Guides: HIST 397: Canada: Migration and Ethnicity: Home

Getting started

Canadian History
by Kristen Howard Last Updated Mar 18, 2024 1266 views this year
Black Canadian Studies
by Kristen Howard Last Updated Jan 3, 2024 505 views this year
Genealogy
by Kristen Howard Last Updated Oct 6, 2023 174 views this year

Find secondary sources

Find books

Library Catalogue
Immigration and Ethnicity in Canada Booklet Series (CHA)
Broad, short surveys of Canada's immigrant and ethnic groups written at a level accessible to general readers, historians, and students from high school to graduate school. An excellent place to begin a research project on immigrant groups in Canada. Some immigrant groups include: Scots, Japanese, Poles, Ukrainians, Irish, Italians, and Hungarians; there are over three dozen total volumes.

Find peer-reviewed articles

America: History and Life
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Provides historical coverage of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes information abstracted from over 2,000 journals published worldwide.
CBCA (Canadian Business & Current Affairs Database)
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A longstanding, comprehensive Canadian periodical collection covering multiple subjects and topics, with millions of full-text records. Accessible to readers and researchers at every level, it features a diversified mix of publications, including scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, reports, radio and television transcripts, news, and dissertations. - Library can facilitate negotiating text-mining rights for this database for McGill faculty and students wishing to acquire the rights with their own research funds. Please contact Digital Scholarship Hub
Erudit
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Multidisciplinary social science and humanities publications containing journals and e-book collections from Quebec University Presses including: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, Presses de l'Université Laval, Publications du CRIR. Erudit Cultural Magazines collection is not included in McGill's subscription.

Find primary sources

Newspapers

Newspapers
by Humanities and Social Sciences Library Last Updated Apr 19, 2024 8080 views this year

Proquest Historical Newspapers: The Globe and Mail (ProQuest)
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Major Canadian newspaper. Available from 1844-four years ago
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Ottawa Citizen (1845 - 2010 )
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Gazette (1857-2010); Montreal.
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ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Victoria Times-Colonist
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Newspaper for Victoria, BC. Available from 1884-2010.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Province (1894-2010)
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Newspaper for Victoria, BC. Available from 1894-2010.
Toronto Star (ProQuest)
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Articles and full page reproductions of the complete newspaper from 1894, but does not include the last three years.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Edmonton Journal (1903 - 2010)
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ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Saskatoon Star-Phoenix (1902-2009)
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ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Vancouver Sun (1912 - 2010)
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Quebec Historical Newspapers (from Bibliothèque et archives nationales du québec)
Magazines and newspapers held by the BAnQ. Interface in French, content in French and English.
British Columbia Historical Newspapers
The BC Historical Newspapers project features digitized versions of historical papers from around the province. The titles, which range from the Abbotsford Post to the Ymir Mirror, date from 1859 to 1995.
Prairie Newspapers
The University of Alberta offers dozens of digitized newspapers from the Prairie Provinces from 1871 to 2013.
Connecting Canadians
Collection of multicultural Canadian newspapers documenting the earliest years of immigrant experience in Canada. Includes Croatian, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Latvian, and Lithuanian newspapers.
SFU Digitized Newspapers
A resource for digitized immigrant and foreign-language papers. By Simon Fraser University.

Primary source databases, collections, and websites

Society, Culture & Politics in Canada: Canadiana Pamphlets, 1818-1929
This collection of pamphlets at McMaster University Library deal with many aspects of Canadian history, literature, social and political conditions. Included are pamphlets on religion and churches, all levels of government, elections, peace movements and war service, Communism, local communities and labor organizations to name but a few of the topics covered. From Archives Unbound.

To best use the McMaster pamphlets collection, consider first exploring the associated Finding Aid. Tip: use ctrl or command + F to keyword search.

Note: after conducting an initial search within the collection, using the new Search box will search all of Archives Unbound rather than just the pamphlet collection. To more easily limit, use the 'Filter Your Results' option at the right to limit to McMaster University.

Migration to New Worlds
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From the century of immigration, through to the modern era, Migration to New Worlds charts the emigration experience of millions across 200 years of turbulent history. Explore the rise and fall of the New Zealand Company, discover British, European and Asian migration and investigate unique primary source personal accounts, shipping logs, printed literature and organisational papers supplemented by carefully compiled teaching and research aids.
Text mining is permitted, but certain conditions apply. Please contact Digital Scholarship Hub
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories. (Alexander Street Press)
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This collection includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries (Alexander Street Press)
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This collection includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters from the 17th to 20th century. Tip: try searching by browsing historical events.

Pier 21 Oral Histories
Museum researchers conduct recorded interviews with immigrants, refugees, settlement workers and others who have lived experiences relating to immigration.
In the Advanced Search, select Oral History and enter keywords into the Description (internal) search box (e.g., Netherlands, Germany, Catholic). Be aware that some interviews are restricted.
LAC: Black History in Canada
In addition to a short background on Black History in Canada, this page includes a selection of primary sources available at Library and Archives Canada as well as the bibliographic information for many published sources and links to other institutions and repositories.
Concordia Centre for Oral History and Storytelling Archives
COHDS is home to an archive containing over 1500 oral history interviews. Access must be approved by the Archivist after an Access Agreement is signed. Consult the collections descriptions and email cohds.chorn.archives@gmail.com to ask to access publicly accessible interviews.

Genealogy & Statistics

Ancestry Library
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VPN required for off-campus access.
Includes census data, birth and death indexes, military service records, for North America and the United Kingdom.

Canada Year Book Historical Collection, 1867-1967
Discover Canada's social and economic past through the people, events and facts that have shaped this vast country. Includes historical data in Statistics Canada's annual Canada Year Book during the first century of Canada's history, from 1867 to 1967
Historical Statistics of Canada
A digitized version of the second edition of Historical Statistics of Canada, which contains over 1,000 statistical tables on the social, economic, and institutional conditions of Canada from the start of the Confederation in 1867 to the mid-1970s.

Citations

History as a discipline uses the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition) for citations, and usually the Notes-Bibliography form. This requires creating properly formatted footnotes footnotes and a Bibliography for your assignments. Resources to understand the Chicago style of citations are included below.

The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition
Publication Date: 2017
There is a copy of the current Chicago Manual of Style available for reference at the McLennan Service Desk (first floor).
A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Ninth Edition by Kate L. Turabian
Call Number: LB2369 T8 2018
Publication Date: 2018
A guide to Chicago Manual of Style with more information on hard-to-cite or unusual sources than the original manual.

Guides

Chicago Manual of Style Citation Quick Guide
McGill Library Citation Subject Guide
Under "citation styles by subject", select "History" for more resources on Chicago style.

Library Support

Chicago Workshops
McGill Librarians offer two virtual Chicago Citation Style workshops per term. Follow this link to find and register for upcoming workshops!
Citation Management
Attend a workshop to learn how to use Zotero or EndNote, useful citation management systems. Zotero is highly recommended for History students!

Liaison Librarian

Kristen Howard

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Subjects: Classical studies, History, Indigenous studies, Religious studies

McGill University Collections Centre

Books are on the move from McLennan Redpath in Winter 2024!

Check on the progress of the move of the McLennan-Redpath Libraries' circulating collection at the Collections Centre website.