American expansionism is an ever-present threat in many parts of the world. Wherever, the United States has chosen to impose its democracy on a country in conflict, those populations suffer horribly. One of the early examples came in the form of the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, revisited in Peter Guardino’s The Dead March (Harvard,...
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Cold War historians have uncovered much evidence to illustrate how the political intolerance of the early 1950s manifested itself in some Canadian cities. However, little has been revealed regarding McCarthyism’s impact on the country’s non-urban communities nor has there been significant exploration of the Cold War resistance that was mobilized in small Canadian towns....
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“Allan M. was a quiet kid; a sissy, according to some of his school mates. He had few friends, wasn’t good at sports, least of all the potentially violent ones like football or hockey. He was a loner, not in the habit of opening up. As the yearbook put it: ‘This tall fair lad...
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  When American Legion commander George Love spoke to a gathering of concerned residents at Junction City, Oregon, in late August 1924, he warned of the imminent danger of allowing a group of Russian immigrants to establish a colony on the rich farm land along the Willamette River. Some of the local residents were...
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One-hundred and fifteen years ago today on November 8, 1892, half the workers of New Orleans struck for ten-hour day and other rights. “In 1892 New Orleans was the scene of a general strike, the culmination of a decade’s growth and development of the city’s labor movement. New Orleans of that period has been...
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When celebrated Wobbly troubadour Joe Hill purportedly visited the Rossland Miners’ Hall in the early 1900s to lend his support to the first Canadian local of the rugged Western Federation of Miners (WFM), he no doubt shared some of his inspired verses with the mine workers who are said to have protected him. Claims...
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At the dawn of the twentieth century, Francisus Verzuh crossed the line from Montana into Canada apparently without being noticed by the authorities that had policed the borderlands regions along the forty-ninth parallel separating the United States and Canada since the mid-1870s. By earlier standards, this was a quiet crossing. There were no United...
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Today, March 25, marks the 100th anniversary of the tragic Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire in New York City that led to mass protests and some modest changes that were designed to create safer work conditions. The workplace tragedy killed 146 workers, many of them immigrant Jewish and Italian women, two only 14 years...
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Few Canadians will have heard of the infamous Ludlow Massacre, a “slaughter of the innocents” at a workers’ tent city in the coalfields of Colorado in the spring of 1914. Fewer still will know that in the footnotes to that show of corporate bullying against miners and their families a familiar name pops up,...
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Descendants of western North American mining and smelting families know that their grandparents came to the United States and Canada as illiterate farmers, shopkeepers, muckers and blackholers looking for a better life, a way to keep their children from dying of destitution in their home villages of Europe, Asia and elsewhere.
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