Michael Akladios

This paper aims to situate Copts in the religious and social history of 1960s Toronto. It is concerned with several questions, but it mainly asks how immigrant groups with limited resources managed to navigate the city’s sacred spaces. To that end, I consider the history of Coptic immigration in tandem with the responses of Protestant churches to declining attendance, rising Catholic immigration, and a thriving counterculture in downtown Toronto (from Bathurst Street to the Don River, south of Rosedale Valley). The successful development of vital social and spiritual services was a product of the unique character and timing of Coptic immigration.

With their life-story approach, Barber and Watson build on, and offer comparisons with, Jim Hammerton and Al Thomson's Ten Pound Poms (a study [End Page 450] of the English in Australia) and Murray Watson's Being English in Scotland. The authors challenge the invisibility of English immigrants in Canadian historiography and suggest rather that "in many respects the English are invisible, though audible" (p. 153). Their analysis sheds light on the range of factors motivating English emigrants and on the ways in which they experienced Canada's newly adopted role as a civic nation. The writers ground these narratives in a wealth of secondary literature, select periodicals, and archival documents, and consider them in relation to "contextual issues related to family and gender, social class, welfare, race and ethnicity, sensory perception, technology, and popular culture" (p. 28). However, one should read their conclusions with caution, since about one-third of English immigrants returned to England or moved elsewhere, and the authors interviewed none of these people.

Building upon The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal, University of Toronto Historian Sean Mills incorporates his past analysis into this nuanced discussion of the interconnected histories of Canada, Quebec, and Haiti. Chronologically structured, A Place in the Sun opens with the 1937 Congress on the French Language in Canada. Constructed as a part of a broader Latin and Catholic culture by Quebecois and Haitian intellectuals, Mills argues, both societies nevertheless existed in a profoundly asymmetrical relationship with each other. Persistent representations of “Haiti as a parallel society upholding French civilization and Haiti as an infantilized Other” were bound by the metaphor of the family and shaped by race, class, and gender (5).

Following Friday’s attack on two buses and a microbus in Egypt’s Minya governorate, killing at least seven Coptic Christians and injuring 16 others, both domestic and international media have deployed subtle and not-so-subtle forms of victim-blaming in their coverage.

The capacity of public history to allow the democratization of access to knowledge ensures that it does not become appropriated by the power structures of ‘legitimized knowledge’: the hallowed halls of academia.[1] To that end, as the founder and project manager of the CCHP, I work with like-minded individuals to organize and host conferences, exhibits, and facilitate the donation of historical documents and photographs to the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections (CTASC), York University.

With a population nearing 100 million, people in Egypt feel the pressure of lacking social services, infrastructure, educational facilities, and housing. Most Uber drivers, all men in their 20s and early 30s, drive part-time to augment their income from working in factories and government offices and to support their families. Some are unable to find steady employment since graduating from university and instead chose to finance a car and drive for Uber. They are fed up.

To date, most scholarly projects on Coptic communities stress an ancient and glorious past that is filled with the stories of great heroes and saints. Such narratives, and the larger-than-life figures who inhabit them, often reflect lofty ideals rather than the reality of daily life. Instead, the CCHP is the first ever repository to prioritize the history and collective memory of ‘ordinary’ Coptic immigrants. Why do people emigrate? What do they leave behind? Where do they go and why? How do they make sense of their new surroundings? What does it mean to be a Copt in Canada? It is such questions that animate this project and drive our continuous search for a diversity of immigrant experiences.

Why is something as seemingly simple as food so influential to the average Canadian’s conception of the Middle East and its culture? Food carries messages about class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and identity. Food is not only what is materially before us or the raw ingredients which go into making a particular dish. Food has symbolic significance. If foodways are the material and cultural significance of food to a group’s identity, then foodscapes are the physical manifestations of culture across space in the proliferation of ethnic restaurants, markets, grocers, food festivals and street-corner vendors. How, then, have Syro-Lebanese foodways come to dominate public (commercial) foodscapes in Toronto and successfully push out other Middle Eastern immigrant groups’ distinctive ethnic cuisines?

After four years of leading tutorials and teaching undergraduate students how to successfully manage their time preparing for and writing exams, I have developed a series of helpful tips for the end of every term. I was delighted when Dr. Christopher Grafos approached me to write about this topic, which I think will be useful to undergraduate students everywhere. The advice that follows shouldn’t simply be bookmarked for reference before you walk into your exam. Read it now. Think it over. Keep it at hand as you begin to review.

Don't hold back because you feel you have to build a stack of evidence before stating your main argument. Think of your favorite court scene from film and television. A lawyer begins the trial with compelling opening remarks outlining their case long before all the evidence is presented. Thus, I encourage you to state your thesis early. Make your argument clear in the introduction and follow it through to the conclusion. Don't leave your reader in suspense.