History News

This week, Dr. Susan Nance's research on historical circus elephants is featured on the Research Matters blog, sponsored by the Council of Ontario Universities.

After more than a century of parading in pink tutus with dogs balancing on their backs, elephants in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s circus are preparing to take their final bow. By 2018, the star performers will retire from the spotlight to live out their lives in an elephant conservation centre. 

These days, fewer and fewer circuses use elephants and their stage exit mirrors the public’s increased empathy toward these animals. But studying their heyday as performers reveals important insights about their audience, in other words, about us as consumer of entertainment. 

Enter Susan Nance, an associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Guelph whose research concentrates on entertainment, from vaudeville to street performers. Her interest in circus elephants was piqued after she uncovered “shocking things that circus historians don’t like to talk about,” says Nance, who set out to change the way historians look at animals. ... read the rest of the blog

Congratulations! Our own Professor Catharine Wilson is the 2014 winner of the Canadian Historical Review Prize for her article: “A Manly Art: Plowing, Plowing Matches, and Rural Masculinity in Ontario, 1800-1930," which appeared in the June 2014 issue of the Review. Dr. Wilson is Francis and Ruth Redelmeier Professor of Rural History in the Department.

praise from the CHR board: This article contributes to a now substantial body of literature on changing forms of masculinity in the context of industrial capitalism; unlike most existing work, however, this article considers farm men. Thus, it simultaneously contributes to rural history, and the history of rural work. It examines what is probably the activity most frequently associated with rural men, plowing, over a long period of time. In so doing, it is able to examine the intersections between technological change and intergenerational identity formation. Wilson makes use of an impressive diversity of sources including visual and audio-visual sources. Her attention to iconography is especially commendable and makes for a rich, multifaceted analysis. Her evocative writing conveys the physical and aesthetic pleasures of plowing. It is an exemplary piece of historical writing and argumentation, one that will have wide appeal and value for anyone interested in rural history, technological change, and/or masculinity.

On April 18 at Knox College, University of Toronto the University of Guelph Centre for Scottish Studies & Scottish Studies Foundation present the 2015 Scottish Studies Spring Colloquium: "Sir John A. Macdonald's Legacy"

The Colloquium runs from 12noon to 4:30pm. All Welcome! For more information visit Scottish Studies

Get the schedule .pdf
Get the poster .pdf

Our own J. Andrew Ross, a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the History Department, has just published Joining the Clubs: The Business of the National Hockey League to 1945 with Syracuse University Press.

Congratulations from all of us!

from the jacket:   How did a small Canadian regional league come to dominate a North American continental sport? Joining the Clubs: The Business of the National Hockey League to 1945 tells the fascinating story. ... The NHL had a special challenge: unlike other major leagues, it was a binational league that had to sell and manage its sport in two different countries. Joining the Clubs pays close attention to these national differences, as well as to the context of a historical period characterized by war and peace, by rapid economic growth and dire recession, and by the momentous technological and social changes of the modern age.

Our own Dr. Joshua MacFadyen has accepted a tenure-track position as assistant professor at Arizona State University, beginning August 2015. Dr. MacFadyen earned his doctorate in our Department in 2010 and has since held a post-doc at the Historical GIS Lab at the University of Saskatechewan where he works in the Sustainable Farm Systems Project. Josh is also well known for his many years work with NiCHE, the Network in Canadian History and Environment and his research on energy, soil nutrient, and landscape sustainability in historical agro-ecosystems.

Congratulations from all of us!

Dr. Susan Nance's recent book, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) is a finalist for the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize. Sponsored by the Canadian Historical Association (CHA), the Prize recognizes outstanding scholarly books in non-Canadian history. The winner will be announced at the CHA Annual Meeting at the University of Ottawa on June 2.

Dr. Nance is Associate Professor of US History in the Department and affiliated faculty with the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare. Her research examines the histories of live performance and communication, with a special focus on animals in entertainment.

Dr. Jennifer Bonnell, a 2011-2013 SSHRC Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department, is on the short list for the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize for her recent book, Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto's Don River Valley. Sponsored by the Canadian Historical Association, the Prize is one of the most prestigious for a historian of Canada, and awarded each year at the Governor General Awards for Excellence in Teaching Canadian History at Rideau Hall in Ottawa and at the CHA’s Annual Meeting. Visit the book at University of Toronto Press. For more on the Prize, visit the Canadian Historical Association

Congratulations from all of us!

from the jacket
With Reclaiming the Don, Jennifer L. Bonnell unearths the missing story of the relationship between the river, the valley, and the city, from the establishment of the town of York in the 1790s to the construction of the Don Valley Parkway in the 1960s. Demonstrating how mosquito-ridden lowlands, frequent floods, and over-burdened municipal waterways shaped the city’s development, Reclaiming the Don illuminates the impact of the valley as a physical and conceptual place on Toronto’s development.

University of Guelph Archival & Special Collections is excited to announce the launch of the Scottish Chapbook Digital Humanities site! This collaborative project between the University of Guelph Library and Centre for Scottish Studies will provide unprecedented free online access to a hidden collection of over 600 chapbooks housed in Archival & Special Collections, as well as essays and exhibits to interpret and contextualize them.
The site was made possible, in part, by undergraduate students in History in our Digital Humanities fourth-year seminar work-study project, who prepared the reproductions of the chapbooks that appear on the site. The digital archive will go live on March 26th, so stay tuned...

Associate Professor Susan Nance is interviewed today about the unexpected, industry-shifting announcement by Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus that they will phase out elephants in their shows by 2018. Dr. Nance is featured on KCRW Public Radio in Los Angeles , WHYY Public Radio in Philadelphia, and 570 News Kitchener, and in Think Progress, The Atlantic, and The Guardian.

This week, Dr. Nance also contributes her insight on "The Troubling Origins of the Circus Elephant Act" on the Johns Hopkins University Press Blog.

  from the jacket

General stores are essential to the image of a colonial village. Many historians, however, still base their stories of settlement on the notion of rural self-sufficiency, begging the question: if general stores were so common, who were their customers?

To answer this, Consumers in the Bush draws on the account books of country stores, rich evidence that has rarely been used. Douglas McCalla considers more than 30,000 transactions on the accounts of 750 families at seven Upper Canadian stores between 1808 and 1861. In telling us about the goods colonists bought, this book explores what they were used for and the stories they allow us to tell about rural lives and experience. By seeing rural Upper Canadians as consumers, Consumers in the Bush reveals them as full participants in the rapidly changing nineteenth-century global world of goods.

Book Launch sponsored by The Rural History Roundtable: April 7, 3:30-5:00 - Grad Lounge/5th fl. UC

Visit the book at McGill Queens University Press