College News

Toronto’s reggae roots are explored this weekend with Harbourfront’s Island Soul festivities and the Irie Music Festival (with a ceremonial opening at Nathan Phillips Square on Friday with appearances by acts from the Queen Street West reggae scene in the 1970s and ’80s). We spoke with Juno-nominated reggae-jazz keyboardist and historian Jason Wilson about the city’s Jamaican dance music past.

Read the interview at the Globe and Mail

Professor Kris Inwood's new edited collection has just been published and features insights from Kris' work with the Historical Data Research Unit in the Department. Congratulations from all of us!
   from the jacket: Collective histories and broad social change are informed by the ways in which personal lives unfold. Lives in Transition examines individual experiences within such collective histories during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This collection brings together sources from Europe, North America, and Australia in order to advance the field of quantitative longitudinal historical research.

Read more at McGill Queen's University Press

Our own Dr. Christine Ekholst has just published a monograph, A Punishment for Each Criminal: Gender and Crime in Swedish Medieval Law, with Brill.

from the dust jacket: A Punishment for Each Criminal is the first in-depth analysis of how gender influenced Swedish medieval law. Christine Ekholst demonstrates how the law codes gradually and unevenly introduced women as possible perpetrators for all serious crimes. The laws reveal that legislators not only expected men and women to commit different types of crimes; they also punished men and women in different ways if they were convicted. The laws consistently stipulated different methods of executions for men and women; while men were hanged or broken on the wheel, women were buried alive, stoned, or burned at the stake. A Punishment for Each Criminal explores the background to the important legislative changes that took place when women were made personally responsible for their own crimes.

A journalist asked me recently ‘what were you doing when the Berlin Wall fell?’ I was fourteen years old in 1989; I wasn’t thinking about the collapse of communism, but about scoring goals in my next football match. Football, not politics, was the centre of my world. And I wasn’t the only one. Andy Meyer, a teammate of the future German goalkeeper Robert Enke, recalled how their team in the East German town of Jena barely noticed the momentous events of 1989 and 1990. ‘There was nothing crucial about it for us kids. The football training just went on.’ Football can be appropriated by mighty organisations. It can also resist them. The journalist’s question got me thinking again about the title of my new book on East German football, The People’s Game.

read the rest of Alan McDougall's post at the Cambridge University Press blog

History doctoral student, Marc-André Gagnon, was interviewed on Radio-Canada over the weekend about his research on St-Jean-Baptiste Day (June 24), which celebrates the patron saint of French-Canada. The interview is about how it has been celebrated in Ontario. In Quebec, the day is currently known as la Fête Nationale. Listen to the interview.

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, Alan McDougall was thinking about what was often on his 14-year-old mind: soccer. The end of the Cold War registered only as a backdrop to the coming weekend’s contest on the pitch in southern England. “I do remember playing football that weekend, and somehow having an association of my regular life going on while these events were occurring that were world-changing,” says McDougall, now a U of G history professor. 
read the rest of the story @Guelph

Prof. Kevin James has just published a new book: Tourism, Land and Landscape in Ireland: The Commodification of Culture with Routledge. The study explores a broad range of evocative Irish travel writing from 1850 to 1914, much of it highly entertaining and heavily laced with irony and humour, to draw out interplays between tourism, travel literature and commodifications of culture. The book focuses on the importance of informal tourist economies, illicit dimensions of tourism, national landscapes, ‘legend’ and invented tradition in modern tourism.
Congratulations from all of us!

Associate Professor, Dr. Alan McDougall has completed new book on the politics of sport in cold war-era East Germany: The People's Game: Football, State and Society in East Germany. The book is published by Cambridge University Press this June. Congratulations from all of us!