History News

Mark your calendars! The Centre for Scottish Studies Fall Colloquium will take place on Saturday, September 26!

This year's colloquium will feature presentations from:
Ewen Cameron (University of Edinburgh), presenting the Jill McKenzie Memorial Lecture;
Allan Kennedy (University of Manchester), winner of the Frank Watson Book Prize, 2015;
Michael Newton (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), launching his new book Seanchaidh na Coille / The Memory-Keeper of the Forest
Debra Nash-Chambers (Wilfrid Laurier University).

Location: The Robert Whitelaw Room (room 246) of the University of Guelph Library
Time: The Colloquium will run from 10:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; on-site registration will be available from 9:30 a.m. in the Library lobby.
Parking: Nearby visitor parking lots on campus are P44 (access from College Ave East) and P31 (access from South Ring Road). Detailed directions to these and other campus parking lots can be found here: www.parking.uoguelph.ca/find-parking

Online registration is now available! Registration is $30 for Scottish Studies Foundation members and for early-bird registrants on or before September 18; the price increases to $35 for non-SSF registrants after that date. A student rate of $10 is available. As always, lunch and coffee break refreshments are included in the registration price. For more information, or to register online, visit www.uoguelph.ca/scottish/events/fall. If you have any questions, please contact us at scottish@uoguelph.ca. Get the poster .pdf

We look forward to seeing you at the Colloquium on September 26!

Dr. Catharine Wilson heads up a team including undergraduate students Sarah Kelly and Lisa Tubb, graduate students Jodey Nurse and Jacqui McIsaac, along with Adam Doan and others from McLaughlin Library, building a new website that engages the public in online transcribing of old diaries. Sponsored by the Francis and Ruth Redelmeier Professorship in Rural History, the site currently showcases over 130 diarists from across Ontario (1800-1960) with over twenty full-text diaries available for people to read, search and transcribe.

Join us on Thursday, September 24, 2015 for the official launch of the Rural Diary Archive Website and a Transcribe-A-Thon!

The event will take place on the first floor of the University of Guelph’s McLaughlin Library in the Academic Town Square from 2:30 PM to 5:30 PM. There will be diaries on display and a draw for prizes! Bring your laptop and make your mark on history by helping to transcribe these digital diaries into searchable text. Come learn more about local rural history and the diarists who helped document it.

Please RSVP to ruraldiaryarchive@gmail.com or call 519-824-4120 x53888 by September 15th, 2015.

get the eVite .pdf

Today in The Atlantic, History Ph.D. candidate  Mark Sholdice explains what Henry Ford and Donald Trump have in common.

Trump—a billionaire business mogul who’s put his name everywhere, and blends anti-immigrant rhetoric with promises to put Americans back to work and make the nation great again—has seen his presidential prospects take flight, eclipsing the establishment candidates of the Republican Party in the early polls. Historians are looking for precedents for his run. Ross Perot? Strom Thurmond? George Wallace?

No, says Mark Sholdice, a doctoral candidate at the University of Guelph:

"Like Trump, Ford’s business success made him a household name. Like Trump, he promised to be a man of action, thinking bigger than government bureaucrats would dare to dream...."

Read the rest of the story at The Atlantic

Recent graduate Katie Anderson (MA '14) is giving a presentation on July 4th at Doon Heritage Village of the Waterloo Regional Museum on her Master's Thesis research, completed here in the Department last year. Katie's talk is part of the "History Under the Trees" event sponsored by the Waterloo Historical Society, which this year is themed: "Barnyard Genealogy: Livestock in Early Twentieth Century Ontario." Katie's excellent thesis, “'Hitched Horse, Milked Cow, Killed Pig': Pragmatic Stewardship and the Paradox of Human/Animal Relationships in Southern Ontario, 1900-1920" contributes to the Department's strengths in Canadian rural history. Katie is also currently a teacher-interpreter at Joseph Schneider Haus, and just finished a Bachelor of Education. 

For more on "History Under the Trees" visit Doon Heritage Village.

Belly dance is an art form celebrated and practised among many cultures and regions of the world — including Canada, new research shows. University of Guelph history PhD student Anne Vermeyden, a dancer herself, is investigating the rich but largely unwritten past of belly dance in Toronto, and why it has flourished there. So far, most research on belly dance history in North America has been largely focused on the United States. Vermeyden says the art form's presence in Canada should be recognized, too. ...

read the rest of the story at the Guelph Mercury

PhD candidate Sarah Shropshire's article "What’s a Guy To Do?: Contraceptive Responsibility, Confronting Masculinity, and the History of Vasectomy in Canada" has recently been awarded the Canadian Historical Association's Jean-Marie Fecteau Prize for the best article published in a peer-reviewed journal by a PhD or MA-level student. In exploring the history of vasectomy, Sarah's article consciously challenges the gendered paradigm that scholars have applied to the history of contraception while also discussing how evolving surgical techniques and social constructions of masculinity have affected the popularity of the procedure. Sarah's article appeared last year in the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History.

Congratulations from all of us!

This year's winner of the J. W. Skinner Medal is recent graduate Steven Rai. The medal is the most prestigious University Convocation award for an undergraduate student at the University of Guelph and is awarded by the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences to a student for exceptional achievement in both academic and extracurricular activities.

Steven is an International Development major who has taken many courses with the Department. He is also familiar to the History Department through his fine work on the 1861 Census Project and the People in Motion research team, supervised by Drs. Kris Inwood and J. Andrew Ross. Congratulations from all of us!

We recently received the excellent news that Dr. Andrew Ross, who has served as a postdoctoral fellow in our Department for many years, has accepted a job with Disposition and Discoverability Task Force at Library and Archives Canada. We all congratulate Andrew and wish him well at his new appointment in Ottawa.

Andrew, we will miss you!

Rural History at Guelph is proud to host the Artifacts in Agraria Symposium October 17 and 18, sponsored by the Francis and Ruth Redelmeier Professorship in Rural History.

Join historians, archaeologists, sociologists and museum professionals from across North America as they explore the material artifacts of everyday life. Observe how these historical sources gather meaning when understood in the context of surviving written records, family history and international commerce. Join the discussion on how artifacts reflect aesthetic and cultural beliefs, symbolize self-identity, affirm values, tell stories, purvey heritage and change meaning over time. Celebrate the new methods and ways of viewing artifacts that deepen our understanding of rural life.

Admission is free when you register before August 3rd, contact Jodey Nurse - jnurse@uoguelph.ca
For more information contact Dr. Catharine Wilson - cawilson@uoguelph.ca or visit Rural History

Get the final schedule .pdf        Get the poster .pdf

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