History News

Jacqueline Murray, Professor in the Department and Director of First Year Seminars at the University of Guelph, has published a new edited collection: Marriage in Premodern Europe: Italy and Beyond (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012).

from the jacket...
The articles in this volume provide an overview of the issues and complexities that informed marriage in the premodern West. They provide a series of ...

by Teresa Pitman
Canada’s Food Guide has gone through a number of transformations since the creation of its predecessor – the more sternly named Canada’s Official Food Rules – 70 years ago. In comparison to the original Food Rules, the current Food Guide has fewer food groups, no specific recommendations about eating four to six slices of “Canada Approved Vitamin B Bread” per day, and definitely no rifle-toting milk bottles marching off to war on the posters and pamphlets promoting it. As post-doc Ian Mosby found in his doctoral research on the history of food and nutrition in Canada during the Second World War, the original Food Rules document certainly bore the mark of its wartime origins.
Read the rest of the story @Guelph

Our own Graeme Morton has written a new book: Ourselves and Others: Scotland 1832-1914, published by Edinburgh University Press just last month.

From the dust jacket:
What does it mean to be a Scot and what forged that identity?

This revised and updated volume of the New History of Scotlandseries explores a period of intense identity formation in Scotland. Examining the 'us and them' mentality, it delivers an account of the blended nature of Scottish society through the transformations of the industrial era from 1832 to 1914.

 

A new book on Lucy Maud Montgomery edited and introduced by retired University of Guelph professors Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston has received positive reviews in the Winnipeg Free Press and in the Globe and Mail.
The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery The PEI Years, 1889-1900 presents the full text of Montgomery’s journals of that period along with a selection of photographs, clippings and captions. The book is considered "a welcome addition to our knowledge of Montgomery’s life and legacy" and supplements the first volume of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, published in 1985.
Read the story @Guelph.

Today one of our very own Post Doctoral Researchers, Dr. Ian Mosby, is interviewed in the Globe and Mail for a story about aboriginal food culture: "According to food historian Ian Mosby, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Guelph, Canadians typically think of aboriginal food as only consisting of precontact ingredients due to ignorance about native people’s lives. The idea that aboriginal food has been frozen in time from an era before European settlement also sidesteps some unpleasant historical facts."
Read "Bannock tacos, fried baloney – this is aboriginal cuisine?"

History professor Matthew Hayday will be featured on the CTV News Channel program Afternoon Express today at 2:30 p.m.
He will be discussing about the continued relevance of bilingualism and the official languages policy of the federal government. Hayday, who studies official languages in education, was a contributor to the book Life After Forty: Official Languages Policy in Canada. It examines the country’s Official Languages Act and discusses why, despite the act, bilingualism in English Canada is only slightly higher than it is in the United States.
     Watch the clip here
Hayday is currently researching the history of bilingualism in English-speaking Canada. He is also the author of Bilingual Today, United Tomorrow, which was a finalist for the Harold Adams Innis Prize, awarded to the best Canadian book in English in the social sciences. The award is administered by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

read the rest of the story...

 Two official languages affirm pride in our past, prepare us for the future. BY SHIONA MACKENZIE, FRIDAY, JUNE 29, 2012

Along with national pride, controversies over bilingualism in Canada often surge around July 1. History professor Matthew Hayday frequently attends the annual “birthday party” on Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, where celebrations include the noontime playing of “O Canada” and flights by the Snowbirds aerobatics team. But he isn’t there just for fun; he is a keen observer of the symbolism connected with Canada’s identity, a researcher who focusses on issues of public policy, English-French relations, and federalism and identity politics in Canada. 

Read the rest of the story @Guelph

BY TERESA PITMAN for @ Guelph, MONDAY, JUNE 25, 2012
 
Think of them as the 19th-century version of TripAdvisor with one major disadvantage: the hotel and inn visitors’ books of that time period were kept on-site, so you couldn’t read warnings like the one above until after you checked in. History professor Kevin James is using the visitors’ books from several Irish inns and hotels to describe how people narrated their travel experiences. The project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Read the rest of the story @ Guelph.

The Department's own Dr. Terry Crowley has been awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in recognition of his services to the community. The medal will be given at a Guelph Arts Council ceremony in the Fall of 2012. Congratulations from all of us!

Oh, The Humanities!: Canada’s Language Czars Losing their Voice

By Kathryn Blaze Carlson for the National Post, May 30, 2012

Matthew Hayday remembers singing along to Angele Arsenault’s Bonjour, My Friend as it spun on his Fisher Price record player as a child. His parents had brought the album home for him, along with a bilingual boardgame he used to play with his sisters.

The record and the boardgame were both part of an educational kit called Oh! Canada, produced by the country’s first Commissioner of Official Languages and doled out for free somewhere in the order of two million copies. It was 1974 — five years after prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s government passed the Official Languages Act and enshrined Canadians’ rights to access government services in the language of their choice. The act tasked the commissioner with protecting the status of both English and French and, most explicitly, with conducting investigations into language-related complaints. (Read the story)