A lively reconstruction of life in a booming North American city.

Benefiting from Montreal's remarkable archival records, Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton use an ingenious sampling of twelve surnames to track the comings and goings, births, deaths, and marriages of the city's inhabitants. The book demonstrates the importance of individual decisions by outlining the circumstances in which people decided where to move, when to marry, and what work to do. Integrating social and spatial analysis, the authors provide insights into the relationships among the city's three cultural communities, show how inequalities of voice, purchasing power, and access to real property were maintained, and provide first-hand evidence of the impact of city living and poverty on families, health, and futures. The findings challenge presumptions about the cultural "assimilation" of migrants as well as our understanding of urban life in nineteenth-century North America. The culmination of twenty-five years of work, Peopling the North American City is an illuminating look at the humanity of cities and the elements that determine whether their citizens will thrive or merely survive.

In this second edition, America’s Urban History now includes contemporary analysis of race, immigration, and cities under the Trump administration and has been fully updated with new scholarship on early urbanization, mass incarceration and cities, the Great Society, the diversification of the suburbs, and environmental justice. The United States is one of the most heavily urbanized places in the world, and its urban history is essential to understanding the fundamental narrative of American history. This book is an accessible overview of the history of American cities, including Indigenous settlements, colonial America, the American West, the postwar metropolis, and the present-day landscape of suburban sprawl and an urbanized population. It examines the ways in which urbanization is connected to divisions of society along the lines of race, class, and gender, but it also studies how cities have been sources of opportunity, hope, and success for individuals and the nation. Images, maps, tables, and a guide to further reading provide engaging accompaniment to illustrate key concepts and themes. Spanning centuries of America’s urban past, this book’s depth and insight make it an ideal text for students and scholars in urban studies and American history.

Sir Wilfrid Laurier famously claimed that the twentieth century would be Canada's century and, indeed, its opening decade witnessed remarkable territorial, demographic, and social transformations. Yet the lives of those who lived and laboured to fashion these changes remain largely hidden from historical view. The Dawn of Canada's Century presents close and systematic interpretations of everyday lives based on the first national sample of the 1911 census. Written by many of Canada's leading historical researchers, The Dawn of Canada's Century demonstrates the wide-ranging and revealing social histories made possible by the new Canadian Century Research Infrastructure, an innovative database of national samples of decennial census microdata, from 1911 through 1951. This revealing collection sheds new light on topics including identity and language, the socio-demography of aboriginal populations, national labour market dynamics, earnings distributions, social mobility, gender and immigration experiences, and the technologies of census taking. Situating early twentieth-century Canada within international historical population studies, these essays provide new ways to understand individuals' lives and connect them to larger structural changes. Contributors include Peter Baskerville (Alberta), Claude Bellevance (Université du Quebéc à Trois Rivière), Sean T. Cadigan (Memorial), Gordon Darroch (York), Lisa Dillon (UdeM), Chad Gaffield (SSHRC), Danielle Gauvreau (Concordia), Gustave Goldmann (Ottawa), Adam J. Green (Ottawa), Kris Inwood (Guelph), Charles Jones (Toronto), Richard Marcoux (Laval), Mary MacKinnon (McGill), Chris Minns (London School of Economics), Byron Moldofsky (Toronto), France Normand (Université du Quebéc à Trois Rivière), Stella Park (Toronto), Terry Quinlan (Newfoundland and Labrador Statistics Agency), Laurent Richard (Laval), Katharine Rollwagen (Ottawa), Evelyn Ruppert (Goldsmiths, University of London), Eric W. Sager (Victoria), Marc St-Hilaire (Laval), and Patricia Thornton (Concordia).

This vibrant biography of Griffintown, an inner-city Montreal neighbourhood, brings to life the history of Irish identity in the legendary enclave. As Irish immigration dwindled by the late nineteenth century, Irish culture in the city became diasporic, reflecting an imagined homeland. Focusing on the power of memory to shape community, Matthew Barlow finds that, despite sociopolitical pressures and a declining population, the spirit of this ethnic quarter was nurtured by the men and women who grew up there. Today, as Griffintown attracts renewed interest from developers, this textured analysis reveals how public memory defines our urban centres.

In this introduction to his large-scale work The Peopling of British North America, Bernard Bailyn identifies central themes in a formative passage of our history: the transatlantic transfer of people from the Old World to the North American continent that formed the basis of American society. Voyagers to the West, which covers the British migration in the years just before the American Revolution and is the first major volume in the Peopling project, is also available from Vintage Books.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize A compelling, fresh account of the first great transit of people from Britain, Europe, and Africa to British North America, their involvements with each other, and their struggles with the indigenous peoples of the eastern seaboard. The immigrants were a mixed multitude. They came from England, the Netherlands, the German and Italian states, France, Africa, Sweden, and Finland, and they moved to the western hemisphere for different reasons, from different social backgrounds and cultures. They represented a spectrum of religious attachments. In the early years, their stories are not mainly of triumph but of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize situations and recapture lost worlds. It was a thoroughly brutal encounter—not only between the Europeans and native peoples and between Europeans and Africans, but among Europeans themselves, as they sought to control and prosper in the new configurations of life that were emerging around them.