Anthony Di Mascio

Citizenship Education in Canada, Past and Present

Canadian youth are growing up in uncertain times and they are aware of this. A nation-wide study found that youth’s major concerns were lack of employment prospects, costs of education and student debt, costs of living, and the environment (MacLean, Shifts shaking Canadian youth, says report from Community Foundations of Canada. Retrieved from http://communityfoundations.ca/generation-flux-seismic-shifts-shaking-canadian-youth-says-report-from-community-foundations-of-canada, 2012; Morrison, The top five challenges facing Millenials in Canada. Retrieved from http://abacusinsider.com/canadian-millennials/top-5-challenges-facing-millennials-canada-millennials/#sthash.KgBNvsBa.dpu, 2013).

Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (review)

In Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, Elizabeth Jane Errington takes the reader on a transatlantic journey from various corners of the British Isles to Upper Canada. In doing so, she reminds us that the resettlement of Upper Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century was undertaken by individual men and women with complex lives and varieties of motivations for leaving home and starting anew. As one of Canada’s leading scholars on the social history and development of Upper Canada, Errington opens a fresh window into the personal world of emigration through a meticulous reading of the writings of emigrants and their families and an empathetic analysis of their emotional voyage. Emigrant Worlds reverses the usual lens for research on migration to North America. Typical studies of migration “look ‘out’ from North America to try to understand how particular cultural practices and political propensities persisted and shaped New World societies” (p. 169). By contrast, Errington’s study looks toward North America to understand what factors drove emigrants to leave home and abandon their familiar cultural practices and political propensities. She finds transatlantic communities in which familial networks were instrumental in establishing a new and broad sense of identity and home. Kinship ties and networks with friends and families who had gone before were often instrumental in forging connections and communities that made the emigrant’s world navigable. Within this context, personal reasons for emigrating were often more pivotal than wide-scale socio-economic conditions. Decisions were very much shaped by the experiences of individual emigrants and the particular circumstances in their local communities and within their transatlantic interpersonal relationships. Errington uses letters, diaries, and journals to examine the variety of reasons that convinced emigrants to go to British North America. She paints a vivid portrait of the physical and emotional stress that preparing to leave home brought upon emigrants, the peculiar culture and surreal experiences that connected emigrants aboard passenger ships on the Atlantic, and both the euphoric and disappointing emotions that welcomed emigrants into the “strange land.” Emigrant