"Sir Wilfrid Laurier famously claimed that the twentieth century would be Canada's century and, indeed, its opening decade witnessed remarkable territorial, demographic, and social transformations. Yet the lives of those who lived and laboured to fashion these changes remain largely hidden from historical view. The Dawn of Canada's Century presents close and systematic interpretations of everyday lives based on the first national sample of the 1911 census.

Situating early twentieth-century Canada within international historical population studies, these essays provide new ways to understand individuals' lives and connect them to larger structural changes."--pub. desc.