History News

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.

Our own Alice Glaze has won the Women's History Scotland Leah Leneman Essay Prize 2014 for her essay: "Women and Kirk Discipline: Prosecution, Negotiation and the Limits of Control." This prize is very prestigious and embellishes the Department's role as a preeminent site for Scottish Studies worldwide!

Alice is a third-year PhD candidate studying women's social and economic networks in seventeenth-century Scotland. Her work uses digital humanities tools such as mapping and network visualization to understand women's ties of kinship, trade and support in the town of Canongate, now part of Edinburgh's Royal Mile. Her winning essay explores the ambiguous and often contradictory relationship between the Canongate kirk session (local church court) and its female parishioners.

Congratulations from all of us! For more on the prize visit Women's History Scotland

Registration for the 2015 Tri-University History Conference is now open!  The Conference will be held on March 7 at at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo. The theme of the conference is War, Memory and Commemoration.

Visit the Tri-U website to register. 

by Teresa Pitman for @Guelph

African Canadians in Union Blue by Richard Reid, Professor Emeritus looks at why so many black Canadians left the safety of home to serve in a foreign war.

Each year Canada honours the legacy of black Canadians during Black History Month in February, and Canadians can gain insight into the experiences of black Canadians and their vital role in the country’s history. But what many people might not know is these contributions extended beyond the border. In the years before the American Civil War, many African-Americans moved to Canada – or, more accurately, the territories that would become Canada in 1867 – seeking a better life without slavery or restrictive laws. Racism was still a reality in Canada, but it was not institutionalized as it was in the U.S.

read the rest of the story @Guelph