Historian Andrea Eidenger published an article on her blog, Unwritten Histories, about non-fiction books that will be published this month that may help genealogists understand aspects of their ancestors’ lives.
Filing the Ranks: Manpower in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1918 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), by Richard Holt, describes “national civilian and military recruitment policies and criteria both inside and outside of Canada; efforts to recruit women, convicts, and members of First Nations, African Canadian, Asian, and Slavic communities; the conduct of entry-level training; and the development of a coherent reinforcement structure.”
If one of your relatives worked in the automotive industry, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960-80 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017), by Jeremy Milloy, may help you understand what their work life may have been like or what they witnessed. The author’s analysis spans 1960 to 1980, when North American auto plants were routinely the sites of fights, assaults, and even murders. “He argues that the high levels of violence were primarily the result of workplace conditions – including on-the-job exploitation, racial tension, bureaucratization, and hypermasculinity – that made fear and loathing a shop-floor reality long before mass shootings attracted media attention in the 1980s.”
These books and others, with images of covers and descriptions, are listed in the blog post, Upcoming Publications in Canadian History –April 2017.
Ms. Eidenger also published a blog post about upcoming publications in Canadian history for May.
