History News

The Department is delighted to announce the appointment of our new Post-Doctoral Researcher, Dr. Allyson Stevenson.

Dr. Alan McDougall tells us that his recent book The People's Game: Football, State and Society has just come out in paperback with Cambridge University Press.

A new, mandatory course for all first year History majors and minors:

HIST*1050 Invitation to History

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 one of the following two classes:

On September 24th, the Rural Diary Archive celebrated its first anniversary. To date volunteers have transcribed 1,630 diary pages in this ongoing crowdsourcing project.

Webmaster Julia Barclay is a third-year history student and busy uploading additional diaries from across Ontario for people to read, search and transcribe online. Cathy Wilson, Founder and Director of the project, will be speaking to several groups in Wellington County this year as we now have 24 diarists from the County. Check out our diaries for 1867 as we approach Canada’s sesquicentennial.

The Department is very delighted to announce that, beginning in January 2017, Brittany Luby will be joining our faculty. Professor Luby comes to us from Laurentian University.   

University of Guelph history professor Kevin James has a genuine passion for researching tourism history in the United Kingdom. From 2010 to 2012, James had the opportunity to lend his expertise to the BBC program Grand Tours of Scotland.

This June, Alan Gordon and Susan Nance are featured in a special issue of Histoire sociale/Social History on tourism in Canada with articles on pioneer villages as living history museums, and on horses of the 1920s Calgary Stampede, respectively.

It is with great sadness that we note the passing on July 15 of History Department Professor Emerita Mary Rogers.

Mary completed her education at the University of Pennsylvania and worked for almost a decade at Sweet Briar College before coming to the University of Guelph in 1966. She was trained in medieval religious history.

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)

Dr. Gregory Klages, a long-time instructor 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.