The CHA Journal Prize ( The best article from #1 and #2 issues) - 2021

Cheryl Thompson

Cheryl Thompson, “Black Minstrelsy on Canadian Stages: Nostalgia for Plantation Slavery in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.”

The CHA Journal Prize is awarded for an article from the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association that presents rigorous research in an accessible academic form to make a significant contribution to the understanding of history. The winner of the 2021 CHA Journal Prize is Cheryl Thompson, for “Black Minstrelsy on Canadian Stages: Nostalgia for Plantation Slavery in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” With its examination of Black actors performing in minstrel shows, this article provides a new way to think about anti-Black racism and xenophobia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reviewers and editors commented on the “rich and robust” research with primary sources, and found that it will make an excellent contribution to Black studies, cultural history, and performance histories.

Canadian Committee on Migration, Ethnicity and Transnationalism Article Prize - 2021

Christopher Crocker

Christopher Crocker, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Vínland: History, Whiteness, Indigenous Erasure, and the Early Norse Presence in Newfoundland,” Canadian Journal of History vol. 55, 102 (2020): 91-122. 

The brief Norse presence in Newfoundland has led to many economic opportunities within provincial tourism and cultural heritage industries but has also served to uphold harmful and outdated colonial traditions concerning the area’s Indigenous peoples, cultures, and histories. Christopher Crocker challenges these longstanding interpretations and asserts that they have obfuscated, decontextualized, and misrepresented Newfoundland’s Indigenous histories. In the process his research provides an important example of public history and scholarly advocacy that blends colonial discourse theory and Indigenous scholarship to decolonize the early Norse presence in Newfoundland. Crocker convincingly urges a reconsideration of this narrative with the re-insertion of the Indigenous presence and a call to rectify a harmful traditional colonial narrative.  

Best Article Prize in Labour History - 2021

David Thompson

David Thompson, “’More Sugar, Less Salt’: Edith Hancox and the Passionate Mobilization of the Dispossessed, 1919-1928,” Labour/Le Travail, 85 (Spring 2020): 127-163.

Meticulously researched, elegantly written, and conceptually imaginative, David Thompson’s detailed reconstruction of the origins and activism of Winnipeg’s Edith Hancox is a major accomplishment. In addressing the only woman known to have spoken before the massive Labor Church congregations meeting during the Winnipeg General Strike, Thompson adds a new dimension to that well-studied event in Canadian working-class studies. He reveals how Hancox’s socialist feminism complicates our understandings of both socialist organization and women’s particular contribution to struggles of the dispossessed in the 1920s. Recovering a long-obscured history, Thompson’s account is a testimony to how diligent research and imaginative interpretation can infuse new meaning into the subject of labour history.

The Hilda Neatby Prize - English Article - 2021

David Thompson

David Thompson, "More Sugar, Less Salt: Edith Hancox and the Passionate Mobilization of the Dispossessed, 1919–1928" Labour/Le Travail 85 (2020): 127-163. https://doi.org/10.1353/llt.2020.0005 

Little is known about the women who contributed to Winnipeg’s early twentieth-century labour movement.  David Thompson’s “More Sugar, Less Salt” intervenes by providing a fascinating analysis of one of the city’s most prolific labour activists: Edith Hancox.  Motivated by personal experience and political conviction, Hancox challenged the capitalist patriarchy in Winnipeg throughout the decade following the General Strike by organizing demonstrations, making public speeches, writing articles and letters, and performing essential but undervalued emotional labour.  Drawing from her writing as well as from archival, government, and family records, Thompson explains how a radical motherhood approach shaped Hancox’s social justice work. 

The Indigenous History Best Article Prize - 2021

Dean M. Jacobs & Victor P. Lytwyn

Dean M. Jacobs and Victor P. Lytwyn, “Naagan ge bezhig emkwaan: A Dish with One Spoon Reconsidered”. Ontario History, Volume 112, Issue 2, Fall 2020, p. 191–210.

In “Naagan ge bezhig emkwaan: A Dish with One Spoon Reconsidered” Victor P. Lytwyn and Dean M. Jacobs reveal how land acknowledgements premised on faulty historical understandings of Indigenous land relationships serve to undermine contemporary Indigenous land rights and sovereignty.  Rigorously sourced and expansive in historical scope, this article contributes both to Anishinaabe political and diplomatic histories, as well as to vital contemporary questions around the potentially negative implications of land acknowledgements.  The authors provide a thoroughly researched example of the importance of understanding the grounded specificities of Indigenous treaties as international agreements that regulate and enact sovereign decision-making over territory, both historically and in the present. In this way, the award-winning article affirms the historical importance and long-standing realities of Indigenous governance and ways of relating to the land as well as other nations.

Best Book in Political History Prize  - 2021

Heidi Bohaker

Heidi Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance. Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2020.

In Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance, Heidi Bohaker draws on a diverse and fragmented source base to produce a fascinating and original account of the principles and system of Anishinaabe governance dating to time immemorial and which also informed Anishinaabe responses to an evolving imperial/settler order. She uses what at first seem unassuming, if not marginal figures—doodem images—as a means to unfold the fundamentally different ontological premises that guide Anishinaabe peoples’ interactions with human and other-than-human beings, and explores the distinctive, yet also fluid political geometries that have characterized their social and legal relations over time. She demonstrates, convincingly, that there can be no reconciliation, let alone decolonization, in what is currently Canada without an accurate understanding of Anishinaabe peoples and other Indigenous Peoples and societies on their own terms. This book is a model for how settler scholars can and should conduct research into Indigenous histories—slowly and humbly, for settlers have much to unlearn that they have been taught, subconsciously as well as consciously, and that takes time and self-reflection; and always in conversation and collaboration with Indigenous people and communities. More broadly, this book is a model of how to write history that matters in the present and that can help fashion better futures for everyone in Canada. It reminds us that overlooking “small” things like doodem is perilous, for they contain multitudes—entire universes of meanings and relations—within them.

The Hilda Neatby Prize - French Article - 2021

Louise Bienvenue

Louise Bienvenue, « Façonner l’âme d’une nation par l’histoire : La vulgarisation historique, selon Marie-Claire Daveluy (1880-1968) ». Historical Studies in Education / Revue d’histoire de l’éducation, Fall/Autumn2020, p1-26.

In this article, Louise Bienvenue examines a specific aspect of the career of historian and writer Marie-Claire Daveluy (1880-1968), focusing on her role as a "popular educator. An archival enthusiast, Daveluy used many channels to disseminate her historical knowledge to diverse audiences of children and adults (stories, novels, radio programs, magazine articles, commemorative ceremonies). For her, history carried civic virtues and patriotic values, and she insisted, long before academic "women's history," on placing women back into the historical narrative. By analyzing Daveluy's varied contributions, drawing on personal correspondence and letters from female admirers, among others, Bienvenue recalls the importance of Daveluy's work in popular education and its influence on the formation of the "soul of a nation."

The CHA's Teaching Prizes - 2021

Mary Chaktsiris, Mairi Cowan, Gordon Baker

Early or Alternative Career Award, Canadian history

Mary Chaktsiris

Prof. Chaktsiris is an associate at the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University. Her nomination package impressed with creative approaches to historical primary source instruction focused on identifying, analysing, and sharing meaningful primary sources. In her pedagogical approach, primary sources illustrated “history as a process,” allowing students to learn to assess historical significance and multiple narratives across various modalities. In upper-level courses Prof. Chaktsiris developed primary source assignments for students to investigate what “counts” as a primary source. The “In Your Backyard” assignment enables students the space to engage with primary sources ranging from family photographs, public buildings, currency, corporate branding, and archival documents, while presenting them with the opportunity to communicate their findings in innovative ways. Prof. Chaktsiris also works closely with librarians and archivists across institutions to promote access to primary source collections and develop teaching programmes that include student engagement with research collections at their institution.

Early or Alternative Career Award, other than Canadian history
The prize was not awarded this year.

Open Career State Award, Canadian history
The prize was not awarded this year.

Open Career State Award, other than Canadian history

Mairi Cowan

Prof. Cowan is an associate professor (teaching stream) in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her impressive nomination package highlighted her dedication to maintaining a focus on primary sources in her teaching. Threaded throughout her courses are innovative assessments and dynamic pedagogical approaches to the use, interpretation, and critique of primary sources. In her first-year Introduction to History course (the largest course in the department and the second largest class at the University of Toronto), Prof. Cowan devotes much of her lesson time to teaching students how to locate, select, and ask the right questions of primary sources. Her innovation and creative use of primary source material is likewise evident throughout many of her upper-level courses. For example, students not only listen to music played by professional musicians in class, but also sing a medieval chant themselves while encouraged to critically analyse music as they would any other primary source. Prof. Cowan’s impressive dedication to teaching with primary sources and sharing pedagogical approaches to the use of primary sources extends beyond the classroom to include her graduate student teaching assistants, elementary students and instructors, the public. She has also authored various peer-reviewed publications.

Honourable Mention

Gordon Barker

Prof. Barker is a full professor in the Department of History at Bishop’s University. He teaches survey courses on American history, as well as upper-level courses on themes such as the American Civil War and Reconstruction, African American history, and Women in Early America. His dedication to student success, across various courses and levels, centres upon the use of primary sources as a way to excite and engage students in historical practice.  

The Eugene A. Forsey Prize - 2021

Mathieu Houle-Courcelles

Mathieu Houle-Courcelles, « “Ni Rome, ni Moscou” : l’itinéraire des militants communistes libertaires de langue française à Montréal pendant l’entre-deux-guerres », thèse de doctorat, Université Laval - Université Paris 1, 2020.

This dissertation examines the little-studied libertarian Communists of Montréal, from 1906 to 1937. Through a collective biography, or prosopography, of over 300 participants in this politically diverse milieu, Houle-Courcelles analyzes not only the politics of libertarian communism, but also the social and economic lives of its adherents. Using a creative methodology that combines traditional social history methods with digital humanities, Houle-Courcelles documents the evolving occupational, gender, ethnic, and household characteristics of the movement. Throughout, the findings are expertly situated within the context of pre-war Montréal and within the historiography of the Quebec, Canadian, and global lefts, to which the thesis makes an important contribution.

Honorable Mention

Mason Godden, “That ‘70s Strike Support:  Labour, Feminism, and the Left in three Ontario Strikes, 1972-1979,” M.A. Thesis, Trent University, 2019. 

Godden’s thesis focuses on three case studies of strikes in Ontario between 1972 to 1979, during a crucial decade for workers and their communities.  His analysis incorporates extensive primary and secondary sources including archival documents and oral history.  This thesis is a welcome addition to the corpus of post-Second World War Canadian labour and working-class history.

The Wallace K. Ferguson Prize - 2021

Rachel Hope Cleves

Rachel Hope Cleves’ Unspeakable : A Life Beyond Sexual Morality has stunned this jury. In its exposition of Norman Douglas's lifelong, self-consciously shameless pursuit of sex with children, this book accomplishes several significant feats, even amid a bumper crop of impressive scholarship. For its archival work spanning many types of documents and places, its pioneering use of children’s letters, its layered appeals to theory and secondary sources, and its smart, sensitive, elegant writing… for these virtues only, this book would be prizewinning. 

But on a broader plane, Unspeakable is particularly timely as we now reconsider the ‘art of bad men’, grapple with permitting freedom of speech for even ‘the unspeakable’, and struggle to recognize the power imbalances that structure sexual encounters in ways that complicate discourses of ‘consent’. The book defamilarizes such “familiar events” as early twentieth-century sexuality and the cosmopolitan world of letters, bringing to life a culture of post-war hedonism and sexual adventurism that invoked the allure of the pagan past to exploit the poverty and dislocation of children in a rapidly changing Europe. It forces the reader to historicize both moral norms to which they cling and the language of ‘monstrosity’ that pushes some kinds of harm outside the society that produces them. Rachel Hope Cleves risked a great deal in telling this story about intergenerational sex. The result is a gripping, heart-breaking biography that explodes the genre’s conundrum of sympathy for its subject.  

Shortlist

Katie Hindmarch-Watson, Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital (U. of California Press)

David Monod, Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890-1925 (U. of North Carolina Press)

Ishita Pande, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891-1937 (Cambridge University Press)

Despina Stratigakos, Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway (Princeton University Press)

Best Scholarly Article in Canadian Business History - 2021

Sarah Elvins & Janis Thiessen

CO-WINNERS

Sarah Elvins, “Lady Smugglers and Lynx-Eyed Customs Agents: Gender, Morality, and Cross-Border Shopping in Detroit and Windsor”. CHR, Volume 101 Issue 4, December 2020, pp. 497-521

This article offers a brilliant look at what Canadians and Americans have historically viewed as consumer necessities, and why. It also enables in-depth understandings of the lengths to which many consumers have gone to obtain foreign goods. By showing that Canadians and Americans regularly crossed the Detroit-Windsor border to buy items on each side between 1900 and 1960, Elvins reveals that when it came to material entitlement, consumers in both countries viewed their own countries’ laws as irrelevant. Ignoring customs regulations and risking fines, female shoppers, especially, purchased such items as meat, butter, and clothing on both sides of the border, and attempted to smuggle such items home, in a variety of ways. Revealing not only the gendered aspects of cross-border shopping, but also the motivations compelling such shoppers to break laws, this article makes a highly original and innovative contribution.

Janis Thiessen, “The Narrative Turn, Corporate Storytelling, and Oral History: Canada’s Petroleum Oral History Project and Truth and Reconciliation Commission Call to Action No. 92”. Enterprise and Society, 20, 1 (March 2019): 60-73.

This is an excellent, necessary, and important article on the pressing need for business historians to engage with the Truth and Reconciliation of Canada: Calls to Action report, particularly the call to action number 92, on the importance of adopting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a “reconciliation framework and to apply its principles, norms, and standards to corporate policy and … activities involving Indigenous peoples and their lands and resources.” In particular, argues Thiessen, corporate historians must engage in oral history work with Indigenous Peoples. Such partnerships will help reveal the role that business has played in resource development on Indigenous lands, and the impacts and profits, among other effects, that such developments have generated. By adopting this 92nd call to action, business historians will offer more critical, thorough, and fulsome histories of the companies and other entities that they study. They will also help to bring the goals of truth of reconciliation more centrally into their research, findings, and practice.

Network in Canadian History and Environment Prize for Best Article or Book Chapter - 2021

Shannon Stunden Bower

Shannon Stunden Bower, “Irrigation Infrastructure, Technocratic Faith, and Irregularities of Vision: Canada’s Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration in Ghana, 1965– 1970,” Agricultural History 93: 2 (2019), 311-340.

Shannon Stunden Bower’s brilliant analysis of the myriad shortcomings of Canadian development projects in postcolonial Ghana is a reminder that environmental history transcends national borders. This transnational case study focuses on damming and irrigation projects pursued by the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA)—first established in 1935 in response to drought and economic depression in the Canadian Prairie provinces—in Ghana’s northern hinterland region during the politically turbulent late 1960s. By showing how the legacy of PFRA officials acting as agents of settler colonialism in the Canadian West during the early twentieth century deeply shaped the institution’s myopic approach to water conservation and agricultural development work in West Africa, Stunden Bower points to contrasting but linked forms of colonialism between the global north and the global south.

Tensions quickly arose between PFRA workers and locals due to a range of factors—from Cold War-era pressures to outpace the Soviet Union in modernizing newly independent states to the fact that Canadian engineers who relocated their entire families to northern Ghana were more concerned with recreating the comforts of home than in learning about the specificities of the region’s land-use practices, ecology, or hydrology. As a result, PFRA recommendations tended to revert to lessons learned decades earlier in arid North American prairielands without sufficient adaptation to local circumstances or input from local experts. After a few frustrating years, the PRFA withdrew from northern Ghana, leaving its work unfinished. Not only did these incomplete projects represent the failure of the PRFA, but they also contributed to an increased prevalence of contagious diseases in the region. In crafting her argument, Stunden Bower incorporates the history of climate, disease, engineering, Cold War diplomacy, and decolonization while engaging critically with the intersections of race, environment, and international development studies. While there are many studies of natural flows across the Canadian border (migratory birds, water, pollution), Stunden Bower’s article should serve as an important wake up call to Canadian environmental historians, imploring them to consider the environmental changes that Canadian government, military, and corporations have wreaked abroad.