History News

Dr. Cathryn Spence (MA '06) has just accepted a teaching position at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, BC. After her time with us, Cathryn earned a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, then came back to Guelph as a SSHRC-funded post-doctoral researcher here in the Department. At VIU, Cathryn will be teaching medieval and early modern history.

This past February, Cathryn also published her first monograph, Women, Credit, and Debt in Early Modern Scotland (Manchester University Press, 2016). Cathryn's research is the first full-length consideration of women's economic roles in early modern Scottish towns. Drawing on tens of thousands of cases entered into burgh court litigation between 1560 and 1640 in Edinburgh, Dundee, Haddington and Linlithgow, she explores how Scottish women navigated their courts and their communities, especially as merchants, merchandisers, producers and sellers of ale, landladies, moneylenders and servants. 

Congratulations from all of us!

This week Dr. Catherine Carstairs is interviewed on the history and politics of water fluoridation:

... Even the history of water fluoridation is a toxic subject, as Catherine Carstairs, a professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, recently discovered. Carstairs was taken aback by the “fierceness” of the responses to her paper in the American Journal of Public Health last year. It was attacked as “an attempt to reignite and legitimise the unsubstantiated claims of anti-fluoridationists”. The journal’s editor was forced to defend his decision to publish “an article that does not unconditionally support community water fluoridation or its glorious history”, as well as the journal’s right “to publish strong pieces of research even when they do not fit well with our preconceived ideas."

"You don’t usually get this kind of attention as an historian,” says Carstairs. “It was like, how dare you say anything against water fluoridation.”

Social media has inured us to the bloodsport of “calling out” or “shutting down” opponents whose views are unorthodox or contrarian. But the people calling out Carstairs and Peckham were university academics, not bedroom-residing teenagers.

Tooth decay is the most widespread chronic disease...

Read the rest of the story at The Guardian

Congratulations to our own Dr. Alan Gordon for his new publication with UBC Press, Time Travel: Tourism and the Rise of the Living History Museum in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada (2016)

from the jacket:
In the 1960s, Canadians could step through time to eighteenth-century trading posts or nineteenth-century pioneer towns. These living history museums promised authentic reconstructions of the past but, as Time Travel shows, they revealed more about mid-twentieth-century interests and perceptions of history than they reflected historical fact. The post-war appetite for commercial tourism led to the development of living history museums. They became important components of economic growth, especially as part of government policy to promote regional economic diversity and employment. Time Travel considers these museums in their historical context, revealing how Canadians understood the relationship between their history and the material world.

Our own Dr. Alan McDougall is interviewed this week at the New Books Network. In The People’s Game: Football, State and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Alan McDougall looks at football from the top-down and bottom-up: as a tool of the state, as forming regional identities in East Germany and in a reunified Germany, and as a popular pastime. Although characterized by mediocrity compared to other sports in East Germany, McDougall demonstrates the ways in which football gave people a means of expressing identities that were separated from and even opposed to that endorsed by the state.

read the rest of the story at the New Books Network.

History Society 

Final meeting of the semester - March 22nd

The History Society is having it's final meeting of the year on March 22nd at 5:30pm in Mackinnon 307. If you're interested in being involved in the History Society for 2016-17, please come out! There will be opportunities to plan for next year's events, and if you're interested, to serve on the executive.

The History Students Society has also organized an Archives Tour as part of Arts Week on Monday, March 21st.  Get the poster .pdf

Dr. Gregory Klages, a long-time instrutor for the Department on our main campus and at the Guelph-Humber campus, has just published a new book. Published with Toronto's Dundurn Press, The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson: Separating Fact from Fiction weighs in on the mysterious death of a well-known painter associated with the famed "Group of Seven" artists.

from the jacket:  How did Tom Thomson die in the summer of 1917?

Was he shot by poachers, or by a German-American draft dodger? Did a blow from a canoe paddle knock him unconscious and into the water? Was he fatally injured in a drunken fight? Did he end his life out of fear of being forced to marry his pregnant girlfriend?

Commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the death of the renowned Canadian landscape painter, The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson offers an authoritative review of the historical record, as well as some theories you might not have thought of in a hundred years. Cultural historian Gregory Klages surveys first-hand testimony and archival records about Thomson’s tragic demise, attempting to sort fact from legend in the death of this Canadian icon.

This week Dr. Susan Nance is interviewed in a piece on VICE, "Ringling Bros. Elephant Sanctuary is Hardly a Paradise." The story explains the nature of and controversy over the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circuses' decision to retire the company elephants and keep them at a facility in Florida in which the animals will be bred with artificial insemination and employed in cancer research. 

In an interview with Peter Holslin, Nance explains why the future of these particular elephants is so hotly contested, and the history of public interest in the lives of the elephant population in North America. 

Read the story at VICE.

HIST*1050 Invitation to History is a new, mandatory course for all first year History majors and minors. 

Invitation to History introduces students to the basics of the historian’s craft including interpreting primary sources, locating and critically analyzing secondary sources and writing for History. It will provide you with the tools you need for success in your History major, minor or area of concentration. Choose any one of the following four classes. 

Fall 2016 - Hist*1050*01  Licit and Illicit Drugs   (instructor: Dr. Catherine Carstairs)
This course will examine the history of the use of licit and illicit drugs across the world, and examine why some have been forbidden and others permitted. 

Fall 2016 - Hist*1050*02  Polar Encounters   (instructor: Dr. Alan Gordon)
This course will trace the history of northern American exploration, including the mysteries of the disappearance of the Franklin and Hudson expeditions, as well as encounters among various peoples in the North and between people and the environment.

Winter 2017 - Hist*1050*03  Crime and Culture   (instructor: Dr. Elizabeth Ewan)
This course will study criminal acts such as homicide, witchcraft, theft and slander and how they were defined and prosecuted in past centuries, and the class will employ historical court records to recover the experiences of people in the past.

For more, visit our First Year Courses page

Celebrate Black History Month and try your hand at transcribing. We suggest the Shadd Diary.

A journey into the Shadd Diary covers the years 1881-1889 and introduces the reader to a variety of fascinating individuals. Garrison is the son of Abraham Doras Shadd, the famed abolitionist and “conductor” of the Underground Railway, and brother of Mary Ann Shadd, the first black woman in North America to publish a newspaper. Garrison oversees his sons taking extended turns writing the diary, first William, then Charles, then others. You'll notice the change in hand-writing. They are fully engaged in farming and the community life of North Buxton.

The diary can be found here: https://ruraldiaries.lib.uoguelph.ca/garrison-william-shadd

We hope you'll join us!
- Erin Elizabeth Schuurs, PhD Candidate on behalf of Rural History at Guelph

The program for the 22nd Annual Tri-University History Conference on March 5, 2016 is here .pdf

Please join us for the 22nd annual Tri-University History Conference on 5 March 2016 at the Best Western Plus Royal Brock Hotel & Conference Centre in Guelph, ON. Organized by the history departments of Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of Guelph and the University of Waterloo, the theme of this year’s conference is “Contesting History: Reflections on Perspective and Approach.”

This year’s conference will also feature the inaugural Tri-University “Rapid Fire” Competition. Participants will have 3 minutes to deliver an overview of their dissertation, thesis or major paper to a panel of esteemed professors and conference attendees. The event will take place during the final session of the day and a number of prizes will be up for grabs.

Get the poster .pdf