In Barton Hacker and Margaret Vining, eds., Companion to Women’s Military History (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 409 – 430. BOOK DESCRIPTION: Military institutions have everywhere and always shaped the course of history, but women’s near universal participation in them has largely gone unnoticed. This volume addresses the changing relationships between women and armed forces from antiquity to… Read More »
ABSTRACT: You constantly behold, with renewed astonishment, women in the very depths of indigence and want, perfectly instructed in their religion, ignorant of nothing that they should know to employ themselves usefully in their families and who, by their manners, their manner of expressing themselves and their politeness, are not inferior to the most carefully… Read More »
RÉSUMÉ: Les historiens ont eu tendance à réduire les femmes engagées dans le commerce en Nouvelle-France à une poignée de chefs d’entreprise autonomes opérant à grande échelle. La recherche a révélé que ces individus exceptionnels étaient flanqués d’un groupe un peu plus nombreux qui ne jouissait pas de la même indépendance, comptant des femmes déléguées… Read More »
ABSTRACT: This article casts light on the gender of fur traders by tapping into new analysis of Albany and Canadian records from the colonial period. A surprising number of active, sometimes outspoken, female participants emerge. Exploring the underlying reasons for this phenomenon, the article discusses the unusual voice Haudenosaunee women had in governance. It then… Read More »
ABSTRACT: One knowledgeable commentator was early 18th-century Jesuit missionary Joseph- François Lafitau, who lived for five years among the Haudenosaunee at the Kahnawahke mission near what is now Montreal. While the group at that time had more than a century of interchanges with Europeans, it still possessed many of its pre-contact attributes. Lafitau’s writing, a foundational… Read More »
ABSTRACT: This article presents documentary evidence supporting a fundamental update of the masculine persona the fur trader carries in both the popular and the scholarly imagination. It demonstrates that, certainly in colonial New York, fur transactions were part of the norm for people of both sexes. Much of the ethnohistorical literature on intercultural economic exchanges… Read More »
Interview of Jan Noel by Scott Anderson. ABSTRACT: On June 18, 1812, the U.S. formally declared war against Great Britain. It was the first and only time our southern neighbour has taken up arms against Canada (or what would become Canada). Two hundred years later, Scott Anderson spoke to Jan Noel, a history prof… Read More »
In S. Slater and F. Yarbrough, Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America 1400-1850 (University of South Carolina Press, 2011), 54-74. BOOK DESCRIPTION: Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the New World, Native Americans across the continent had developed richly complex attitudes and forms of expression concerning gender and sexual roles. The role of the “berdache,”… Read More »
In Mona Gleason and Adele Perry, eds., Rethinking Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2010), 32-34. BOOK DESCRIPTION: Rethinking Canada is a collection of essays on the diverse lives, struggles, and contributions of women in Canadian history. Now in its sixth edition, this trusted text includes articles spanning from the 1600s to the present day. Eighteen new essays… Read More »
ABSTRACT: Historians have tended to portray women who were involved in commerce in New France as a handful of large-scale, self-motivated entrepreneurs. The literature presents these exceptional individuals as flanked by a somewhat larger group that was less independent, consisting of wives deputized by their husbands or merchants’ widows stepping into the dead man’s shoes.… Read More »