Kirjahaku

War, depression, secularization, urbanization, and the rise of industry – between 1900 and 1945 Canada struggled with all these developments, and from them was born the modern welfare state. New services were created, along with new taxes to pay for them and expanded bureaucracies to administer them. Government activity grew enormously; so did government expenditures. The role of the state in a modern industrialized society became the focus of a lively and continuing debate for two generations of intellectual reformers. Doug Owram looks back at that debate and the academics, civil servants, and political activists who engaged in it. Adam Short, W.L. Grant, Frank Underhill, W.C. Clark, Harold Innis, and many others exchanged ideas – sometimes cautiously, sometimes passionately – about the wisdom of planning and reform, and on practical schemes for their realization. Owram explores the reforming impulse and its political dimension: the impact of warm and depression on attitudes to the state, the League of Social Reconstruction and its relations with the CCF, R.B. Bennett’s New Deal, and the various changes of heart experienced over forty years by Mackenzie King.The Canada that emerged from the Second World War was very different from the one that had existed at the turn of the century relations between the individual and the state had altered drastically and irrevocably. The people examined in this book and the social and political movements in which they believed helped shape Canada’s response to powerful forces that were changing its way of life forever.

Through the last half of the nineteenth century, numbers of Canadians began to regard the West as a land of ideal opportuniy for large-scale agricultural settlement. This belief, in turn, led Canada to insist on ownership of the region and on immediate development. Underlying the expansionist movement was the assumption that the West was to be a hinterland to central Canada, both in its economic relationship and in its cultural development. But settlers who accepted the extravagant promises of expanionism found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the assumption of easstern dominance with their own perception of the needs of the West and of Canada. Doug Owram analyses the various phases of this development, examining in particular the writings - historical, scientific, journalistic, and promotional - that illuminate one of the most significant movements in the history of nineteenth-century Canada.

It is rare in history for people to link their identity with their generation, and even rarer when children and adolescents actually shape society and influence politics. Both phenomena aptly describe the generation born in the decade following the Second World War. These were the baby boomers, viewed by some as the spoiled, selfish generation that had it all, and by others as a shock wave that made love and peace into tangible ideals. In this book, Doug Owram brings us the untold story of this famous generation as it played out its first twenty-five years in Canadian society. Beginning with Dr Spock's dictate that this particular crop of babies must be treated gently, Owram explores the myth and history surrounding this group, from its beginning at war's end to the close of the 1960s. The baby boomers wielded extraordinary power right from birth, Owram points out, and laid their claim on history while still in diapers. He sees the generation's power and sense of self stemming from three factors: its size, its affluent circumstance, and its connection with the 1960s – the fabulous decade of free love, flower power, women's liberation, drugs, protest marches, and rock 'n' roll. From Davy Crockett hats and Barbie dolls to the civil-rights movement and the sexual revolution, the concerns of this single generation became predominant themes for all of society. Thus, Owram's history of the baby-boomers is in many ways a history of the era. Doug Owram has written extensively on cultural icons, Utopian hopes, and the gap between realities and images – all powerful themes in the story of this idealistic generation. A well-researched, lucid, and humorous book, Born at the Right Time is the first Canadian history of the baby-boomers and the society they helped to shape.