Prof. Catherine Wilson’s MA History students, in collaboration with CFRU’s Chris Currie, are on CFRU this July and August airing their half-hour shows featuring 19th-century diarists from the Rural Diary Archive website. | College of Arts

Prof. Catherine Wilson’s MA History students, in collaboration with CFRU’s Chris Currie, are on CFRU this July and August airing their half-hour shows featuring 19th-century diarists from the Rural Diary Archive website.

Posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2018

History Students Making Radio Waves This Summer

 

Tune in to Radio 93.3 FM for Professor Wilson’s MA History students on CFRU this July and August.  Students of “Rural History HIST6550” have created half-hour shows in collaboration with Chris Currie from CFRU, the University of Guelph’s radio station.  Each show features a nineteenth-century diarist from the Rural Diary Archive website. 

As a United Empire Loyalist, Hannah Peters Jarvis once had her own servants and slaves, now in 1845 she has fallen on hard times and looks after her grandchildren in a decaying mansion home.  A sense of foreboding and dramatic tension prevails as she struggles with her identity near the end of her life.   

William Porte’s diary provides a settler-gothic story.  A crackling fire introduces the scene of Porte writing by his hearth in the late 1870s about the escalating cases of incendiarism.  He is postmaster in the community where the infamous Donnelly family are murdered in their beds in 1880.  In the months and years that follow, an unsettling sense that justice hasn’t been done ensues. 

William Sunter and his great-great granddaughter speak across the centuries, he about

strategies pioneering just east of Guelph in 1857and she about finding and transcribing his diary online one-hundred and sixty years later. 

James Cameron is a riverman living on an Island at the time of Confederation.  He is in tune with his environment, hunting, fishing, and trapping with his male friends. 

In the show about Ann Amelia Day Sunley, we feel the excitement of preparations leading up to her marriage day and then learn how her family helps her set up home in a new community in the 1870s.

Garrison Shadd 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 and his sons leave their own legacy in a diary revealing how they enacted community and were successful farmers.  Their 1885 diary is a narrative of self-governance, racial determinism, and uplift. 

Students have provided a diversity of thought-provoking perspectives and entertaining listening.

Their challenge has been to apply historical knowledge to the diary story they want to tell and then create visual images in the listener’s mind with sound.  They have learned to use a sound board and have created scripts that include narrator's exposition, character dialogue, and interviews.

This is experiential learning and a great way to share student research  - and history -  in a imaginative format with listeners.

 

Date

Diarist

Time Period

Place

Show created by

26 July

Hannah Peters Jarvis

1845

Niagara Township, Lincoln County

Fergus Maxwell

2 August

William Porte

1864-98

Lucan,

Middlesex County

Taylor Graham

9 August

William Sunter

1857

Eramosa Township, Wellington County

Victoria Hodgkinson

16 August

James Cameron

1867

Cameron Island, Glengarry County

Scott Jennings

23 August

Ann Amelia Day Sunley

1878-79

Eramosa Township, Wellington County

Courtney Svab

30 August

Garrison & William Shadd

1885

Raleigh Township, Kent County

Rebecca Pyrah