Showing 855 results

Virginia Woolf, novelist and essayist, was born in Kensington on 25 January 1882 and educated at home by her father, Sir Leslie Stephen. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf. Together they established the Hogarth Press in 1917. Although her early novels employed a more traditional style of writing, she later explored different techniques such as stream of consciousness. In addition to her fiction, Woolf wrote essays, biography, and the feminist classic A Room of One's Own. She suffered from bouts of mental instability throughout her life and drowned herself on 28 March 1941.

In October 1927, five companies (McClary Manufacturing Company, London, Ontario; Sheet Metal Products Company of Canada Limited, Toronto; Thomas Davidson Manufacturing Company Limited, Montreal; E. T. Wright Limited, Hamilton, Ontario; and A. Aubry et fils Limitée, Montreal) merged to form General Steel Wares (GSW) Limited with John C. Newman becoming the company’s first President. The newly formed company, producing housewares and appliances, became a significant Canadian manufacturer. Expansion soon followed, notably, in 1920 with the acquisition of the Happy Thought Foundry Company of Brantford, Ontario, and in 1958 with the purchase of the Easy Washing Machine Company Limited.

Beatty Brothers Limited, a metal farm implement company established in 1873 at Fergus, Ontario, gained a controlling interest in GSW in 1962 through a reverse takeover, thereby merging these two companies under the GSW name. The company changed significantly at this time under the direction of Ralph M. Barford and Robert A. Stevens. Among other acquisitions by GSW between 1965 and 1975 was the Moffatt Company in Canada, a large appliance manufacturer, in 1971. Negotiations between GSW and Canadian General Electric Company Limited resulted in 1976 in the formation of the joint venture Canadian Appliance Manufacturing Company (CAMCO). More recent acquisitions have included the American Water Heater Company in 2002.

Ernest Klein, linguist, author, and rabbi, was born on 26 July 1899 in Szatmar, Hungary. He was educated at the University of Vienna. He held a number of posts as rabbi in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and France before he immigrated to Canada where he held the post of Rabbi of Congregation Beth Yitshak in Toronto until his death in 1983. He is the author of A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (1966-1967).

The Kilmaster family lived in Brantford, Ontario. There are documents relating to three family members in this fonds: George B., W.G., and Eliza, the widow of George A. Kilmaster. The only document pertaining to Eliza is her funeral notice of 23 January 1904. She died in South Walshingham. W.G. Kilmaster is noted as acting in the same play as George B. The remaining documents are all addressed to either George B. or Mr. Kilmaster. George Kilmaster was a Lance Corporal with the Dufferin Rifles of Brantford in the 1880s.

Dian Fossey, primatologist, educator, and author, was born in San Francisco, California, on 16 January 1932. She was educated at San Jose State College (B.A, 1954) and Cambridge University (Ph.D., 1976). With the encouragement of Louis Leakey she founded the Karsoke Research Centre in 1967 in Rwanda to study mountain gorillas. She made several television appearances on programs such as National Geographic, wrote many journal and magazine articles and published a book, Gorillas in the Mist (1983). She was murdered in late December 1985 in Ruhengeri, Rwanda.

Iris Murdoch, novelist and philosopher, was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 15 July 1919, and educated at Somerville College, Oxford, and Newnham College, Cambridge. She was a fellow and university lecturer in philosophy at St. Anne's College, Oxford, from 1948 to 1963 when she became an honorary fellow. Her novel, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) won the Whitehead Literary Award for fiction in 1974 while The Black Prince won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the same year. In 1978, The Sea won the Booker Prize. She has also published several books of philosophy, beginning with Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953). Iris Murdoch died on 8 February 1999 in Oxford.

Dodd, Mead and Company was founded in New York city by Moses W. Dodd in 1839. It grew from a small religious publishing house into one of the leading publishing firms in the United States. The company's history was published in 1939 by Edward H. Dodd as The First Hundred Years.

Eric White, music critic and arts administrator, was born in Bristol on 10 September 1905 and educated at Balliol College, Oxford. From 1929 to 1933 he worked as a translator for the League of Nations. Later on, from 1942 to 1971 he was employed by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) and its successor, the Arts Council. His most important book is considered to be Stravinsky: The Composer and His Work (1966), based on a long study. He also wrote The Rise of English Opera (1951) and A History of English Opera (1983). He died in September 1985 in London.

Barbara Howard, artist, was born in Long Branch, Ontario in 1926. She was educated at the Ontario College of Art and St. Martin’s School in London, England. She married Richard Outram in 1957. Together they founded the Gauntlet Press in 1960 in order to publish Richard's poetry, which was illustrated by Barbara's wood engravings. Barbara died in 2002.

Richard Outram , poet, was born in Oshawa, Ontario in 1930. He was educated at Victoria College in the University of Toronto. He is the author of several books of poetry. He married Barbara Howard in 1957. Together he and Barbara founded the Gauntlet Press in 1960, primarily in order to publish Richard's poetry, illustrated by Howard's wood engravings. Richard died in 2005.

Stanley Gray was born in 1944 and grew up in the working class, east end of Montreal. He graduated from McGill University (B.A.) and Balliol College (B. Phil.). Gray taught at McGill University and was one of the main organizers of Opération McGill. He was dismissed from the Political Science department in 1969 when a compromise could not be reached over his political activities. Thereafter, he became a leader of the Front de libération populaire (FLP). When it began to decline in importance after the 1970 provincial election, he was instrumental in forming another organization, the Patriotes québecois. Gray was also a prominent member of the Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Gray wrote a thesis for Oxford (D. Phil) on Marxist theory with an historical analysis of working class struggles in England, the United States, and Quebec.

The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was founded in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1933 and became Canada's first national socialist-democratic party.

The Ontario Woodsworth Memorial Foundation, a private educational institute, was founded by Co-operative Commonwealth Federation members and supporters in Toronto, Ontario in 1944. It merged with the Douglas-Coldwell Foundation in 1987.

Richard Slobodin (1915-2005) was an American anthropologist and a founder of the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. Born and educated in New York City, he worked extensively from the 1930s onwards as an ethnologist. The chief focus of his ethnological studies were the Dené peoples of the Yukon and Alaska, particularly the Gwich'in (Kutchin). His scholarly interests were broad, however, and he published extensively on a variety of subjects. These publications included significant biographical treatments of pioneering anthropologists <a href="http://holdings.mcmaster.ca/index.php/rivers-w-h-r-2">W.H.R. Rivers</a> and Northcote W. Thomas.

After a brief stint in the United States armed forces during and after the Second World War, he returned to academic life only to fall afoul of Sen. Robert McCarthy's House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUUAC) in the early 1950s. This blacklisting saw him disbarred from academic employment for a period of seven years, during which time he worked a variety of jobs to support himself before eventually completing his Ph.D. in 1959. He spent the next four years working various academic appointments in the United States while seeking entry to Canada, which repeatedly denied him a visa owing to his supposed Marxist connections.

He finally was admitted to Canada in 1964, accepting an academic appointment at McMaster University, and he became a Canadian citizen in 1970. During the 1960s and 1970s Slobodin continued extensive fieldwork in the Arctic while also playing an instrumental role in developing the faculty of anthropology at McMaster, of which he was a co-founder. In 1981, he was forced to accept compulsory retirement owing to his age, but remained active in the United Church and the New Democratic Party while maintaining voluminous correspondence with friends and fellow scholars around the world. He died in 2005 at the age of 89.

The Company of Young Canadians (CYC) was set up by an act of parliament in 1966. Its members were involved in various community-based projects directed towards social change across Canada. The CYC ceased around 1970.

Doug Ward was active in the Company of Young Canadians.

The Toronto Association for Peace (TAP) was one of the many peace groups under the umbrella of the Canadian Peace Congress (CPC). It was founded at the same time or slightly before the CPC, in December 1948.

J. N. (Pat) Kelly served as public relations adviser to the Steel Company of Canada (Stelco) during the 1946 strike. He lived with Hugh Hilton, President of the Company, at the Royal Connaught Hotel during the strike.

The Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CUCND) was founded in the late 1950s. In December 1964 it was succeeded by Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) which was concerned with a wide range of social issues, not simply nuclear disarmament. SUPA's head office was in Toronto but there were branches on many university campuses in Canada. SUPA projects included work with blacks in Nova Scotia, poor whites in Kingston, Ontario, native peoples in Saskatchewan and Doukhobors of Nova Scotia, and anti-Vietnam protests and marches. By the winter of 1965 SUPA was an exhausted organization and was beginning to fall apart. From late 1965 to 1967, SUPA's role consisted mainly of supplying literature from its Research, Information and Publications Project (RIPP). SUPA was formally dissolved in September 1967 and succeeded by the New Left Committee which lasted until the summer of 1968.

Claire Culhane (née Eglin) was born on 2 September 1918 into a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in Montreal. She later married Gerry Culhane, a member of the Communist Party and trade-union activist but the marriage did not last. In 1967-1968 Culhane worked as an advisor and hospital administrator with the Canadian Anti-Tuberculosis Hospital in Quang Ngai, South Vietnam. Upon her return to Canada, she became very involved in peace activism. In 1976 she was appointed a member of the Citizens Advisory Committee for British Columbia Penitentiaries. An author, one of her books was titled Why Is Canada in Vietnam? She died on 28 April 1996 in Vancouver.