|
|
|
Book Review
| Bienfait: The Saskatchewan Miners' Struggle of '31. By Stephen Lyon Endicott. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. xi + 180 pp. Illustrations, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00, £40.00, cloth; $21.95, £14.00, paper.)
|
|
The three-week-long strike in southern Saskatchewan's lignite coalfield, perhaps the bloodiest strike in Depression-era Canada, ended on the streets of Estevan on 29 September 1931, when RCMP officers and the local police chief turned a protest rally by strikers and their families into a riot that ended with three strikers killed and scores of others wounded. By Canadian standards, this strike has attracted significant scholarly attention. Stephen Endicott, drawing movingly upon the memories of the children of striking families, has produced a very useful community study of Bienfait (pronounced "bean-feat"), the village where most of the strikers resided. Though he has probably exaggerated the impact of the strike on "the thinking of a whole generation of Canadians" (notably Saskatchewan's future social democratic premier T. C. Douglas), he has made a serious contribution to its historiography. |
. . . |
There are about 364 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|