Johann Baptist Packh was born in Esztergom, Hungary in 1831. He later changed his name to Paul O. Esterhazy, became an immigration agent in Canada in 1885, and founded the town of Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, settled by Hungarian immigrants. He died in 1912.

Throughout the late 1800s, waves of immigrants came over from Europe to North America, their arrival serving a dual purpose. On the one hand, the immigrants were seeking a better life for themselves and their families. On the other hand, the Canadian federal, provincial, and territorial governments were seeking to populate their territory in a bid to maintain sovereignty over the land and to develop it for agriculture. Among these immigrants were the Hungarian and Western Slavic settlers who founded the Esterhaz Colony, which later became known as the Kaposvar and Kolin districts, in southeastern Saskatchewan. A key figure in the founding of this colony was the enigmatic Count Paul O. d’Esterhazy, a.k.a. Janos Baptiste Packh. As an immigration agent for the Canadian and American governments, he worked tirelessly not only to promote immigration to the Kaposvar and Kolin districts but also to improve the lives of the immigrants who settled there. Although d’Esterhazy was not without his detractors, this book takes pains to emphasize the sincerity of his vision of a “Little Hungary on the Canadian Prairies” and the many challenges that he and other proponents of the colony faced as they sought to see that vision fulfilled. Meticulously researched and documented, this book offers a treasure trove of insight into not only the Esterhaz colony and surrounding area but also the myriad and often conflicting forces involved in the founding of Canada as a nation.

From the 1870s until the Great Depression, immigration was often the question of the hour in Canada. Politicians, the media, and an array of interest groups viewed it as essential to nation building, developing the economy, and shaping Canada's social and cultural character. One of the groups most determined to influence public debate and government policy on the issue was organized labour, and unionists were often relentless critics of immigrant recruitment. Guarding the Gates is the first detailed study of Canadian labour leaders' approach to immigration, a key battleground in struggles between different political factions within the labour movement. This book provides new insights into labour, immigration, social, and political history.

The first big book on one of the most overlooked episodes in Canadian history, and the origin of today's greatest national debate, Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark relives the 1918 attempt by 3 premiers to wrest control of their natural resources away from Ottawa--and end their role as second-class provinces. The oil sands. Global warming. The National Energy Program. Though these seem like modern Canadian subjects, Mary Janigan reveals them to be a legacy of longstanding regional rivalry. Something of a "Third Solitude" since entering Confederation, the West has long been overshadowed by Canada's other great national debate. But as the conflict over natural resources and their effect on climate change heats up, 150 years of antipathy are coming to a head. Janigan takes readers back to a pivotal moment in 1918, when Canada's western premiers descended on Ottawa determined to control their own future--and as Margaret MacMillan did in Paris 1919, she deftly illustrates how the results reverberate to this day.

For immigrants making the transoceanic journey from Europe or Asia to North America, the experience of a new country began when they disembarked. In Canada the federal government built a network of buildings that provided newcomers with shelter, services, and state support. "Immigration sheds" such as Pier 21 in Halifax – where ocean liners would dock and global migrants arrived and were processed – had many counterparts across the country: new arrivals were accommodated or incarcerated at reception halls, quarantine stations, and immigrant detention hospitals. For the Temporary Accommodation of Settlers reconstructs the experiences of people in these spaces – both immigrants and government agents – to pose a question at the heart of architectural thinking: how is meaning produced in the built environments that we encounter? David Monteyne interprets official governmental intentions and policy goals embodied by the architecture of immigration but foregrounds the unofficial, informal practices of people who negotiated these spaces to satisfy basic needs, ensure the safety of their families, learn about land and job opportunities, and ultimately arrive at their destinations. The extent of this Canadian network, which peaked in the early twentieth century at over sixty different sites, and the range of building types that comprised it are unique among immigrant-receiving nations in this period. In our era of pandemic quarantine and migrant detention facilities, For the Temporary Accommodation of Settlers offers new ways of seeing and thinking about the historical processes of immigration, challenging readers to consider government architecture and the experience of migrants across global networks.

"The Regina Riot, which erupted in that city's Market Square on July 1, 1935, was the climax of a strike by relief camp workers which had begun in British Columbia on April 4. After lingering two months in Vancouver, the participants struck out east by freight train, on to Ottawa, where they intended to tell the Government of Canada that the situation of the unemployed had become intolerable. The origins of the Strike, the Trek, and the Riot -- the character of those events -- are what this book is all about. It is a narrative, composed from federal, provincial and municipal records, from news reports, from interviews with participants, from sworn testimony, from photographs, from maps, from sawn-off baseball bats. It is the story of an event which figured prominently, at the same instant, in the history of the Canadian worker, in the history of the Canadian radical, in the histories of two Canadian cities and in the history of R. B. Bennet's Depression years government." --

Immigration and Settlement, 1870-1939 includes twenty articles organized under the following topics: the "Opening of the Prairie West," First Nations and the Policy of Containment, Patterns of Settlement, and Ethnic Relations and Identity in the New West. The second volume in the History of the Prairie West Series, Immigration and Settlement includes chapters on early immigration patterns including transportation routes and ethnic blocks, as well as the policy of containing First Nations on reserves. Other chapters grapple with the various identities, preferences, and prejudices of settlers and their complex relationships with each other as well as the larger polity.