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Although Canadian history has no shortage of stories about disasters and accidents, the phenomena of risk, upset, and misfortune have been largely overlooked by historians. Disasters get their due, but not so the smaller-scale accident where fate is more intimate. Yet such events often have a vivid afterlife in the communities where they happen, and the way in which they are explained and remembered has significant social, cultural, and political meaning.
An Accidental History of Canada brings together original studies of an intriguing range of accidents stretching from the 1630s to the 1970s. These include workplace, domestic, childhood, and leisure accidents in colonial, Indigenous, rural, and urban settings. Whether arising from colonial power relations, urban dangers, perils in resource extraction, or hazardous recreations, most accidents occur within circumstances of vulnerability, and reveal precarity and inequities not otherwise apparent. Contributors to this volume are alert to the intersections of the settler agenda and the elevation of risk that it brings. Indigenous and settler ways of understanding accidents are juxtaposed, with chapters exploring the links between accidents and the rise of the modern state.
An Accidental History of Canada makes plain that whether they are interpreted as an intervention by providence, a miscalculation, an inevitability, or the result of observable risk, accidents – and our responses to them – reveal shared values.
“This books depicts a Canada different from the one generally seen in the historiography, which has tended to focus on major urban centres. The contributors are much more attentive to Canada’s geographical margins – its resource frontiers and its rural peripheries. This detailed collection paints a portrait of Canada ‘from the margins in.’” Magda Fahrni, Université du Québec à Montréal
"Each of the twelve essays in this book features dozens of footnotes and an extensive bibliography, a depth of documentation that underscores how the history of accidents has been chewed over for some time. The charm of the book is its focus on lesser-known individuals and small groups. Appropriately, the introduction quotes the American journalist Jessie Singer: 'When we die by accident, we die in ones and twos.'" Literary Review of Canada
“A welcome contribution to the study of the accident from the 1630s to the 1980s [that will] inspire readers to reflect on the way all accident tropes are constructed, communicated, if not mythologised, and continue to define, if not haunt, communities to this day.” Social History of Medicine
Megan J. Davies is professor emerita at York University and an activist community historian.
Geoffrey L. Hudson is associate professor in the History of Medicine at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University.