Sherry Olson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3671417 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sherry Olson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sherry |
| FAMILY NAME | Olson |
| SIGNATURE | OLSON S |
| AFFILIATIONS | McGill University, Quebec, Canada |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 65 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
From Conversation to Contract: The Notary’s Role in Nineteenth-Century Montreal
Whether the subject embraces a family or an empire, the historian attempts to tap the information flow on which its life depended. The notaries of Montreal created and accumulated documents that now constitute a massive archive, accessible but underutilized because of the challenges of search and discovery. As a probe of the source for the 19th-century metropolitan habitat, the authors assembled notarized transactions among the one hundred member…
Recovering Identities from the Judicial Archives of Quebec
Under the rigorous marriage regime of Quebec, two patterns of evasion have left puzzles in the nineteenth-century archives: an annual cohort of newborns registered "of unknown parents" and a perennial population of women whose husbands are "absent from this province and in parts unknown." We explore the circumstances under which some of the "unknowns" made themselves known. By mobilizing a network of support for judicial recognition, they recover…
Serving Up Irish Hospitality on Credit: Business Practices of Women Publicans and Grocers in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Montréal
Irish women were not only wives and daughters of publicans and grocers; their labour was critical to public houses and grocery shops. Moreover, their involvement in hospitality, as publicans and grocers, provided them with the means to raise families and to realize economic independence, autonomy, and security, especially in the face of widowhood with children to support. Tavern- and innkeepers and grocers required a good head for business becaus…
Setting the census household into its urban context: Visualizations from 19th-century Montreal
Organized by household, North American census data promoted research into household composition, but discouraged research into connections between urban households. Yet these constitute "communications communities" that powerfully influence demographic dec
Silver and Hotcakes and Beer: Irish Montreal in the 1840s
The papers of Bartholomew O'Brien, innkeeper and broker of silver, offer a fresh look at Montreal's Irish Catholic community in the 1840s. His interventions illustrate the way an individual navigated an "ethnicized" social network and circulated resources between the market economy and the gift economy, spheres that Ferdinand Tönnies termed the Gesellschaft and the Gemeinschaft (1887). In a city embarked on the revolution of steam power, the two …
Peopling the North American City: Montreal, 1840–1900
Many North American cities trace their population booms to the nineteenth century when immigrants and migrants flooded emerging industrializing urban centres in search of better lives. Peopling the North American City examines this phenomenon in Montreal through the eyes of a thousand couples to construct both an intimate portrait and a compelling overview of life in a nineteenth-century metropolis
Mortality in late nineteenth-century Montreal: Geographic pathways of contagion
In the City of Montreal, 1881, the presence of three cultural communities with different profiles of economic status makes it possible to observe the way social settings affected survival over a lifetime. Regression models show culturally determined maternal factors dominant for infants, and persistent throughout childhood. For post-neonates, children aged 1-4, and adults aged 15-59 household poverty has a comparable effect. Among adults, a gende…
Mobilité sociale dans une ville industrielle nord-américaine: Montréal, 1880-1900
Durant les dernières décennies du xix e siècle, Montréal, comme d’autres grandes villes nord-américaines, est le théâtre de bien des rêves de réussite sociale. Si certains d’entre eux se concrétisent, d’autres tournent court ou, pire encore, se terminent dans la déchéance. Quels facteurs président à ces différents destins ? Quelles stratégies sont utilisées pour tenter d’améliorer son sort ? Nous explorons ces questions à l’aide des données des r…
Tuberculosis and the city
Tracking tuberculosis in the past: The use of genealogical evidence
Residential Segregation in the Industrializing City: A Closer Look
This article maps and measures several dimensions of residential segregation in Montreal in 1881, thereby adding to our understanding of the social structure of the industrial city. Taking advantage of an unusual historical database—a historical geographic information system (H-GIS)—we locate 17,000 individual households with precision, and evaluate the "dissimilarity" of neighborhoods along several social dimensions and at various levels of spat…
Tuberculosis in Town: Mobility of Patients in Montreal, 1925–1950
Durant le deuxième quart du XX e siècle, la gestion idéale de la tuberculose exigeait l'immobilisation du malade pendant un an ou plus. En même temps, les villes nordaméricaines vivaient des changements majeurs axés sur une augmentation importante de la mobilité personnelle. Dans un ensemble de 300 cas d'étude montréalais, les auteurs observent les pressions contradictoires exercées sur les tuberculeux, ainsi que la résistance qu'ils pouvaient le…
Ecosystems in Transition: The Experience of Australia and New Zealand
Downwind, Downstream, Downtown: The Environmental Legacy in Baltimore and Montreal
For two centuries, each surge of city-building has consumed massive amounts of raw materials and restructured flows of materials, as merchants and manufacturers reached out to capture resources from greater distances but persisted in accumulating a large share of the wastes close to home. Eight such surges of growth can be seen, and synchronized, in Baltimore, Maryland, and Montreal, Quebec. The environmental impacts are marshalled to appeal for …
Dwellings, crowding, and tuberculosis in Montreal
Métiers, loyers et bout de rue: L'Armature De La Société Montréalaise, 1881 À 1901
La représentation graphique et cartographique des loyers payés par un échantillon de résidents, rue par rue, permet de saisir l'échelle sociale de Montréal, en pleine évolution entre 1881 et 1901, et de déceler divers « patterns » dans le tissu social, lequel sert de toile de fond aux conflits de travail, de classe et d'ethnie à cette époque. Les données sont tirées des rôles d'évaluation établis par la ville de Montréal pour le calcul de la taxe…
Ethnic Partition of the Work Force in 1840s Montréal
As AN APPRAISAL OF ETHNIC WEIGHTING in the Montreal labour force, I introduce the 1842 manuscript census to estimate the relative sizes of four cultural communities and the social distances among them. The logic of grouping is schematized in Figure 1 in terms of shared language or religion. Since each community occupied a distinctive niche in the urban economy, it is possible that ethnic differences, often cited as a root of the violence of the 1…
Pour se créer un avenir » Stratégies de couples montréalais au XIX e siècle
Dans l'expansion de l'économie québécoise au XIXe siècle, les ménages sont demeurés des acteurs nombreux et entreprenants, mari et femme engagés dans un réseau de parents et alliés. Les femmes, malgré la discrimination de la loi, jouaient un rôle dynamique dans le fonctionnement des réseaux qui gouvernaient la migration vers Montréal, la mobilité résidentielle à l'intérieur de la ville et la promotion sociale. L'argument est fondé sur l'observati…
A deadly discrimination among Montreal infants, 1860–1900
We compare Montreal's three largest cultural communities – French Canadian, Irish Catholic, and Anglo-Protestant – with respect to infant survival over the forty years 1860–1900. From three birth cohorts we present evidence for a powerful and persistent cultural dimension which outweighs distinctions of social status. The local cultural mix offers insights into mechanisms operating through a chain of cultural practices, property interests, ethnic…
Claims on Housing Space in Nineteenth-Century Montreal
Space per person is a fundamental measure of equity in an urban society. From small samples of the Montreal population over the years 1861-1901, we infer substantial improvement in the average dwelling space available per person, but an extreme and persistent inequity in the distribution among households. The housing market remained polarised in terms of class and cultural identity. As crowding diminished, urban density increased, and the problem…
Family Contexts of Fertility and Infant Survival in Nineteenth-Century Montreal
In the cohort of 4000 infants born in Montreal in 1859, the cultural context showed a powerful influence on infant mortality: more French Canadian infants died in their first year than Protestant or Irish Catholic. Socio-economic status shows no effect on infant mortality, although in each cultural community the wealthy had a higher birth rate than the poor. A higher birth rate to French Canadian mothers can be attributed entirely to the larger n…
Dimensions sociales de la mortalité infantile à Montréal au milieu du XIXe siècle
L'analyse des taux de mortalité infantile dans la cohorte de 4 000 enfants nés à Montréal en 1859 porte à croire que l'appartenance à une communauté culturelle pèse plus lourd que le métier du père, le loyer familial, le quartier et le type d'habitat. Parmi les Canadiens français 27,6 % des enfants sont morts avant l'âge de un an. Ce taux est nettement plus que ceux des protestants (18,6 %) et des Irlandais catholiques (20,0 %), malgré la misère …
Occupations and Residential Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Montreal
Provenances of naturalised plants in Australasia
In both Australia and New Zealand, numbers of naturalised flowering plant species have increased steadily since the start of European settlement, and this process shows no sign of abating. Plants native to Western Europe, the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East predominated during the mid‐nineteenth century, but in recent decades other geographical areas (notably the Western Hemisphere, Asia and Southern Africa) have become important sources …
Red destinies: The landscape of environmental risk in Madagascar
Mortality in late nineteenth-century Montreal: Geographic pathways of contagion
In the City of Montreal, 1881, the presence of three cultural communities with different profiles of economic status makes it possible to observe the way social settings affected survival over a lifetime. Regression models show culturally determined maternal factors dominant for infants, and persistent throughout childhood. For post-neonates, children aged 1-4, and adults aged 15-59 household poverty has a comparable effect. Among adults, a gende…
Residential Segregation in the Industrializing City: A Closer Look
This article maps and measures several dimensions of residential segregation in Montreal in 1881, thereby adding to our understanding of the social structure of the industrial city. Taking advantage of an unusual historical database—a historical geographic information system (H-GIS)—we locate 17,000 individual households with precision, and evaluate the "dissimilarity" of neighborhoods along several social dimensions and at various levels of spat…
Dwellings, crowding, and tuberculosis in Montreal
Downwind, Downstream, Downtown: The Environmental Legacy in Baltimore and Montreal
For two centuries, each surge of city-building has consumed massive amounts of raw materials and restructured flows of materials, as merchants and manufacturers reached out to capture resources from greater distances but persisted in accumulating a large share of the wastes close to home. Eight such surges of growth can be seen, and synchronized, in Baltimore, Maryland, and Montreal, Quebec. The environmental impacts are marshalled to appeal for …
A deadly discrimination among Montreal infants, 1860–1900
We compare Montreal's three largest cultural communities – French Canadian, Irish Catholic, and Anglo-Protestant – with respect to infant survival over the forty years 1860–1900. From three birth cohorts we present evidence for a powerful and persistent cultural dimension which outweighs distinctions of social status. The local cultural mix offers insights into mechanisms operating through a chain of cultural practices, property interests, ethnic…
Family Contexts of Fertility and Infant Survival in Nineteenth-Century Montreal
In the cohort of 4000 infants born in Montreal in 1859, the cultural context showed a powerful influence on infant mortality: more French Canadian infants died in their first year than Protestant or Irish Catholic. Socio-economic status shows no effect on infant mortality, although in each cultural community the wealthy had a higher birth rate than the poor. A higher birth rate to French Canadian mothers can be attributed entirely to the larger n…
Occupations and Residential Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Montreal
Silver and Hotcakes and Beer: Irish Montreal in the 1840s
The papers of Bartholomew O'Brien, innkeeper and broker of silver, offer a fresh look at Montreal's Irish Catholic community in the 1840s. His interventions illustrate the way an individual navigated an "ethnicized" social network and circulated resources between the market economy and the gift economy, spheres that Ferdinand Tönnies termed the Gesellschaft and the Gemeinschaft (1887). In a city embarked on the revolution of steam power, the two …
Tuberculosis in Town: Mobility of Patients in Montreal, 1925–1950
Durant le deuxième quart du XX e siècle, la gestion idéale de la tuberculose exigeait l'immobilisation du malade pendant un an ou plus. En même temps, les villes nordaméricaines vivaient des changements majeurs axés sur une augmentation importante de la mobilité personnelle. Dans un ensemble de 300 cas d'étude montréalais, les auteurs observent les pressions contradictoires exercées sur les tuberculeux, ainsi que la résistance qu'ils pouvaient le…
Métiers, loyers et bout de rue: L'Armature De La Société Montréalaise, 1881 À 1901
La représentation graphique et cartographique des loyers payés par un échantillon de résidents, rue par rue, permet de saisir l'échelle sociale de Montréal, en pleine évolution entre 1881 et 1901, et de déceler divers « patterns » dans le tissu social, lequel sert de toile de fond aux conflits de travail, de classe et d'ethnie à cette époque. Les données sont tirées des rôles d'évaluation établis par la ville de Montréal pour le calcul de la taxe…
Ethnic Partition of the Work Force in 1840s Montréal
As AN APPRAISAL OF ETHNIC WEIGHTING in the Montreal labour force, I introduce the 1842 manuscript census to estimate the relative sizes of four cultural communities and the social distances among them. The logic of grouping is schematized in Figure 1 in terms of shared language or religion. Since each community occupied a distinctive niche in the urban economy, it is possible that ethnic differences, often cited as a root of the violence of the 1…
Setting the census household into its urban context: Visualizations from 19th-century Montreal
Organized by household, North American census data promoted research into household composition, but discouraged research into connections between urban households. Yet these constitute "communications communities" that powerfully influence demographic dec
Tracking tuberculosis in the past: The use of genealogical evidence
Pour se créer un avenir » Stratégies de couples montréalais au XIX e siècle
Dans l'expansion de l'économie québécoise au XIXe siècle, les ménages sont demeurés des acteurs nombreux et entreprenants, mari et femme engagés dans un réseau de parents et alliés. Les femmes, malgré la discrimination de la loi, jouaient un rôle dynamique dans le fonctionnement des réseaux qui gouvernaient la migration vers Montréal, la mobilité résidentielle à l'intérieur de la ville et la promotion sociale. L'argument est fondé sur l'observati…
Red destinies: The landscape of environmental risk in Madagascar
Dimensions sociales de la mortalité infantile à Montréal au milieu du XIXe siècle
L'analyse des taux de mortalité infantile dans la cohorte de 4 000 enfants nés à Montréal en 1859 porte à croire que l'appartenance à une communauté culturelle pèse plus lourd que le métier du père, le loyer familial, le quartier et le type d'habitat. Parmi les Canadiens français 27,6 % des enfants sont morts avant l'âge de un an. Ce taux est nettement plus que ceux des protestants (18,6 %) et des Irlandais catholiques (20,0 %), malgré la misère …
Occupations and Residential Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Montreal
Provenances of naturalised plants in Australasia
In both Australia and New Zealand, numbers of naturalised flowering plant species have increased steadily since the start of European settlement, and this process shows no sign of abating. Plants native to Western Europe, the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East predominated during the mid‐nineteenth century, but in recent decades other geographical areas (notably the Western Hemisphere, Asia and Southern Africa) have become important sources …
Family Contexts of Fertility and Infant Survival in Nineteenth-Century Montreal
In the cohort of 4000 infants born in Montreal in 1859, the cultural context showed a powerful influence on infant mortality: more French Canadian infants died in their first year than Protestant or Irish Catholic. Socio-economic status shows no effect on infant mortality, although in each cultural community the wealthy had a higher birth rate than the poor. A higher birth rate to French Canadian mothers can be attributed entirely to the larger n…
Claims on Housing Space in Nineteenth-Century Montreal
Space per person is a fundamental measure of equity in an urban society. From small samples of the Montreal population over the years 1861-1901, we infer substantial improvement in the average dwelling space available per person, but an extreme and persistent inequity in the distribution among households. The housing market remained polarised in terms of class and cultural identity. As crowding diminished, urban density increased, and the problem…
A deadly discrimination among Montreal infants, 1860–1900
We compare Montreal's three largest cultural communities – French Canadian, Irish Catholic, and Anglo-Protestant – with respect to infant survival over the forty years 1860–1900. From three birth cohorts we present evidence for a powerful and persistent cultural dimension which outweighs distinctions of social status. The local cultural mix offers insights into mechanisms operating through a chain of cultural practices, property interests, ethnic…
Pour se créer un avenir » Stratégies de couples montréalais au XIX e siècle
Dans l'expansion de l'économie québécoise au XIXe siècle, les ménages sont demeurés des acteurs nombreux et entreprenants, mari et femme engagés dans un réseau de parents et alliés. Les femmes, malgré la discrimination de la loi, jouaient un rôle dynamique dans le fonctionnement des réseaux qui gouvernaient la migration vers Montréal, la mobilité résidentielle à l'intérieur de la ville et la promotion sociale. L'argument est fondé sur l'observati…
Ethnic Partition of the Work Force in 1840s Montréal
As AN APPRAISAL OF ETHNIC WEIGHTING in the Montreal labour force, I introduce the 1842 manuscript census to estimate the relative sizes of four cultural communities and the social distances among them. The logic of grouping is schematized in Figure 1 in terms of shared language or religion. Since each community occupied a distinctive niche in the urban economy, it is possible that ethnic differences, often cited as a root of the violence of the 1…
Métiers, loyers et bout de rue: L'Armature De La Société Montréalaise, 1881 À 1901
La représentation graphique et cartographique des loyers payés par un échantillon de résidents, rue par rue, permet de saisir l'échelle sociale de Montréal, en pleine évolution entre 1881 et 1901, et de déceler divers « patterns » dans le tissu social, lequel sert de toile de fond aux conflits de travail, de classe et d'ethnie à cette époque. Les données sont tirées des rôles d'évaluation établis par la ville de Montréal pour le calcul de la taxe…
Dwellings, crowding, and tuberculosis in Montreal
Downwind, Downstream, Downtown: The Environmental Legacy in Baltimore and Montreal
For two centuries, each surge of city-building has consumed massive amounts of raw materials and restructured flows of materials, as merchants and manufacturers reached out to capture resources from greater distances but persisted in accumulating a large share of the wastes close to home. Eight such surges of growth can be seen, and synchronized, in Baltimore, Maryland, and Montreal, Quebec. The environmental impacts are marshalled to appeal for …
Ecosystems in Transition: The Experience of Australia and New Zealand
Mobilité sociale dans une ville industrielle nord-américaine: Montréal, 1880-1900
Durant les dernières décennies du xix e siècle, Montréal, comme d’autres grandes villes nord-américaines, est le théâtre de bien des rêves de réussite sociale. Si certains d’entre eux se concrétisent, d’autres tournent court ou, pire encore, se terminent dans la déchéance. Quels facteurs président à ces différents destins ? Quelles stratégies sont utilisées pour tenter d’améliorer son sort ? Nous explorons ces questions à l’aide des données des r…
Tuberculosis and the city
Tracking tuberculosis in the past: The use of genealogical evidence
Residential Segregation in the Industrializing City: A Closer Look
This article maps and measures several dimensions of residential segregation in Montreal in 1881, thereby adding to our understanding of the social structure of the industrial city. Taking advantage of an unusual historical database—a historical geographic information system (H-GIS)—we locate 17,000 individual households with precision, and evaluate the "dissimilarity" of neighborhoods along several social dimensions and at various levels of spat…
Tuberculosis in Town: Mobility of Patients in Montreal, 1925–1950
Durant le deuxième quart du XX e siècle, la gestion idéale de la tuberculose exigeait l'immobilisation du malade pendant un an ou plus. En même temps, les villes nordaméricaines vivaient des changements majeurs axés sur une augmentation importante de la mobilité personnelle. Dans un ensemble de 300 cas d'étude montréalais, les auteurs observent les pressions contradictoires exercées sur les tuberculeux, ainsi que la résistance qu'ils pouvaient le…
Peopling the North American City: Montreal, 1840–1900
Many North American cities trace their population booms to the nineteenth century when immigrants and migrants flooded emerging industrializing urban centres in search of better lives. Peopling the North American City examines this phenomenon in Montreal through the eyes of a thousand couples to construct both an intimate portrait and a compelling overview of life in a nineteenth-century metropolis
Mortality in late nineteenth-century Montreal: Geographic pathways of contagion
In the City of Montreal, 1881, the presence of three cultural communities with different profiles of economic status makes it possible to observe the way social settings affected survival over a lifetime. Regression models show culturally determined maternal factors dominant for infants, and persistent throughout childhood. For post-neonates, children aged 1-4, and adults aged 15-59 household poverty has a comparable effect. Among adults, a gende…
Silver and Hotcakes and Beer: Irish Montreal in the 1840s
The papers of Bartholomew O'Brien, innkeeper and broker of silver, offer a fresh look at Montreal's Irish Catholic community in the 1840s. His interventions illustrate the way an individual navigated an "ethnicized" social network and circulated resources between the market economy and the gift economy, spheres that Ferdinand Tönnies termed the Gesellschaft and the Gemeinschaft (1887). In a city embarked on the revolution of steam power, the two …
Setting the census household into its urban context: Visualizations from 19th-century Montreal
Organized by household, North American census data promoted research into household composition, but discouraged research into connections between urban households. Yet these constitute "communications communities" that powerfully influence demographic dec
From Conversation to Contract: The Notary’s Role in Nineteenth-Century Montreal
Whether the subject embraces a family or an empire, the historian attempts to tap the information flow on which its life depended. The notaries of Montreal created and accumulated documents that now constitute a massive archive, accessible but underutilized because of the challenges of search and discovery. As a probe of the source for the 19th-century metropolitan habitat, the authors assembled notarized transactions among the one hundred member…
Recovering Identities from the Judicial Archives of Quebec
Under the rigorous marriage regime of Quebec, two patterns of evasion have left puzzles in the nineteenth-century archives: an annual cohort of newborns registered "of unknown parents" and a perennial population of women whose husbands are "absent from this province and in parts unknown." We explore the circumstances under which some of the "unknowns" made themselves known. By mobilizing a network of support for judicial recognition, they recover…
Serving Up Irish Hospitality on Credit: Business Practices of Women Publicans and Grocers in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Montréal
Irish women were not only wives and daughters of publicans and grocers; their labour was critical to public houses and grocery shops. Moreover, their involvement in hospitality, as publicans and grocers, provided them with the means to raise families and to realize economic independence, autonomy, and security, especially in the face of widowhood with children to support. Tavern- and innkeepers and grocers required a good head for business becaus…
Sociology (15 works) · Canadian Identity and History (14 works) · Geography (14 works) · Political science (12 works) · Demography (9 works) · Economics (8 works) · History (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis (7 works) · History (7 works)