Social and Economic Studies

At the end of World War I, after four years of unimaginable man-made destruction, a swiftly killing virus travelled the planet. Up to one hundred million people perished in the most lethal pandemic in recorded history, the so-called "Spanish" influenza. More than half those who died were young adults aged between twenty and forty.

Shaped by Silence brings together the powerful stories of five women from Ireland, Canada, and Australia whose lives were shaped by forced confinement in Magdalene laundries and other institutions operated by the Roman Catholic Order of Sisters of the Good Shepherd. Their narratives include one teenager's experience in a Good Shepherd training school in Canada; another story of a child who was born in a Canadian Good Shepherd laundry; and three accounts of adolescent girls held in Good Shepherd Magdalene laundries in Ireland and Australia. In these institutions, women and girls became a coerced workforce. Hard, unpaid and relentless physical toil, isolation, enforced silence, and prayer constituted the nuns' strategy for converting their "fallen" charges into the Christian image of pure womanhood. Within this regime, girls and women suffered physical, psychological, and emotional abuse. While intimately capturing the dark and enduring after-effects of ill-treatment, the stories recounted in Shaped by Silence also describe survivors' efforts to heal and rebuild their lives. This important book shines a light on a pervasive and systemic pattern of cruelty and exploitation. It reveals the unwarranted confinement of generations of girls and women in Good Shepherd institutions around the world and constitutes a call for full acknowledgement of their suffering.

Was Robert Bond really "Newfoundland's only statesman"? First elected to Newfoundland's House of Assembly in 1882, Robert Bond served as a member of government and opposition-and notably as prime minister-in an era filled with challenges that still resonate today. During three turbulent decades, St. John's burned down, the banks failed, and the drive for economic diversification caused difficult problems (and included railway building, the century's favoured mega-project). As for external affairs-Bond struggled to negotiate reciprocity with the United States, to navigate tricky issues concerning the French Shore and to deal successfully with imperial powers in London whose priorities could vary greatly from those in Newfoundland. In this in-depth examination of Bond's political activity, James Hiller explores the stakes, the rivalries and the competing visions at play during the period, and he highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the man who was often at or near centre stage: Robert Bond, politician, leader and Newfoundland patriot.

Left out of the national apology and reconciliation process begun in 2008, survivors of residential schools in Labrador and Newfoundland received a formal apology from the Canadian government in 2017. This recognition finally brought them into the circle of residential school survivors across Canada, and acknowledged their experiences as similarly painful and traumatic. For years, the story of residential schools has been told by the authorities who ran them. A Long Journey helps redress this imbalance by listening closely to the accounts of former students, as well as drawing extensively on government, community, and school archives. The book examines the history of boarding schools in Labrador and St. Anthony, and, in doing so, contextualizes the ongoing determination of Indigenous communities to regain control over their children's education.

The Foresters' Scribe is the first comprehensive study of the Newfoundland Forestry Companies (NFC) of the First World War. It adds a long-overdue and essential chapter to the Great War history of Newfoundland and Labrador. A century has gone by since the NFC was formed in 1917, yet little is known of this small unit of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. Its members were men recruited for woods work in the United Kingdom. Their assignment: to cut and mill Scottish timber to supply wood for the war. During the NFC's time overseas, thirty-seven letters were written home by "the Foresters' scribe," Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant John A. Barrett. Published in Newfoundland newspapers, they provided a detailed and articulate account of the NFC's service in Scotland. This book compiles Barrett's letters and examines their historical significance. In addition, it includes letters from other foresters, descriptions of key events that Barrett omitted, and rare photos of the foresters at work. Ursula Kelly complements this material with her own comprehensive account of the formation of the NFC and related issues, and an examination of what the NFC story suggests about the socio-cultural politics of war service and commemoration. The Foresters' Scribe is an insightful and celebratory account of an overlooked military unit that made an important contribution to the Great War effort.

Fairies might be good or bad, and encounters with them funny or fatal. They can take on the form of people or animals, or they may have no form at all, as when a person walking in the woods is "led astray" by some irresistible force. This variability in fairies is matched by the diversity of human attitudes about them. Barbara Rieti's study began in 1983 when she met a young man who told her that he had been followed by the fairies. Subsequent research drew on the hundreds of archival accounts of fairies and on Dr. Rieti's own fieldwork on Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula. Rieti describes the specific contexts in which fairy experiences are recounted and the manner in which they are told, keeping the storytellers at centre stage. She also highlights themes such as connections between fairies and nature, and the relationships between fairies and people. Comparative material sets the subject in historical and international context and demonstrates the remarkable tenacity of these old yet persistent tales. The fairies may be going, but they are not gone yet. The stories still to be heard offer a window on everyday folklife, as well as on an extraordinary world.