History News

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
 

Little-known Canadian helped transform public health nursing

     By Teresa Pitman - Friday, February 27, 2015

University of Guelph professor Susan Armstrong-Reid's book about Canadian nurse Lyle Creelman. Creelman Hall is familiar to everyone in the University of Guelph community, and many know that the building is named for George Creelman, a former president of the Ontario Agricultural College.

There’s another Creelman, a distant cousin of George’s, who was equally accomplished and who left her mark in the field of public health and nursing in Canada and internationally. Lyle Morrison Creelman died in 2007 at the age of 98, but U of G history professor Susan Armstrong-Reid interviewed her a few years previously and says, “She was a woman of strong character until the end...

Read the rest of the story @Guelph

Summer 2015:
HIST*3130 DE - Popular Culture and Punishment
       (new as a DE course)
HIST*2280 DE - Hockey in Canadian History

Fall 2015:
HIST*3260 - Cinema and the Moving Image

Visit our course outlines page and WebAdvisor for more info.

Our next Scottish Studies Roundtable Series is on March 2 from 4-5:30pm in MCKN 132. Ryan Burns of Northwestern University, will give a presentation titled "Cromwell, Lord Protector of Catholics? Strange Bedfellows in Cromwellian Scotland." This presentation "will explain why Scottish Catholics welcomed Cromwell, a man whose massacres in Ireland were well known, and a man who saw Catholicism as a “false, abominable and Antichristian doctrine” full of “useless orders and traditions”. It is part of a larger project on anti-popery and religious toleration’s failure to rise in early modern Scotland."

Ryan Burns is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University, specializing in British and European history. His work explores the ways in which early modern societies coped with religious diversity, and the reasons why toleration or secularism emerged in some regions while sectarian animosities persisted in others. Ryan holds a BA in History and Political Science from Kenyon College and an MPhil in early modern history from the University of Cambridge.

As always, light refreshments will be provided. Email scottish@uoguelph.ca for more details. The event is open to the public.

Our own Dr. Alan McDougall is quoted in a recent McLean's article on the political biography of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Read the article at McLean's.