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)
Historical books, re-enactments and tourism capture public interest... By Teresa Pitman for @Guelph
The word “amateur” – meaning someone who engages in a pursuit for love, not money – often has negative connotations. A professional gets the job done right; an amateur may just be a bumbler. But history professor Alan Gordon is more positive about amateur historians than you might expect from someone who has made history his profession. “They play an important role in getting historical issues discussed and debated,” he says. Read the rest of the story @Guelph
An opinion piece by history professor Jacqueline Murray about Monday’s Ontario Court of Appeal decision regarding sex-trade workers appears today in the Globe and Mail. Murray, the director of the First-Year Seminars program, is a medieval historian whose research focuses on sex, sexuality and gender. Her op-ed article discusses examines the history of the sex-trade industry and the legalization of brothels. The Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that many sections of Canada’s criminal code violated the rights of sex-trade workers.
To coincide with College Royale, the Department of History also presents Dr. Janet Golden: "Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome". Janet Golden is Professor of History at Rutgers University - Camden and is the author of A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (Harvard University Press, 2005). She is currently working on a book on the history of babies. Visit http://dept.camden.rutgers.edu/jgolden Get the flyer: (.pdf)
College Royal is a University open house featuring campus research and teaching in agriculture and animal science. It's a family-day with lots for kids and interested members of the public to see. See you there!
by Andrew Vowles for @Guelph
Once a month, Deborah Livingston-Lowe leaves her Toronto Beaches home, heads to the Ontario Science Centre (OSC) and steps back into the Victorian era. As with other occasional OSC volunteers, she spends a day recreating patterns of a prominent 19th-century Ontario weaver on a massive, one-of-a-kind loom now owned by the science centre. But Livingston-Lowe has a deeper connection to the loom and its maker. This fall she began a master’s degree in U of G’s history department studying Scottish immigrant weaver John Campbell, who spent almost four decades near London, Ont., turning out Jacquard coverlets and rugs, blankets and flannel items on that loom. Besides highlighting his early work, her research will likely help correct a few romantic misconceptions and stereotypes about 19th-century lives, says her adviser, Prof. Catharine Wilson, a specialist in Canadian rural history.
Read the rest of the story @Guelph
Some of Canada’s most respected and popular War of 1812 historians will gather at the University of Guelph Feb. 25 for a War of 1812 bicentennial symposium. The event, which is open to the public, will include re-enactors in period costumes, storytelling, public talks and battle re-creations. Uniformed “soldiers” will help direct people to the conference, to be held in Rozanski Hall. The event is sponsored by U of G’s Department of History and the Cambridge, Ont.-based 41st Regiment of Foot re-enactment group, as well as “living history” groups in London and Hamilton, the Wellington County Museum, the Guelph Historical Society and Guelph Museums.
Read the rest of the story and find registration details @Guelph
