news
10th Anniversary Season!
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)
Rural History Roundtable Call for Papers
After a great Winter season of speakers (.pdf), we're excited about planning the upcoming year. If you’d like to present your work to the Rural Roundtable this coming year (Fall 2011 and Winter 2012) please submit a brief proposal to cawilson@uoguelph.ca consisting of a few sentences describing your proposed paper and your preferred time of year to present. (If you have suggestions for speakers from Guelph or beyond, these are welcome too.)
A schedule of meeting dates, speakers and topics will be available in September.
- Catharine, July 2011
Sharon Weaver featured by @Guelph
Our own PhD candidate, Sharon Weaver is featured in @Guelph magazine on the university website this month, and talks about her research into the "Back to the Land" movements of late twentieth-century Canada. read more...
The Winter 2011 schedule of speakers for the Rural History Roundtable is now available: (.pdf)
Congratulations to Catharine Wilson on the publication of her new book, Tenants in Time: Family Strategies, Land, and Liberalism in Upper Canada, 1799-1871 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009) - Jan. 2009
Distinguished rural historian to be Visiting Professor at Guelph.
The Department of History is please to announce that Dr. Royden Loewen, Chair of Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg, will be a Visiting Professor in the Department during his sabbatical leave in 2007-2008. Dr. Loewen is the author or editor of numerous books, including the award-winning Family, church, and market : a Mennonite community in the Old and the New Worlds, 1850-1930 (1993); Hidden worlds : revisiting the Mennonite migrants of the 1870s (2001); and most recently Diaspora in the countryside : two Mennonite communities and mid-twentieth-century rural disjuncture (2006). For further information on Dr. Loewen, please see his website at the University of Winnipeg, Mennonite Studies.
Congratulations to Amy Parker, who has very successfully defended her MA thesis, "'Making the Most of What We Have': The Women's Institutes of Huron County, Ontario during the Inter-War Period." The thesis examines the many activities of four branches of the WI through close investigation of their minutes, and situates their interests and orientation in relation to larger historiography of the WI and of women in North America in the post-suffrage period. - Feb. 2007
The supplementary List of Business Account Booksnow references over fifty account books held at the Provincial Archives of Ontario. Click this link to download the complete list in MS Excel format. Several new links have been added to the Business Account Books and Geographic Information Systems pages. - Dec. 2006
Congratulations to Sharon Weaver, PhD Candidate, Department of History, for successfully defending her comprehensive exams in October. She is now collecting oral research for her dissertation on the back to the land movement. - Oct. 2006
New Material on Business Account Books
A full-text file for researchers studying nineteenth-century accounting practices is available on the Business Account Books page. As well, the List of Business Account Books has been expanded to include material found at the Archives of Ontario. - June 2006
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Rural History
This new web page in the "Resources" section introduces applications that can help rural historians maximize the spatial components of their research. The essay includes a case study, and it emphasizes the many online resources available to the public as well as the data and training available to the Guelph community. - May 2006
Rural History at UG Welcomes Michelle Hamilton
Michelle is a new postdoctoral fellow in the department of History. She recently obtained her PhD from Western and is a Guelph grad (History & Anthropology BA, 1995). She also has an MA in Public History from Western in 1997 and was a curator at the Glenbow in Calgary for two years before returning for PhD studies. She works on the nineteenth century collection of native artifacts and bones, and pays particular attention to how native people responded to these collectors. Half of her time will be devoted to her own research, and half will be devoted to work on the 1891 Census project. - Sept. 2005