Book Review

The fur trade is a rare topic that encourages scholars to cross borders, both geographic and disciplinary. New Faces of the Fur Trade, a collection of fifteen articles based on papers presented at the 1995 North American Fur Trade Conference, is thus a sampler of social, political, and business history, cultural anthropology, archaeology, ethnohistory, and economics as applied to traders and transactions in both Canada and the United States from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries.

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According to their introduction, the volume's editors selected these essays to showcase both new approaches to, and novel interpretations of, older topics. The freshest pieces deal with gender. For example, Jo-Anne Fiske and Caroline Mufford use oral history interviews with Carrier women fur trappers to demonstrate that this activity has not been exclusively the men's preserve that writers have generally assumed. Susan Sleeper-Smith's study of the kin network created by an eighteenth-century Illiniwek woman is striking evidence of the importance of both women and kinship ties in the economy, religion, and politics of the colonial Midwest. Carolyn Podruchny's clever study of a Montreal fraternal organization, the Beaver Club, explores bourgeois men's masculine, professional, and class identities during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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