The Pre-History of Multiculturalism in Canada(2023 Reissue)

Witness to Yesterday (The Champlain Society Podcast on Canadian History)

Welcome to Witness to Yesterday. This summer, we will be reissuing our top 10 episodes. We hope you enjoy revisiting these with us. The Witness to Yesterday team is working hard, and we're excited to bring you the next new season in September, 2023. Thank you for listening. Original Episode Description: In this podcast episode, Greg Marchildon interviews Daniel Meister, the author of The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-History of Canadian Multiculturalism published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2021. This book recounts the history of the concept of multiculturalism in the decades before the establishment of multiculturalism as an official policy of the Government of Canada in 1971. Meister examines this intellectual history through the thinking of three influential individuals: Watson Kirkconnell, Robert England, and John Murray Gibbon. In the process, they explore concepts such as scientific racism, citizenship and folk culture. A recent PhD graduate of the history department at Queen’s University, Daniel Meister is currently an independent historian based in Halifax.

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