Celebrating Canada: Commemorations, Anniversaries, and National Symbols

by Raymond B. Blake, Mathew Hayday

Overview

Popular and government-funded anniversaries and commemorations, combined with national symbols, play significant roles in shaping how we view Canada, and also provide opportunities for people to challenge the pre-existing or dominant conceptions of the country. Volume 2 of Celebrating Canada continues the scholarly debate about commemoration and national identity. Raymond B. Blake and Matthew Hayday bring together emerging and established scholars to consider key moments in Canadian history when major anniversaries of Canada’s political, social, or cultural development were celebrated.

The contributors to this volume capture the multiple and multi-layered meanings of belonging in the Canadian experience, investigate various attempts at shaping and re-shaping identities, and explore episodes of groups resisting or participating in the identity-formation process. By considering the small voices and those on the margins of Canada’s many commemorative anniversaries, the contributors to Celebrating Canada reveal how important it is to think not only about anniversary moments but also about what they can tell us about our history and the shifting function of nationalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442621565
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	02/05/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	392
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Raymond B. Blake is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Regina.

Matthew Hayday is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Guelph.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Celebrating Canada: Commemorations, Anniversaries and National Symbols

1. National Symbols and Commemorations: Analyzing the Loyalist Centennial and the Conventions nationales acadiennes in New Brunswick in the 1880s
    Denis Bourque, Bonnie Huskins, Greg Marquis, and Chantal Richard

2. Emblemizing Canada in the "Flag Debate" of 1895
    Peter Price

3. Children of a Common Mother: The Rise and Fall of the Anglo-American Peace Centenary
    Brandon Dimmel

4. Competing Pasts, Multiple Identities: The Diamond Jubilee of Confederation and the Politics of Commemoration
    Robert Cupido

5. Bilingualism and Biculturalism at the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation
    Robert J. Talbot

6. Canada’s Centennial Experience
    Helen Davies

7. A "labor of love in a community spirit": The Cape Breton Miners’ Museum and the Remaking of Historical Consciousness
    Meaghan Beaton

8. Federal Funding, Local Priorities: Urban Planning and Ontario’s Municipal Centennial Projects
    Christopher Los

9. Alternative Identities: The 1967 Centennial and the Campaign for a Better Canada
    Ted Cogan

10. Fit for Citizenship’: Scouting and the Centennial Celebrations of 1967
      James Trepanier

11. A Continental Centennial: Situating Expo 67 within the Canadian-American Relationship
      Robyn E. Schwar

12. New Nationalism in the Cradle of Confederation: Prince Edward Island’s Centennial Decade
      Matthew McRae

Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Jeff A. Webb

"Celebrating Canada, Volume 2 makes a significant contribution to the history of Canadian political identity. Moving beyond a study of the federal state, this collection shows how local communities make their own meaning out of the July 1 celebrations."

Len Kuffert

"Presenting emerging scholarship about Canadian commemorative efforts, especially those surrounding anniversaries or the qualities of 'Canadian-ness,' Celebrating Canada, Volume 2 is both implicitly and explicitly aware of how cultures of varying scopes and sizes construct commemorative and celebratory events from anniversaries of battles or migrations to continual interpretation."

Norman Hillmer

"This second volume of Celebrating Canada exposes the varieties, commonalities, and contradictions of the Canadian experience; the multiple and multilayered meanings of belonging; identity -shaping, identity -shifting, and identity -resisting; nationalisms and the uses to which they can be put; the small voices alongside the powerful; the absences, exclusions, and the margins as well as the grand national story; the modern and the anti-modern; top-down and bottom-up mobilization and something in between; and the constant and fluid re-imagining and re-imaging of what it means to be Canadian."

Editorial Reviews

" Celebrating Canada, Volume 2 makes a significant contribution to the history of Canadian political identity. Moving beyond a study of the federal state, this collection shows how local communities make their own meaning out of the July 1 celebrations."

—Jeff A. Webb, Department of History, Memorial University

"This second volume of Celebrating Canada exposes the varieties, commonalities, and contradictions of the Canadian experience; the multiple and multilayered meanings of belonging; identity -shaping, identity -shifting, and identity -resisting; nationalisms and the uses to which they can be put; the small voices alongside the powerful; the absences, exclusions, and the margins as well as the grand national story; the modern and the anti-modern; top-down and bottom-up mobilization and something in between; and the constant and fluid re-imagining and re-imaging of what it means to be Canadian."

—Norman Hillmer, Chancellor’s Professor of History and International Affairs, Carleton University

"Presenting emerging scholarship about Canadian commemorative efforts, especially those surrounding anniversaries or the qualities of ‘Canadian-ness,’ Celebrating Canada, Volume 2 is both implicitly and explicitly aware of how cultures of varying scopes and sizes construct commemorative and celebratory events from anniversaries of battles or migrations to continual interpretation."

—Len Kuffert, Department of History, University of Manitoba

From the Publisher