The People and the Bay: A Social and Environmental History of Hamilton Harbour

by Nancy B. Bouchier, and Ken Cruikshank

Published by: UBC Press

Series: Nature | History | Society

Imprint: UBC Press

Sales Date: 2016-07-01

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CA$34.95
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Published: July 2016

Product Details

Imprint: UBC Press

Series: Series: Nature | History | Society

Page Count: 344 Pages

Illustrations: 47 illustrations, 6 maps, 9 tables

Dimensions: 6.00 x 9.00

344 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 x 0.92 in, 47 illustrations, 6 maps, 9 tables

Paperback

CA$34.95

ISBN: 9780774830423

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This masterful social and environmental history raises questions about how decisions being made about the natural world today will shape the cities of tomorrow.

In 1865, John Smoke braved the ice on Burlington Bay to go spearfishing. Soon after, he was arrested by a fishery inspector and then convicted by a magistrate who chastised him for thinking that he was at liberty to do as he pleased “with Her Majesty’s property.”

With this story, Nancy Bouchier and Ken Cruikshank launch their history of the relationship between the people of Hamilton, Ontario, and Hamilton Harbour (aka Burlington Bay). From the time of European settlement through to the city’s rise as an industrial power, townsfolk struggled with nature, and with one another, to champion their particular vision of “the bay” as a place to live, work, and play. As Smoke discovered, the outcomes of those struggles reflected the changing nature of power in an industrial city. From efforts to conserve the fishery in the 1860s to current attempts to revitalize a seriously polluted harbour, each generation has tried to create what it believed would be a livable and prosperous city.

Nancy B. Bouchier is an active member of the North American Society for Sport History and the author of For the Love of the Game: Amateur Sport in Small-Town Ontario, 1838–1895. An associate professor of history and an associate member of the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster University, she teaches courses in Canadian, sport, and exercise history.

Ken Cruikshank is an active member of the Network in Canadian History and Environment, a past editor of the Canadian Historical Review, and author of Close Ties: Railways, Government, and the Board of Railway Commissioners, 1851–1933. A professor of history and the dean of humanities at McMaster University, he teaches courses in Canadian, environmental, and business history.

Foreword: Down by the Bay / Graeme Wynn

Introduction: Whose Harbour?

1 Civilizing Nature: Community Property Transformed, 1823–95

2 Conserving Nature: The Education of John William Kerr, 1864–88

3 Boosting Nature: The Contradictions of Industrial Promotion, 1892–1932

4 Organizing Nature: The Search for Recreational Order, 1900–30

5 Planning Nature: The Waterfront Legacy of T.B McQuesten, 1917–40

6 Confining Nature: The Bay as Harbour, 1931–59

7 Unchaining Nature: Gillian Simmons’s Backyard, 1958–85

8 Remediating Nature: Hamilton Harbour as an Area of Concern, 1981–2015

Conclusion: Choosing Nature

Notes; Index

Working in Hamilton, Bouchier and Cruikshank are able to draw on a powerful collection of sources—oral, textual, and photographic—that track the efforts of different civic, government or industrial bodies as they tried to control, study, transform or remediate the places and people of the bay. But the authors also humanize the ideologies that were in play by seeing how they coalesced within individual actors … The work is unabashedly focused on the Hamilton environment and will be a joy to people looking for an intimate understanding of their own community. It also plays a critical role in expanding the repertoire of environmental and urban histories in Canada. Dale Barbour, Ontario History