communities impoverished and demoralized. The structural violence of capitalism occurs gradually and out of sight, but it doesn’t play out the same for everyone. Point Saint-Charles was left to rot until it was revalorized by gentrification, whereas Little Burgundy was torn apart by urban renewal and highway construction. This historical divergence had profound consequences in how urban change has been experienced, understood, and remembered. Drawing extensive interviews, a massive and varied archive of imagery, and original photography by David Lewis into a complex chorus, Steven High brings these communities to life, tracing their history from their earliest years to their decline and their current reality. He extends the analysis of deindustrialization, often focused on single-industry towns, to cities that have seemingly made the post-industrial transition. The urban neighbourhood has never been a settled concept, and its apparent innocence masks considerable contestation, divergence, and change over time. Deindustrializing Montreal thinks critically about locality, revealing how heritage becomes an agent of gentrification, investigating how places like Little Burgundy and the Point acquire race and class identities, and questioning what is preserved and for whom.

In the late Victorian era, smoking was a male habit and tobacco was consumed mostly in pipes and cigars. By the mid-twentieth century, advertising and movies had not only made it acceptable for women to smoke but smoking had become a potent symbol of their emancipation. From mass cigarette production in 1888 to the first studies linking cigarettes to lung cancer in 1950, The Freedom to Smoke explores gender and other key issues related to smoking in Montreal, including the arrival of "big tobacco," first attempts to ban the cigarette, wartime tobacco funds, French Canadian smoking habits, rituals of manliness, and the growing respectability of women smokers - none of which have been examined by historians. Jarrett Rudy argues that while people smoked for highly personal reasons, their smoking rituals were embedded in social relations and shaped by dominant norms of taste and etiquette. The Freedom to Smoke examines the role of the tobacco industry, health experts, churches, farmers, newspapers, the military, the state, and smokers themselves. A pioneering city-based study, it weaves Western understandings of respectable smoking through Montreal's diverse social and cultural fabric. Rudy argues that etiquette gave smoking a political role, reflecting and serving to legitimize beliefs about inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy that were at the core of a transforming liberal order.

The 1840s were a period of rapid growth and social conflict in Montreal. The city's public life was marked by a series of labour conflicts and bloody sectarian riots; at the same time, the ways that elites wielded power and ordinary people engaged in the political process were changing, particularly in public space. In Taking to the Streets Dan Horner examines how the urban environment became a vital and contentious political site during the tumultuous period from the end of the 1837-38 rebellions to the burning of Parliament in 1849. Employing a close reading of newspaper and judicial archives, he looks at a broad range of collective crowd experiences, including riots, labour demonstrations, religious processions, and parades. By examining how crowd events were used both to assert claims of political authority and to challenge their legitimacy, Horner charts the development of a contentious democratic political culture in British North America. Taking to the Streets is an important contribution to the political and urban history of pre-Confederation Canada and a timely reminder of how Montrealers from all walks of life have always used the streets to build community and make their voices heard.

At the turn of the century American industrialist J.B. Duke set his sights on one of North America's greatest and most spectacular rivers - the Saguenay. In Amassing Power David Massell chronicles thirty years of international intrigue as Duke manoeuvred to gain access to, develop, and sell the tremendous hydro-electric potential of a remote river in Quebec. The damming of the Saguenay brought industrialisation on a grand scale to rural Quebec in the form of newsprint and aluminum manufacture. Tapping into rich and diverse sources in Canada, the United States, and Europe, Massell provides an interdisciplinary, cross-border study of American capital and Canadian resources. He shows us how ever-larger amounts of capital yielded increasingly massive and sophisticated applications of hydroelectric technology. Grand industrial plans, in turn, encroached upon provincial water rights and farmers' lands, which drew the attention of the state. He examines the protracted power struggle between public and private interests - between American capitalists and the nascent bureaucracy of the province of Quebec - and describes the origins and evolution of the events that led to state control over hydraulic resources in the province. In doing so he provides vivid portraits of Duke and of Quebec politicians of the period and gives a dramatic account of the protracted battle of wits between Duke's chief engineer, William States Lee, and Quebec's chief of Hydraulic Service, Arthur Amos. Amassing Power speaks to the integration of North American economies, vividly illustrating the process by which American capital drew Canada's resource-rich North into the economic orbit of the United States.

An examination of the effects of dams on the environment, Aboriginal peoples, and the war effort.

French settlers distanced the indigenous people and flora and fauna to create a landscape that by the mid-eighteenth century had become recognizably European. British industrialists and landowners attempted similar appropriations with far less durable results and the area remained a heartland of French-Canadian life, with a sense of cohesive community. This community spirit, rooted in agrarian landscape, was channelled into the developing sense of colonial nationalism of the 1820s and 1830s. Drawing on maps by explorers and surveyors, correspondence documenting the conflict between a backwoods priest and his parishioners, a gentlewoman's sketchbook, and the documents of a bitter court case between a seigneur's wife and a local priest, Coates illuminates the development of the region and the social, cultural, and economic ties and tensions within it, providing insights into the often hidden values of a rural community.