Books published by publisher Univ of Toronto Pr

In this book Yousuf Karsh, whose great photographic portraits have revealed so vividly the outstanding personalities of our time, writes about his own life and work. It is the story of an Armenian immigrant boy who rose to be the world's finest portrait photographer, whose pictures, reproduced in newspapers, magazines, and books, and shown in museums, art galleries and exhibitions, have been admired by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. Of his early years in Armenia, Karsh gives a brief but compelling account, writing without bitterness but not sparing the reader the impact on his youthful mind of the brutalities, massacres, and atrocities of that time. The dramatic impression made on him by his first experiences as a young citizen of Sherbrooke, Quebec. His several years of study in Boston with the famous photographer, Garo, show the gradual development of his ideas and skills in portraiture. In 1932, Karsh opened his own studio in Ottawa, capital city of Canada, and there he met Solange Gauthier, the volatile, charming, and practical Frenchwoman whom he married. Together they established his world-wide reputation. Karsh takes the reader with him to his sittings, and shows how he seeks to bring out the essence of the personalities he is portraying. The reader accompanies Karsh and Madam Karsh as they travel to Washington, New York, Hollywood, across Canada and to the Arctic, and on their European tours, photographing and interviewing statesmen, tycoons, artists, actors, musicians, popes, presidents, and kings. At Karsh's side, the reader hears Churchill's lion roar, the wit of Bernard Shaw, the bark of John L. Lewis, the profound accents of Einstein. He observes the grave serenity of Sibelius, and hears the noble 'cello of Casals. He shares in the problems and disappointments of securing adequate reproduction of the portraits in book form, and in the artist's gratification when Portraits of Greatness, printed by the finest gravure for the University of Toronto Press, appeared in 1959 and the magnificent volume became an immediate best-seller. Yousuf's profession has led him into the high places of the world, and this book is enriched by his twenty years of observation of the celebrities he has encountered. These are the experiences of a distinguished artist, a gifted raconteur, and a delightful human being.

The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’Arte Stage examines the emergence of the professional actress from the 1560s onwards in Italy. Tracing the historical progress of actresses from their earliest appearances as sideshow attractions to revered divas, Rosalind Kerr explores the ways in which actresses commodified their sexual and cultural appeal.Newly translated archival material, iconographic evidence, literary texts, and theatrical scripts provide a rich repertoire through which Kerr demonstrates how actresses skillfully improvised roles such as the maidservant, the prima donna, and the transvestite heroine. Following the careers of early stars such as Flaminia of Rome, Vincenza Armani, Vittoria Piissimi, and Isabella Andreini, Kerr shows how their fame arose from the combination of dazzling technical mastery and eloquent powers of persuasion. Seamlessly integrating the Italian and English scholarly literature on the subject, The Rise of the Diva is an insightful analysis of one of the modern world’s first celebrity cultures.

In the lives of ordinary people are the truths of history. Such truths abound in the diaries of Jacob Epp, a Russian Mennonite school-teacher, lay minister, farmer, and village secretary in southern Ukraine. This abridged translation of his diaries offers a remarkably vivid picture of Mennonite community life in Imperial Russia during a period of troubled change. Epp’s writings reveal a skilled and honest diarist of deep feelings, and tell a human story that no conventional historical account could hope to equal.The diaries overflow with the details of his workaday world. Family, village, church, and community routines are broken by trips to market, visits to other Mennonite settlements, and a memorable steamer voyage to boomtown Odessa on the Black Sea. He chronicles his long-time involvement in an unusual Imperial experiment in which Mennonites were “model farmers” in Jewish villages.Harvey L. Dyck places the diaries in their historical, ethnocultural, social, religious, economic, and political settings. Based on archival research, interviews, travels, and consultations with other scholars, his detailed and perceptive introduction and analysis trace Jacob Epp’s life and present a sketch and interpretation of his larger family, community, and Imperial world.With striking clarity the diaries and introduction together re-create a time and way of life marked by controversy and flux. They reflect significant facets of the experience of ethno-religious minorities in Imperial Russia and of the development of the southern Ukrainian frontier. Above all, they fill significant missing pages of the great community-centred story of Russian Mennonite life.This book is richly illustrated with maps, black-and-white photographs, and watercolour paintings by Cornelius Hildebrand, Jacob Epp’s former village school pupil and later brother-in-law.

This collection brings together a wide array of writings on Canadian immigrant history, including many highly regarded, influential essays. Though most of the chapters have been previously published, the editors have also commissioned original contributions on understudied topics in the field. The readings highlight the social history of immigrants, their pre-migration traditions as well as migration strategies and Canadian experiences, their work and family worlds, and their political, cultural, and community lives. They explore the public display of ethno-religious rituals, race riots, and union protests; the quasi-private worlds of all-male boarding-houses and of female domestics toiling in isolated workplaces; and the intrusive power that government and even well-intentioned social reformers have wielded over immigrants deemed dangerous or otherwise in need of supervision.Organized partly chronologically and largely by theme, the topical sections will offer students a glimpse into Canada's complex immigrant past. In order to facilitate classroom discussion, each section contains an introduction that contextualizes the readings and raises some questions for debate. A Nation of Immigrants will be useful both in specialized courses in Canadian immigration history and in courses on broader themes in Canadian history.

An established writer before she came to Canada, Georgina Binnie-Clark (1871-1947) settled in Saskatchewan in 1905 to become a farmer. It was an unlikely ambition for a woman in her day, particularly an English gentlewoman, and in the opinion of many, an impossible one. The reaction of onlookers was unhesitatingly and unqualifiedly unsupportive. Binnie-Clark, however, proved their skepticism to be unfounded.Originally published in 1914, Wheat and Woman is an autobiographical account of Georgina Binnie-Clark's first three years on the prairies, the story of how she learned to define and deal with her anomalous position in pre-war prairie society. Although Binnie-Clark does not dismiss the difficult lessons of life on the land for an 'English greenhorn,' or the loneliness of a woman pursuing what was considered to be a man's job, she emphasizes the unique opportunities for women in Canada. If life was difficult in Canada, it was impossible, for some, in England. With a surplus population of more than a million women, most stood almost no statistical chance of finding a husband in England. The gentlewomen among them were barred by class from all but a few overcrowded and underpaid occupations.Wheat and Woman also illuminates the sexual politics of settlement. Binnie-Clark was only too familiar with the limitations that Canadian law placed on women. Among women of the prairies, chief among these was the homestead law, which excluded all but a handful of women from the right to claim a free farm from the Dominion's public lands. This new reprint of Binnie-Clark's autobiographical writing includes an introduction by Susan Jackel, written for a 1979 edition of the text, as well as a new scholarly introduction by historian Sarah A. Carter, who received a Killam Fellowship for the study of Great Plains women of Canada and the United States.Wheat and Woman is a fascinating record of a gifted and determined woman's experience in prairie farming and a unique document in Canadian social history.

How was it that the Torrens system, a mid-nineteenth-century reform of land titles registration from distant South Australia, gradually replaced the inherited Anglo-Canadian common law system of land registration? In The Law of the Land, Greg Taylor traces the spread of the Torrens system, from its arrival in the far-flung outpost of 1860s Victoria, British Columbia, right up to twenty-first century Ontario.Examining the peculiarity of how this system of land reform swept through some provinces like wildfire, and yet still remains completely unknown in three provinces, Taylor shows how the different histories of various regions in Canada continue to shape the law in the present day. Presenting a concise and illuminating history of land reform, he also demonstrates the power of lobbying, by examining the influence of both moneylenders and lawyers who were the first to introduce the Torrens system to Canada east of the Rockies.An exact and fluent legal history of regional law reforms, The Law of the Land is a fascinating examination of commonwealth influence, and ongoing regional differences in Canada.

Robert Barr has been almost completely overlooked by critics and anthologists of Canadian literature, in part because, although he was educated in Canada, he spent most of his life in the United States and England. However, since most of his serious novels are either set in Canada or have some Canadian connection, Barr deserves attention. The Measure of the Rule, originally published in 1907, is the nearest he came to writing an autobiographical novel. It concerns the Toronto Normal School and the experiences there in the 1870s of a young man who undoubtedly is Barr himself. In this novel, Barr is exorcising unhappy memories and is ironic, even bitter, about the school’s quality of education, the rigid discipline observed by its staff and their indifference to their students, and the sexual segregation practiced. A number of men under whom Barr actually studied are vividly caricatured. As a realistic study of Ontario's only central teacher-training institution in the late nineteenth century, The Measure of the Rule will appeal both to those interested in Canadian fiction of that period and to those more concerned with the evolution of the system of education established by Egerton Ryerson. Also included with this reprint of the novel is an essay originally published in 1899 and entitled 'Literature in Canada.' In this essay, Barr elaborated upon his opinions of the school system and its quality of education.

Canada and the United States share the world’s longest international border. For those living in the immediate vicinity of the Canadian side of the border, the events of 9/11 were a turning point in their relationship with their communities, their American neighbours and government officials. Borderline Canadianness offers a unique ethnographic approach to Canadian border life. The accounts of local residents, taken from interviews and press reports in Ontario’s Niagara region, demonstrate how borders and everyday nationalism are articulated in complex ways across region, class, race, and gender. Jane Helleiner’s examination begins with a focus on the “de-bordering” initiated by NAFTA and concludes with the “re-bordering” as a result of the 9/11 attacks. Her accounts of border life reveals disconnects between elite border projects and the concerns of ordinary citizens as well as differing views on national belonging. Helleiner has produced a work that illuminates the complexities and inequalities of borders and nationalism in a globalized world.

The letters collected in this volume preserve the vivid and thoughtful impressions of a young man who came to western Canada in the early twentieth century. J. Burgon Bickersteth joined the Anglican mission in Edmonton a year after its establishment in 1910. As a lay missionary he travelled in the country northwest of Edmonton for two years, during the first year among homesteaders, and in the second among railroad builders. In his letters to friends and relatives in England he described the land he found so captivating and ‘life in the raw’ as he witnessed it day by day. He wrote ‘of some discomfort, of occasional hardships, but most certainly of absorbing interest and unique opportunity.’ On his return to England in 1913 he was encouraged to publish his letters by Lord Grey, the recently retired governor-general of Canada. The Land of Open Doors appeared the next year, with the letters edited only for factual errors and punctuation. For this reprint, Mr. Bickersteth has prepared a new introduction to the letters he wrote over sixty years ago.(Social History of Canada 29)