Guides: HIST 586: Canada: Diasporas and the State: Home

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Canadian History
by Kristen Howard Last Updated Sep 26, 2024 2069 views this year
Black Canadian Studies
by Kristen Howard Last Updated Oct 2, 2024 886 views this year
Genealogy
by Kristen Howard Last Updated Aug 16, 2024 582 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 (EBSCO)
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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) (ProQuest)
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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 Sep 25, 2024 17144 views this year

Proquest Historical Newspapers: The Globe and Mail (ProQuest)
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Coverage 1844-2018
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Ottawa Citizen (1845 - 2010 )
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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- dshub.library@mcgill.ca, Subject: ProQuest text or data mining question.
Gazette (1857-2010); Montreal. (ProQuest)
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Archive page content of the Gazette, precursor to the Montreal Gazette. 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
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Victoria Times-Colonist
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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- dshub.library@mcgill.ca, Subject: ProQuest text or data mining question.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Province (1894-2010)
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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- dshub.library@mcgill.ca, Subject: ProQuest text or data mining question.
Toronto Star (ProQuest)
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Part of ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Articles and full page reproductions of the complete newspaper from 1894, but does not include the last three years.
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
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Edmonton Journal (1903 - 2010)
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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- dshub.library@mcgill.ca, Subject: ProQuest text or data mining question.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Saskatoon Star-Phoenix (1902-2009)
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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- dshub.library@mcgill.ca, Subject: ProQuest text or data mining question.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Vancouver Sun (1912 - 2010)
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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- dshub.library@mcgill.ca, Subject: ProQuest text or data mining question.

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.

Multicultural/Immigrant newspapers

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

Migration to New Worlds (Adam Matthew)
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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)
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Includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information (composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives), providing a 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)
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This collection contains 150,000 indexed and searchable pages of diaries and letters from 1,325 women documenting their experiences. Includes biographical sketches of those represented, as well as over 7,000 pages of previously unpublished material.

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

For assistance in accessing statistics, contact the Data Librarian at data.library@mcgill.ca. The Data Librarian offers workshops on accessing Canadian census data (and other data sets) every term, find the list of workshops available here.

Ancestry Library (ProQuest)
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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
Census of Canada (Internet Archive)

Odesi
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Contains over 5,600 datasets for the social sciences, with more than 22,300 additional dataset descriptions available for searching.

Historical Statistics of Canada

Annual Reports on Immigration

Administrative history of immigration
Sessional papers, 1867-1900
Sessional papers, 1901-1925
Annual department reports, 1924-1929/30
Formerly issued in the series of "Sessional papers." In 1925, the House of Commons ceased to order annual departmental reports to be printed as Sessional papers. After 1929/30, the reports are no longer collected but are distributed from the individual departments.
Annual report - Department of Manpower and Immigration Canada, 1966-1973
Annual report for the fiscal year by Canada, Manpower and Immigration, 1973-1977
Annual report to Parliament on immigration, 2002-2011

Citations

History as a discipline uses the Chicago Manual of Style (18th 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.

Note: Chicago Manual of Style updated to the 18th edition in September 2024.

HCS Guide to the Chicago Manual of Style
A guide to the Chicago Manual of Style developed for students in History and Classics (18th edition).

The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition
Publication Date: 2024
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