For many years after Confederation, Canadian governments wrestled with a sorry fact: until the West was settled, Canada was an illogical country. The great nation-building policies of John A. Macdonald's National Policy and the transcontinetal railway could not succeed without a living farm population on the prairies. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Austrian crown lands of Bukovyna and Galicia - part of present-day Ukraine - were overpopulated with "redundant" peasants. Their precarious existence triggered the forces of emigration. More than 170 000 of them sailed for Canada. Life in the promised land was hard. To begin with, Canadians seemed to think that the only good immigrants were British. Some went so far as to suggest that the Ukrainian newcomers were less than human. Editorialists wondered how "beings bearing the human form could have sunk to such a bestial level." But on the harsh and remote prairies, the Ukrainians triumphed over the toil and isolation of homesteading. Those who turned to wage work withstood the wretched conditions reserved for the labour of the emerging Canadian industrial system. As the question of education rights split the West on religious lines in the early years of the century, the Ukrainians were caught in the crossfire between French Catholics and English Protestants. Despite all this, the peasants put down roots and prospered. Peasants in the Promised Land is the first book to focus on the formative period of Ukrainian settlement in Canada. Drawing on exhaustive research, including rich Ukrainian-language archival sources, Jaroslav Petryshyn brings history to life with extracts from memoirs, letters and newspapers of the period. His text is illustrated with maps and historical photographs.
Eschewing the often romanticized Underground Railroad narrative that portrays southern Ontario as the welcoming destination of Blacks fleeing from slavery, The Promised Land reveals the Chatham-Kent area as a crucial settlement site for an early Black presence in Canada. The contributors present the everyday lives and professional activities of individuals and families in these communities and highlight early cross-border activism to end slavery in the United States and to promote civil rights in the United States and Canada. Essays also reflect on the frequent intermingling of local Black, White, and First Nations people. Using a cultural studies framework for their collective investigations, the authors trace physical and intellectual trajectories of Blackness that have radiated from southern Ontario to other parts of Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. The result is a collection that represents the presence and diffusion of Blackness and inventively challenges the grand narrative of history.
Iconoclast David F. Noble traces the evolution and eclipse of the biblical mythology of the Promised Land, the foundational story of Western Culture. Part impassioned manifesto, part masterful survey of opposed philosophical and economic schools, Beyond the Promised Land brings into focus the twisted template of the Western imagination and its faith-based market economy. From the first recorded versions of ‘the promise’ saga in ancient Babylon, to the Zapatistas’ rejection of promises never kept, Noble explores the connections between Judeo-Christian belief and corporate globalization. Inspiration for activists and students alike.
DIVDiscusses the migration of African-Americans from the south to the north after WWI through the 1940s and the effect this had on African-American churches and religions./div
In this superb cultural history, John R. Hall presents a reasoned analysis of the meaning of Jonestown--why it happened and how it is tied to our history as a nation, our ideals, our practices, and the tension of modern culture. Hall deflates the myths of Jonestown by exploring how much of what transpired was unique to the group and its leader and how much can be explained by reference to wider social processes.
The essential, “richly researched”* biography of Harriet Tubman, revealing a complex woman who “led a remarkable life, one that her race, her sex, and her origins make all the more extraordinary” (*The New York Times Book Review). Harriet Tubman is one of the giants of American history—a fearless visionary who led scores of her fellow slaves to freedom and battled courageously behind enemy lines during the Civil War. Now, in this magnificent biography, historian Kate Clifford Larson gives us a powerful, intimate, meticulously detailed portrait of Tubman and her times. Drawing from a trove of new documents and sources as well as extensive genealogical data, Larson presents Harriet Tubman as a complete human being—brilliant, shrewd, deeply religious, and passionate in her pursuit of freedom. A true American hero, Tubman was also a woman who loved, suffered, and sacrificed. Praise for Bound for the Promised Land “[Bound for the Promised Land] appropriately reads like fiction, for Tubman’s exploits required such intelligence, physical stamina and pure fearlessness that only a very few would have even contemplated the feats that she actually undertook. . . . Larson captures Tubman’s determination and seeming imperviousness to pain and suffering, coupled with an extraordinary selflessness and caring for others.”—The Seattle Times “Essential for those interested in Tubman and her causes . . . Larson does an especially thorough job of . . . uncovering relevant documents, some of them long hidden by history and neglect.”—The Plain Dealer “Larson has captured Harriet Tubman’s clandestine nature . . . reading Ms. Larson made me wonder if Tubman is not, in fact, the greatest spy this country has ever produced.”—The New York Sun
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency
ISBN:
Category: Biography & Autobiography
Page: 310
View: 737
Legends of the Promised Land is the passionate memoir recounting the forced immigration of a Vietnamese family to the U.S., following the Vietnam war and the rise of communism in their homeland. In her own words, traditional aphorism, and the voices of her children and husband, the matriarch of the family describes her family’s inspirational realization of the American dream, beginning with her lone arrival in the U.S. as a penniless boat person. Xuan-Lan Nguyen tells how for six generations her hard-working family amassed wealth that was all lost when the Vietnamese Communists arrived in Saigon in 1975. Her husband, a well-known lawyer in Vietnam and a seventeen-year prisoner of the Vietnamese Communists, eventually joined her, becoming a writer and orator now living with his family in America. She says proudly, “We have three daughters, now three doctors in the medical field in the U.S.”
In Search of the Promised Land is an exciting challenge to the established historiography of post-war Ireland, based on extensive research using Irish departmental files, British and American political archives, the personal papers of politicians and other policy players, and interviews with officials, businessmen, trade unionists, and others who were active during the period.