BOOM AND BUST: THE EFFECTS OF HOUSE PRICE INFLATION ON HOMEOWNERSHIP PATTERNS IN MONTREAL, TORONTO, AND VANCOUVER

it is widely supposed that urban house price inflation has recently put ownership beyond the reach of many potential home buyers. In fact, between 1974 and 1982 this was not uniformly the case in Canada's three largest cities. Homeownership rates declined in Vancouver, held steady in Toronto, and increased in Montreal. In Montreal all social classes shared in an ownership boom. In Toronto, the middle class fared well, blue-collar workers rather poorly. In Vancouver, blue-collar workers held their own, but the middle class lost ground. Everywhere the relative position of the self-employed declined. The geographical impact of house price inflation has been variable while the social and political implications merit study. There is a need for synthetic studies of specific cities.     

Fire and its roles in early hominid lifeways

Discovery of the uses and later the invention of fire-making are fundamental to humanity. Following reports over the last decade of traces of fire found on Lower Pleistocene archaeological sites in eastern Africa, the dating of the control of fire by hominids has become a controversial issue. In this paper we critically review the contexts and, in the light of a battery of archaeometric techniques, the nature of reported instances of fire from Koobi Fora and Chesowanja in Kenya, and from Gadeb and the Middle Awash in Ethiopia. We conclude with a discussion of the roles fire may have played in the lifeways of early Pleistocene savanna-living hominids.

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Résumé La découverte des usages du feu et ensuite de sa préparation est fondamentale pour l'humanité. Suite à des rapports au cours de la dernière décennie signalant des traces de feu relevées dans des sites archéologiques du Pléistocène inférieur dans l'est de l'Afrique, la datation du contrôle du feu par les hominiens est devenu une source de controverse. Dans cet article, nous révisons d'un oeil critique les contextes et la nature des cas de feu signalés à Koobi Fora et à Chesowanja au Kenya, et à Gadeb et dans l'Awash moyen en Éthiopie, à la lumière d'une suite de techniques archéometriques. Suit en conclusion une discussion sur les rôles qu'aurait pu jouer le feu dans les modes de vie des hominiens vivant dans les savannes du Pléistocène inférieur.

     

Exchange on the quantitative measurement of ethnic and national identity*

In recent decades, there has been a noticeable increase in the use of quantitative techniques in the study of ethnicity and nationalism, without, however, a sufficient amount of reflection on how these techniques have contributed to our understanding of ethnic and national identities. As such, in this exchange three sets of authors answer questions about the degree to which it is possible to use quantitative data to measure ethnic and national identities, which types of methods are most suitable in measuring these identities and what the major research findings of this quantitative research are that were not possible using qualitative approaches.     

"A sudden and terrible revelation": motherhood and infant mortality in France, 1858-1874

In 1874, legislators in France passed a law regulating the wet-nursing industry. Citing recent medical research into the causes and social costs of high infant mortality, the law's supporters met little opposition, despite the fact that the law challenged the tradition of paternal authority and familial autonomy that had been inscribed in French law since the promulgation of the Civil Code of 1804. Extending state power into the familial realm required a concerted effort by reformers, who concentrated on two issues: maternal responsibility for newborn infants and the social costs of early death. Because working women in urban areas used wet-nurses to preserve their wage-earning capacity, reformers capitalized on widespread opposition to women's labor outside the home. The law met little opposition in part because the issues of paternal authority had already been thoroughly debated several months earlier in the child labor law of 1874.