Journalists and poets, economists and political historians, have told the story of Canada's railways, but their accounts pay little attention to the workers who built them. The Bunkhouse Man is the only study devoted to these men and their lives in construction camps; a pioneering work in sociology, it is still the best description of what it was like to be a working man in Canada before the First World War. E.W. Bradwin drew on his own experience as an instructor for Frontier College, working alongside his students during the day and teaching at night, to present this graphic portrait of life in the camps from 1903 to 1914. No detached observer, Bradwin played a vigorous role trying to improve the lot of the men-practicing the sociology of engagement advocated by radical sociologists today. Work camps have existed in Canada from early pioneer times to the 1970s and are unlikely to disappear. In the years of Bradwin's study there were as many as 3,000 large camps employing 200,000 men, 5 per cent of the male labour force. Like the settling of the prairies, these camps are a characteristic Canadian phenomenon, but they have never drawn comparable attention. The republication of The Bunkhouse Man, with an introduction by Jean Burnet, makes available once more a work essential to the exploration of Canada's history and social structure.

In this study of the problems of social organization in a rural community of Alberta, a drought-afflicted wheat-growing area centring round the town of Hanna is described as it appeared to the sociologist in 1946. Dr Burnet examines geographical and economic conditions in Hanna, and shows how farming practices, ways of living, and modes of tenure brought into the area from more humid regions proved ill adapted to the dry belt and delayed economic adjustment. In turn, the difficulties in the realm of economics had adverse social and cultural consequences in both the households and the community as a whole. The Hanna area was chosen for study, though not altogether typical, because it revealed more clearly than other areas not so severely hit by the drought of the 1930s the kind of disturbances within the Alberta social structure which made possible the rise of the Social Credit movement.