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This article sheds light on the agent, an overlooked participant in newspaper circulation networks in the early 1800s. Based on archival letters from the newspaper agents of Mackenzie's Gazette, which was published in New York state by Upper Canadian rebel leader William Lyon Mackenzie, this study shows that agents played key roles in circulation, collection, and feedback. The relationship between editor and agent also was highly political. The Gazette began as a platform to educate Americans about the rebel cause in Upper Canada, attracting agents from both the Whig and Democratic parties, but Mackenzie lost the support of agents as he attacked their parties. This study shows how the agent-editor relationship worked and characterizes the agents' role as administrative, sparked by personal initiative, interactive, and allegiance to a cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that scholars of immigrant integration should pay more attention to immigrants' ‘civic visibility’ among local government officials, organisations and other residents. To document and analyse immigrants' civic visibility, we examine coverage of the Vietnamese and Indian communities in newspapers in San Jose, Boston, Vancouver and Toronto from 1985 to 2005. We ask (i) do local newspapers cover the lives of immigrants and their descendants and (ii) what explains variation in the amount of coverage devoted to different immigrant-origin communities in different places? We find little evidence that newspaper coverage is affected by the demographics of an area, newsroom factors or simplified models of the national political and discursive opportunity structures. Instead, we take an ‘embedded’ context of reception approach, which takes seriously the intersection between general discursive opportunity structures on immigration and particular discourses about certain types of migrants. Our findings suggest the need to complicate national opportunity structure frameworks by considering how their interaction with specific immigrant communities produces between-country and between-group variation. Our results also underscore the importance of immigrant agency; greater visibility in local media appears to link with immigrants' greater presence in domestic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For many Japanese people, the 49th parallel was only a line on a map, yet there were differences for the Japanese residents in the United States and Canada. The two nations had different concepts of citizenship and constitutions but, in what has been called “hemispheric orientalism,” prejudice knew no border. Both countries severely restricted immigration from Japan. In the United States, immigrants, the Issei, were aliens ineligible for citizenship. Thus, states could deny their access to commercial fishing and the right to own or lease land. Because the American constitution bestows full citizenship on the native-born, their American-born children, the Nisei, could vote and acquire land, but experienced discrimination especially in employment. On paper, the Canadian Issei had more civil rights since they could become naturalized but this provided few advantages apart from the rights to own land and to fish commercially. The Canadian Nisei had no more rights than their parents. In British Columbia, where 95 percent of the Japanese lived, they could not vote and provincial laws and customs denied their access to many occupations. During the Second World War, both nations required all the Nikkei to leave the Pacific Coast, incarcerated some, severely restricted the mobility of others, and proposed to “repatriate” many of them to Japan. Drawing mainly on the previous scholarship which has examined specific themes, time periods, or comparisons, this article offers an overview of how between the 1890s and the 1940s the effects of prejudice varied more in detail and timing than in principle even though formal consultation between the two nations was sporadic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper builds on the growing body of literature on the British World, which has shown that people in the dominions had a strong British identity and their claims to Britishness were recognised by people in the British Isles. It attempts to gauge the extent to which this British World identity influenced the global allocation of British capital. Much of the existing literature on British investment in the dominions dismisses the possibility that the pattern in Britain's capital exports was significantly affected by imperial patriotism. This article will suggest that imperial sentiment did indeed influence the destination of British capital exports. Imperialist sentiment influenced the legal and political institutions of the dominions in ways that encouraged British investment. Moreover, imperial ideology may have influenced investors' decisions in ways that the existing historiography does not adequately explore: at least some British investors may have been willing to accept a lower anticipated rate of return because they valued the psychological satisfaction of investing in territories that happened to be part of the British Empire. This article compares the experience of British investment in the United States, which has an ambiguous relationship with the British World, with that of investment in Canada with a view to understanding the impact of the British World identity on investment patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxy-methylamphetamine, a.k.a. “ecstasy”) was first synthesized in 1912 and resynthesized more than once for pharmaceutical reasons before it became a popular recreational drug. Partially based on previously overlooked U.S. government documentation, this article reconstructs the early history of MDMA as a recreational drug in the U.S. from 1960 to 1979. According to the literature, MDMA was introduced as a street drug at the end of the 1960s. The first forensic detection of MDMA “on the street” was reported in 1970 in Chicago. It appears that MDMA was first synthesized by underground chemists in search of “legal alternatives” for the closely related and highly sought-after drug MDA, which was scheduled under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in 1970. Until 1974, nearly all MDMA street samples seized came from the U.S. Midwest, the first “hot region” of MDMA use. In Canada, MDMA was first detected in 1974 and scheduled in 1976. From 1975 to 1979, MDMA was found in street samples in more than 10 U.S. states, the West Coast becoming the major “hot region” of MDMA use. Recreational use of MDMA spread across the U.S. in the early 1980s, and in 1985 it was scheduled under the CSA. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Physical literacy is a term that has increasingly gained popularity in recent years. A variety of individuals and organizations have promoted the use of the term internationally, and a variety of claims have been made for the benefits of using the term. A historical overview allows the reader to consider physical literacy as one of many terms that have gained popularity in the field and describes divergent views as well as areas of agreement concerning the term physical literacy. Three North American institutional approaches to physical literacy are discussed. Other issues are also discussed, including assessment and other literacy types (e.g., health, sports). The article is designed to provoke thought among professionals and representatives of institutions concerning physical literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the emergence and development of mental hygiene professional organizations in Canada and the US by analyzing discursive differences in the publications of two sister committees: the National Committee for Mental Hygiene and the Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene. The analysis finds that while mental hygiene in North America initially emerged as a single, shared continental professional discourse, the two movements diverged in critical ways for reasons directly related to their institutional contexts and donor bases. Even as US popular and political discourse veered towards eugenic policies, the US mental hygiene discourse shifted sharply away from eugenics. In contrast, in Canada, mental hygiene publications focused increasingly on the moral dangers of Canada’s immigrant population and played a role in producing scientific legitimacy for eugenic policies. This analysis suggests that the different trajectories of the two professional communities have their origins in organizations’ membership and donor bases, not broader differences in national character. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between 1900 and 1941, American and Canadian census planners devised queries about race in disparate ways. Whereas Americans were identified as members of white, black, Amerindian, or various Asian “races,” only once were Canadians similarly classified. Canadian authorities instead recorded the historic “racial origins” of the population (e.g. English, French, or Chinese). These different approaches reflected the primary ways in which race was understood in both the US (the colorline) and Canada (Anglo- and French Canadian biculturalism). American and Canadian planners, however, sought demographic information that did not align with their respective nation’s framework. Therefore, they tweaked their queries. In the US the mother tongue and national origin of immigrants became proxies for race while Canadians structured their “racial origins” queries within a white/nonwhite binary. While such efforts led to many similar forms of racial categorization, differing primary frameworks towards race on the American and Canadian censuses prevented total accord. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Toronto is conventionally considered quite unlike “American cities.” This article does not fundamentally challenge this convention, but does suggest that differences between Toronto and American cities may be overdrawn and that Toronto may have more American elements than is generally recognized. The evidence presented in this study comes from three episodes in Toronto’s postwar planning history: creation of an ambitious postwar master plan in 1943–44, formation of metropolitan government and planning in the mid-1950s, and the design and construction of the iconic suburban neighborhood of Don Mills also in the 1950s. All three show strong American planning connections. The article then offers some reasons why these American planning ideas did not produce an “American city,” and concludes by challenging the view that it is due to Canada having a fundamentally different urban culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The history of the Bank of Canada and the U.S. Federal Reserve System is intertwined not only because of geographical proximity but because of the reciprocal influence on the way they have evolved their structures to conduct monetary policy. While both find their origins in financial crises, the environment in which they were embedded in the early twentieth century was quite different. Before central banking, the U.S. banking structure was decentralized and susceptible to recurrent breakdowns, thereby necessitating a lender of last resort, while the Canadian banking system was oligopolistic and highly centralized from its inception. For most of the postwar period, the Bank of Canada tended to follow policies that generally originated south of the Canadian border; but over the past quarter-century, the Bank of Canada has been at the forefront of policy innovations, particularly in seeking to restructure its policy system along Wicksellian lines. A detailed account of these institutional changes is provided, including the recent changes that have taken place in the aftermath of the financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the production of The Book of Negroes during the British evacuation of New York in 1783 and situates it as the first government-issued document for state regulated migration between the United States and Canada that explicitly links corporeal identifiers to the right to travel. I do this to argue that the body made legible with the modern passport system has a history in the technologies of tracking blackness. I explore surveillance technologies of transatlantic slavery, namely lantern laws, and I examine arbitration that took place at Fraunces Tavern in New York City in 1783 between fugitive slaves exercising mobility rights claims by seeking to be included in The Book of Negroes and those who claimed them as property. Coupling the archive of The Book of Negroes with a discussion of rituals and practices engaged by free and enslaved blacks, I suggest that these interactions with surveillance served as both strategies of coping and critique, and in so being represent acts of freedom. This article begins with a story of black escape by taking up the surveillance-based reality television programme Mantracker to question how certain technologies instituted through slavery to track blackness as property anticipate the contemporary surveillance of the racial body. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article compares the prescriptions for trans-continental empire articulated by two Anglo-American executives in the late eighteenth century: Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States (1801–1809), and John Graves Simcoe, Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada (1792–1798). While the political character of the republican Jefferson and the ultra-monarchist Simcoe differed, they articulated strikingly similar prescriptions for trans-continental empire. Both emphasized the importance of white settlement and commercial development in the West. The article explains this apparent paradox by arguing that Jefferson and Simcoe represent variations on a common Anglo-American theme of empire. The similarity of Jefferson's and Simcoe's prescriptions for new forms of empire reflected their common experience of imperial governance, the American Revolution and exposure to political and economic thought in the British Atlantic World, as well as the common challenges of winning over the volatile allegiance of western settlers and the opposition of native peoples in the trans-Appalachian West. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents information on a study which compared the historical perspective on the housing and social policy of Canada and the United States. Similarities and differences in national housing policy between the two countries; Housing policies in historical perspective; Conclusion.