Working Lives: Essays in Canadian Working-Class History

by Craig Heron

Overview

Craig Heron is one of Canada’s leading labour historians. Drawing together fifteen of Heron’s new and previously published essays on working-class life in Canada, Working Lives covers a wide range of issues, including politics, culture, gender, wage-earning, and union organization. A timely contribution to the evolving field of labour studies in Canada, this cohesive collection of essays analyzes the daily experiences of people working across Canada over more than two hundred years.

Honest in its depictions of the historical complexities of daily life, Working Lives raises issues in the writing of Canadian working-class history, especially "working-class realism" and how it is eventually inscribed into Canada’s public history. Thoughtfully reflecting on the ways in which workers interact with the past, Heron discusses the important role historians and museums play in remembering the adversity and milestones experienced by Canada’s working class.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487522513
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	10/09/2018
Pages:	640
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Craig Heron is a professor emeritus in the Department of History at York University and author of Working Steel: The Early Years in Canada, 1883-1935, also published by University of Toronto Press.

Table of Contents

Part One: On the Job
1. On the Job in Canada
2. Ontario’s First Factory Workers
3. Work and Struggle in the Canadian Steel Industry, 1900-50

Part Two: Workers’ Cultures
4. Arguing about Idleness
5. Labour and Liquor
6. Into the Streets

Part Three: Getting Organized
7. Labourism and the Working Class
8. The Great War, the State, and Working-Class Canada         
9. Contours of a Workers’ Revolt

Part Four: A Gendered World
10. Working Girls
11. Boys Will Be Boys
12. Male Wage-Earners and the Canadian State

Part Five: Doing History
13. Workers in the Camera’s Eye
14. The Labour Historian and Public History
15. The Relevance of Class

What People are Saying About This

David Frank

"No one has done more to apply the methods of the new labour history to the twentieth-century working-class experience than Craig Heron, and few have demonstrated the same strengths of incisive analysis and evocative writing."

James Naylor

"Craig Heron's fine-grained exploration of the character, contexts, and complexities of working-class life is unsurpassed, and collectively these essays are a fitting testimony both to the travails and celebrations of working people and to the author's careful historical scholarship."

Editorial Reviews

"Heron is a master researcher and synthesizes the social history of workers on the job, as working conditions became more centralized and mechanized, in communities, and in the home."

—Laurel Sefton Macdowell, University of Toronto, University of Toronto Quarterly: Letters in Canada 2018

"Craig Heron’s fine-grained exploration of the character, contexts, and complexities of working-class life is unsurpassed, and collectively these essays are a fitting testimony both to the travails and celebrations of working people and to the author’s careful historical scholarship."

—James Naylor, Department of History, Brandon University

"No one has done more to apply the methods of the new labour history to the twentieth-century working-class experience than Craig Heron, and few have demonstrated the same strengths of incisive analysis and evocative writing."

—David Frank, Department of History, University of New Brunswick

From the Publisher

"Heron is a master researcher and synthesizes the social history of workers on the job, as working conditions became more centralized and mechanized, in communities, and in the home."

University of Toronto Quarterly: Letters in Canada 2018 - Laurel Sefton Macdowell