Literatura académica sobre el tema "Halifax Relief Commission"

This chapter examines how the people of Halifax integrated disaster relief aid into their complex family economies following the explosion. Relief workers and managers offered aid that seemed obvious after the Halifax explosion destroyed houses and rendered them uninhabitable. However, only a few people availed themselves of the help extended by the army, people, and institutions of Halifax, often preferring to stay in their ruined houses, in the overcrowded homes of their friends and relatives, or even in hastily jerry-rigged shacks. Drawing on a random sample of 739 case files of the Halifax Relief Commission, this chapter considers how survivors and other Haligonians engaged in delicate, subtle, and often tacit negotiations as they sought to maximize the material aid they claimed from the state while minimizing the autonomy and privacy the state took from them in return. It shows that many Haligonians rejected, or tried to reject, the new bureaucratic machine that offered them money and other material aid, and instead turned to the reciprocal solidarity of people they knew.

This chapter examines how the Halifax explosion changed local churches and unions, as well as the ways that membership in a church or union altered the individuals' and families' experiences of the disaster. In applying for and receiving disaster relief, disaster survivors were sorted by organizational membership—in churches, in clubs, and in other formal institutions. When Haligonians applied for aid from the Halifax and Dartmouth Relief Committees and their successor, the Halifax Relief Commission, they were asked, among other things, what organizations they belonged to, including their church, their union, and their fraternal societies. This chapter compares the Halifax Relief Commission's instrumental use of churches, which emphasized clerical authority, with the ways that lay congregants chose to use churches to come to terms with their grief. It also considers how unions responded to the considerable growth of the technocratic, interventionist, progressive state during World War I.