About BC Books Online
BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
A quick tip: When reviewing the "Browse by Category" listings, please note that these are based on standardized BISAC Subject Codes supplied by the books' publishers. You will find additional selections, grouped by theme or region, in our "BC Reading Lists."
Description
This book examines Canadian experiences of social control, moral regulation, and governmentality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Informed by the wealth of theoretical and historical writings that have recently emerged on these subjects, the contributors explore diverse state, social, legal, and human encounters with the regulation of lives in British Columbia and Canadian history. Incest in the criminal courts, racial-ethnic dimensions of alcohol regulation, public health initiatives around venereal disease, and the seizure and indoctrination of Doukhobor children, among other issues, are examined in these nine original essays.
This collection will interest scholars, researchers, practitioners, and students of a wide range of contexts including law, history, sociology, criminology, women’s studies, Native studies, social work, and political science.
Contributor Notes
John McLaren is Lansdowne Professor of Law, University of Victoria. Robert Menzies and Dorothy Chunn are both professors of criminology at Simon Fraser University.
Editorial Reviews
This book will be of great interest to those intrigued by legal history and, more specifically, the role the law has played in constructing people’s lives, perceptions and experiences.
— Saskatchewan Law Review, Vol. 66
... ably illustrates how thoughtful questions and the willingness to pose such queries will, more often than not, steer engaged inquiries in wonderfully creative, unexpected, and intriguing directions ... And thus, if we can safely take Regulating Lives as an indication of the work to follow, the new Law and Society series from UBC Press will be invaluable.
— The Canadian Historical Review, 84:4, December 2003
John McLaren’s study of the seizure and indoctrination of Sons of Freedom children 1950-60 ... is a masterpiece that examines the history of the Sons’ attempt to keep their children out of public schools and preserve their unique way of life. Having a firm foot on the ground and in local, provincial, and federal sources, McLaren’s work is a model of legal-historical research and writing. This collection could not be more complete ... This is a model study of how local history can inform our past and the making of public policy in the future.
— Canadian Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 18
I hope too that it will be widely read on both sides of the Atlantic, both as containing interesting and important history and as inviting debate on the relationship between the data of historical experience and the concepts around which those data are arranged. I am glad that I read it.
— Journal of Law and Society, Sept 2003
