This second of three volumes in theHistory of the Book in Canada demonstrates the same research and editorial standards established with Volume One by book history specialists from across the nation.

Educating the Neglected Majority is Richard Jarrell’s pioneering survey of the attempt to develop and diffuse agricultural and technical education in nineteenth-century Canada’s most populous regions. It explores the efforts and achievements of educators, legislators, and manufacturers as they responded to the rapid changes resulting from the Industrial Revolution. Identifying the resources that the state, philanthropic organizations, private schools, moral reform societies, and churches harnessed to implement technical education for the rural and industrial working classes, Jarrell illuminates the formal and informal learning networks of Upper Canada/Ontario and Lower Canada/Quebec at this time. As these colonial societies moved towards mechanization, industrialization, and nationhood, their educational leaders looked to US and British developments in pedagogy and technology to create academic journals, evening classes, libraries, mechanics’ institutes, museums, specialist societies, and women’s institutes. Supervising these varied activities were legislatures and provincial boards, where key figures such as E.-A. Barnard, J.-B. Meilleur, and Egerton Ryerson played dominant roles. Portraying the powerful hopes and sometimes unrealistic dreams that motivated energetic and determined reformers, Educating the Neglected Majority presents Ontario and Quebec’s response to the powerful industrial and demographic forces that were reshaping the North Atlantic world.

In a compelling and comprehensive treatment of the nineteenth-century voluntary association movement, Darren Ferry situates these organizations within the much larger framework of the construction of collective liberal identities. He shows that by attempting to transcend the political, religious, class, and ethnic divisions of their constituencies, voluntary societies acted as cultural mediators in the reproduction, transmission, and contestation of liberal values throughout central Canadian society.