We Lived a Life and Then Some: The Life, Death, and Life of a Mining Town

Ontario Boys explores the preoccupation with boyhood in Ontario during the immediate postwar period, 1945–1960. It argues that a traditional version of boyhood was being rejuvenated in response to a population fraught with uncertainty, and suffering from insecurity, instability, and gender anxiety brought on by depression-era and wartime disruptions in marital, familial, and labour relations, as well as mass migration, rapid postwar economic changes, the emergence of the Cold War, and the looming threat of atomic annihilation.

Ontario's rich geologic history is illustrated here by short descriptions of more than 200 field sites ranging from Timmins in the north to Windsor in the south. These include the Sleeping Giant near Thunder Bay; Agawa Canyon; the Sudbury meteorite crater; Niagara Escarpment; the Falls and Gorge; numerous caves, the mineral-rich Bancroft area; and the high lakeshore cliffs at Scarborough Bluffs. Some sites are sacred to First Nations and are associated with spectacular rock art.

Reading Julie Berry’s poetry means entering a new poetic space, crossing thresholds of pain and delight at once raw and refined. “like marie d’oignies who buried bloody/ mouthfuls of herself/ in the garden/ i need my poems to be like this,” Berry writes in “Touching Ground.”  “Like this” is finely-turned and constantly surprising, haunting as plainsong, throaty as the blues.

There are many great Canadians who deserve recognition for what they have done for the nation and its people. This book profiles ten of these individuals who rose above with their courage and compassion, protecting the things that we as a community and as a nation hold close to our hearts. These heroes are men, women and even children throughout four hundred years of this nation's history who deserve our attention and our admiration.

Approaching a scholar and critic as legendary as Northrop Frye is a daunting task — but not for Mel Montrose. Armed with a prestigious academic award and a nothing-to-lose attitude, she convinces Frye to supervise her ambitious thesis exploring E.J. Pratt’s epic poem about Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf. To embark on her study, Mel takes a job at the newly reconstructed historical site at Sainte-Marie among the Hurons, where de Brébeuf and seven other missionaries met their tragic ends.

In this memoir Penny Petrone tells what it was like growing up in Northern Ontario as the daughter of parents who moved to Canada from the class-bound feudal society of Southern Italy during the first quarter of the century when America was the dream of millions of Europeans.

Despite the "green" benefits of rail travel, Canada has lost much of its railway heritage. Across the country stations have been bulldozed and rails ripped up. Once the heart of communities large and small, stations and tracks have left little more than a gaping hole in Canada's landscapes. This book revisits the times when railways were the country's economic lifeline, and the station the social centre.

From Meteorite Impact to Constellation City is a historical geography of the City of Greater Sudbury. The story that began billions of years ago encompasses dramatic physical and human events.

Canadian Shield traces the geologic evolution of the Shield, its first tentative exploration by humans starting 11,000 years ago as the last great ice sheets withdrew, its changing economic fortunes as Europeans penetrated its remote rocky vastnesses for furs and metals, and its transformation in the twentieth century into a national icon to Canadians. 

When Tom Douglas's father returned home after the Second World War, he was forced to move his family from Sault Ste. Marie north to Wawa, where he was the timekeeper at the Helen Mine. Although his parents were upset by the move, Tom was thrilled. In the forties, Wawa was still a wooden-sidewalked mud wallow of a mining town, and for a city kid, nothing could have been more exciting.

Headframes dominate the landscape of mining communities in Northeastern Ontario and Northwestern Quebec. Distinctive structures built to house the apparatus at the head of the mine shaft, headframes tower above their surroundings, reminding every resident that without the mine, there would be no reason for their settlement to exist.

Where else can that well-known phrase be better applied than to a study of the Finns in Sudbury? “Rock” defines the physical reality of the Sudbury setting: rugged hills, mines, farms and forests set in the Precambrian Shield. “Hard” defines the human setting: Finnish immigrants having to contend with the problems and stresses of relocating to a new culture, with livelihoods that required great endurance as well as a tolerance for hazardous conditions.

Ontario Rocks tells this fascinating 3 billion year long story of Ontario's geological evolution, from its beginnings as part of an early landmass called Arctica, its incorporation into enormous supercontinents, through to the repeated ice ages and abrupt climatic changes of the last few thousand years.  Merging Canadian geology with global evolution, this highly illustrated survey also touches on the development of Ontario's mining and oil industries, and the commercial use of rocks as building material.

Mirrors of Stone delves into the many ethnic cultures that thrived in the mining areas of Northern Ontario from the 1920s to the 1960s. The stormy history of hardrock mining camps has never fit into the comfortable cliches by which Canada “tells its story.” Angus unearths the dark sides of this history—“the wild tales of bootleggers, mobsters, and prostitution rings” and in so doing opens up new ways of seeing Ontario’s history and culture.