History News

Quilting bees. Threshing bees. Barn-raisings. Friendly, hard-working neighbours gathering together to get things done. It’s one of those rural traditions that we tend to look back on nostalgically. But there’s another side to these “bees,” says history professor Catharine Wilson. Sometimes, everything went wrong. “There were serious, sometimes fatal, accidents and fights frequently broke out. Some turned into major brawls. I even found information about 16 cases of murder at the bees or right afterwards. She calls them “bees-gone-wrong.”

Read the whole story by Teresa Pitman @Guelph

Visit our job postings page to see the available positions and applications procedures:
http://www.uoguelph.ca/history/job-postings
Applications due by February 4, 2012.

The Department's famous Rural History Roundtable is ten years old! Congratulations to Dr. Catharine Wilson, Dr. Douglas McCalla and all the speakers and coordinators who have made the Roundtable a College of Arts institution over the years. The Winter 2012 Roundtable schedule will carry on this great tradition with speakers addressing tourism, consumer culture, rural amusements and more. Get the schedule (.pdf)

A University of Guelph economics professor belongs to a winning team in a prestigious humanities and social sciences research competition. Kris Inwood’s project in mining information from one of the largest population databases in the world was named one of the victors of the 2012 Digging Into Data Challenge today. Sponsored by Canada, the United States, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the competition promotes innovative research using digital resources to learn about people and cultures and to develop multidisciplinary partnerships.

... is now available at http://www.uoguelph.ca/history/NewsletteroftheDepartment
The Newsletter of the Department is published each January and September. For more information or to send news, please contact Dr. Susan Nance, snance@uoguelph.ca  or visit www.uoguelph.ca/history

by Teresa Pitman

It was a trend that was promoted by the highest levels of government at the time. Pierre Elliot Trudeau had hitchhiked around Europe and the Middle East as a young man, long before he became prime minister. In 1970, apparently remembering his own experiences in a positive way, he publicly advised young Canadians to “Hit the road. Drive or hitchhike and see what Canada’s all about.” Many teens and young adults took his advice to heart, and hitchhikers with their thumbs stuck out became a familiar sight on Canadian highways. U of G history professor Linda Mahood never hitched across Canada, but she did hitchhike around her home in Saskatchewan and later on Vancouver Island. “When I mentioned this to some of the students in my women’s history class, they were horrified,” says Mahood. “That’s when I started to get interested in the history of hitchhiking.”

by Teresa Pitman

Which Christian denomination holds the most appeal for people in Africa? It’s not mainstream in Canada, but Pentecostalism is the largest and fastest-growing denomination of Christianity in Nigeria – in fact, it’s ranked number one in all of Africa and in much of Asia and South America as well. “Some estimates show that globally, it’s surpassed the Catholic Church,” says U of G history professor Femi Kolapo.

History professor Matthew Hayday is making headlines today discussing bilingualism in English Canada. The article appears in today’s Montreal Gazette. He is a contributor to a new book due out next month, 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. Hayday, who studies official languages in education, contributed an article to the book, Finessing Federalism: The Development of Institutional and Popular Support for Official Languages and is currently researching the history of bilingualism in English-speaking Canada. Matthew is associate professor in the Department and the author of Bilingual Today, United Tomorrow (McGill-Queens University Press, 2005).

Small and polluted, the river is still a drawing card for people...     by Teresa Pitman for @Guelph
Jennifer Bonnell became interested in the Don River because it was so different from the rivers she’d known as a child. “When I first moved to Toronto in 2001, I rode my bike a lot to familiarize myself with my new surroundings. The bike path along the Don was one of the places I returned to again and again. “Having grown up on Vancouver Island, the rivers I knew were rushing, powerful and relatively clean. I had little experience with urban rivers. I was struck by the fact that despite the Don’s insignificant size, and its polluted condition, people were still drawn to it.” (read the rest of the story)

The 18th Annual Tri-University History Conference will be held at Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) on Saturday March 3, 2012. The Tri-University Graduate History Program, one of Canada's largest and most comprehensive, unites graduate faculty and students at the University of Guelph, the University of Waterloo, and Wilfrid Laurier University.