Catherine Gidney

White Spot, a popular BC restaurant chain solicits hamburger concepts from third and fourth grade students and one of their ideas becomes a feature on the kids' menu. Home Depot donates playground equipment to an elementary school, and the ribbon-cutting ceremony culminates in a community swathed in corporate swag, temporary tattoos, and a new "Home Depot song" written by a teacher and sung by the children. Kindergarten students return home with a school district-prescribed dental hygiene flyer featuring a maze leading to a tube of Crest toothpaste. Schools receive five cents for each flyer handed to a student. While commercialism has existed in our schools for over a century, the corporate invasion of our schools reached unprecedented heights in the1990s and 2000s after two decades of federal funding cuts and an increasing tendency to apply business models to the education system. Constant cutbacks have left school trustees, administrators, teachers, and parents with difficult decisions about how to finance programs and support students. Meanwhile, studies on the impact of advertising and consumer culture on children make clear that the effects are harmful both to the individual child and the broader culture. Captive Audience explores this compelling history of branding the classroom in Canada.

Historians, veterans, museums, and public education campaigns have all documented and commemorated the experience of Canadians in times of war. But Canada also has a long, rich, and important historical tradition of resistance to both war and militarization. This collection brings together the work of sixteen scholars on the history of war resistance. Together they explore resistance to specific wars (including the South African War, the First and Second World Wars, and Vietnam), the ideology and nature of resistance (national, ethical, political, spiritual), and organized activism against militarization (such as cadet training, the Cold War, and nuclear arms). As the federal government continues to support the commemoration and celebration of Canada's participation in past wars, this collection offers a timely response that explores the complexity of Canada's position in times of war and the role of social movements in challenging the militarization of Canadian society.

At the turn of the century Protestantism permeated the cultural fabric of English-Canadian society. By 1970, however, universities were primarily secular. Was this change the result of the changing nature of Protestantism at the turn of the century or forces external to it? By examining the role Protestantism played on university campuses from 1920 to 1970, Catherine Gidney furthers the debate over the nature and process of secularization in English Canada.