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The vast transformations that shaped western cities at the turn of the twentieth century were the product of global processes and interactions. Drawing on the cases of Montreal and Brussels, this article argues that underlying these broad dynamics were questions and preoccupations pertaining to more localized and personal scales of the body and the home. Concentrating on the discourses that circulated in these distinct, yet analogous cities, the article shifts the focus of the transnational approach from specific contacts between individuals and places, to the wider web on which circulated the ideas and initiatives that reshaped people's living environment.

Proliferating streetlights generated complex emotional responses in modern cities. Drawing on recent scholarship in the history of the emotions, this article argues that examining the feelings of pride and prestige associated with technological innovation, but also of anger and fear when light was lacking or unpleasant, reveals the intimate nature of urban dwellers' relationship to their environment. Street lighting is often studied as part the networks of infrastructure that gave cities their contemporary form, or as elements of the commercial expansion that made them centers of consumerism. At the intersection of these trends stood the emotional experiences of those seeking to lay claim to the urban night. If the cultural significance of emotions varies according to historical circumstances, comparing the tensions, politics, and atmospheres of streetlights in distant places like Montreal and Brussels suggests that the rapidly changing urban environment of the period produced its own distinct emotional regime.

In a recent landmark decision, the Supreme Court of Canada confirmed that the underfunding of British Columbia’s Conseil scolaire francophone constitutes a breach of Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees in matters of minority-language education. While this marked the end of a decade of judicial proceedings, this article situates the decision in a broader historical context by examining the struggle to develop French-language educational programs in BC. If the province did not experience the education crises that tore through other parts of Canada in the decades following Confederation, BC francophones seized on the growing acceptance of bilingualism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to fight for an education system catering to their linguistic and cultural aspirations. Shifting the scholarly focus from the constitutional negotiating tables at which sat politicians and high-level bureaucrats to the kitchen tables around which parent groups gathered to formulate their demands, this article traces the grassroots battle to bring French-language schools to the province with Canada’s highest rate of linguistic assimilation.

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