Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Able to Lead

Disablement, Radicalism, and the Political Life of E.T. Kingsley

by (author) Ravi Malhotra & Benjamin Isitt

Publisher
UBC Press
Initial publish date
May 2021
Subjects
People with Disabilities, Social History, Disability, People with Disabilities

Single logical reading order

Publisher’s web page for detailed accessibility information:
https://www.ubcpress.ca/accessibility

Index navigation

Next / Previous structural navigation

Print-equivalent page numbering

Use of color is not sole means of conveying information

Table of contents navigation

Use of high contrast between text and background color

  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780774865791
    Publish Date
    May 2021
    List Price
    $125.00

Library Ordering Options

Description

Eugene T. Kingsley led an extraordinary life: he was once described as “one of the most dangerous men in Canada.” In 1890, Kingsley was working as a railway brakeman in Montana when an accident left him a double amputee, and politically radicalized. Ravi Malhotra and Benjamin Isitt trace Kingsley’s political journey from soapbox speaker in San Francisco to prominence in the Socialist Party of Canada. They examine Kingsley’s endeavours for justice against the Northern Pacific Railway, and how his life intersected with immigration law and free-speech rights. Able to Lead highlights Kingsley’s profound legacy for the twenty-first-century political left.

About the authors

Ravi Malhotra is a professor in the faculty of law at the University of Ottawa.

Ravi Malhotra's profile page

Benjamin Isitt is a historian and legal scholar specializing in the political and legal history of British Columbia’s working class, with previous works including From Victoria to Vladivostok (UBC Press, 2010) and Able to Lead (UBC Press, 2021). He also serves as a city councillor and regional director in Victoria, BC.

Benjamin Isitt's profile page

Editorial Reviews

...the book provides a rich and lively account of a dynamic period in the history of the Canadian left— and tantalizing glimpses of an extraordinary man who lived in the thick of it.

Literary Review of Canada

The authors’ focus on this historical figure enriches and widens the lens on BC’s history.

BC Studies

Able to Lead paints a vivid picture of a fascinating political figure whose oratory one would have liked to have experienced first-hand.

Against the Current

Able to Lead... portrays the fractured politics of the B.C. labour left, providing an admiring account of the role of one man in that process… [the book] should achieve its stated goal of encouraging a new perception of the capabilities of disabled people while also prompting a rethink of the early North American left.

The Ormsby Review

...Malhotra and Isitt are to be commended for a book that, besides providing extraordinarily useful information on subjects ranging from the ubiquity of railway accidents in the late nineteenth century to the influence of eugenics on Canadian immigration policies at the same time, recognizes that Kingsley, even though he never spoke or wrote of his disability, likely constantly had to make decisions, whether about the class struggle or where to live, that reflected its existence in an ablist world.

H-Net