“Creating a ‘Home Feeling’: The Canadian Reading Camp Association and the Uses of Fiction, 1900-1905.” Labour / Le Travail 76 (fall 2015): 109-32. (original) (raw)

Although the history of Canada’s oldest adult literacy organization, Frontier College, is of great relevance to labour studies, it has been more or less ignored by this field, largely because of its links to the early 20th-century social gospel movement and because of the difficulty of studying workers’ responses to the association. This article examines the first half-decade of Frontier College (known until 1919 as the Canadian Reading Camp Association) using a variety of methodologies––labour history, cultural and literary history, the history of education, and the history of reading––to understand how culture was used in the service of liberal government in the context of northern Ontario’s lumber camps at the turn of the century.