News

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

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.

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.

Congratulations to SETS PhD grad Ian Reilly who has accepted a tenure-track position at Mount Saint Vincent University.

Now on the SETS homepage is a newly researched history of English Studies at Guelph by Natalie Shore. It can be found in the SETS Research list on the right side of this page. Enjoy!

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.

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.