News
People, Politics, and Polemics: Inside the Judith Robinson Archive
February 11th, 2022, 12:00 p.m. EST
Registration link: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/2716334422574/WN_LKNxU21qQCO_K3vzv6bmIQ
Judith Robinson (1897-1961) was one of Canada’s most read newspaper columnists in the mid-20th century. Her career spanned three decades and two major newspapers (The Globe and Mail and The Telegram). As author of “the most polished newspaper prose in North America, with an acid fillip in every phrase,” she commented on all the key stories of her day – including Canada’s entry into the Second World War, the Munich Agreement, and the Avro Arrow cancellation – with fearless criticism of those in power. Her connections to significant figures of Canadian political philosophy also place her as an unsung collaborator on many of the ideas that shaped 20th century Canadian political thought. Join Chris Long (McMaster University’s Archives Arrangement and Description Librarian) for a firsthand look at some of the items in Judith Robinson’s archive, which is held by McMaster’s William Ready Divisions of Archives and Research Collections. Through a close look at her work, we’ll discover why Judith Robinson was once described as “the most feared woman on Parliament Hill.”
Barry Cahill has completed his history of Mackenzie King biography and is now working on a book about Robert Winters.
The transnational Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time (DePOT ) SSHRC Partnership project, based at Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, brings together historians from across Western Europe and North America to examine the politics of mine, mill and factory closures and the longer-term consequences of deindustrialization such as Trump, Brexit and the rise of right-wing populism. The Canadian component includes Concordia, UQAM, Cape Breton, Toronto, and Calgary as well as the national museum Ingenium, Unifor, and le Centre d’histoire et d’archives du travail. Check out our website (deindustrialization.org) for the latest news and events.
Historian Megan Davies (York University) has created an online exhibit to commemorate the disproportionate and tragic impact of the pandemic on people living in long-term care facilities. https://covidinthehouseofold.ca.
The Centre for Humanities is happy to announce the appointment in January 2022 of Dr. Osire Glacier as Assistant Professor of History. Dr. Glacier earned her PhD at McGill University, and comes to us from Bishop’s University, where she taught in three departments: Religion, Society and Culture; Politics and International Studies; and History and Global Studies. Her research focuses on modern Moroccan women’s history, the politics of gender and sexuality in postcolonial Morocco, and the issue of human rights in postcolonial Morocco. Dr Glacier’s scholarly publications include the book Universal Rights, Systemic Violations and Cultural Relativism in Morocco (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), and the chapter “The Impact of Impunity for Violating Cultural Rights in Morocco”, in the Routledge Handbook on Human Rights and the Middle East and North Africa (2016). Dr. Glacier also reaches a broader audience through various media.
Athabasca University offers a 4-year History Major, 3-year History Concentration, and a History Minor in the BA degree. Our undergraduate history courses are asynchronous and online. They are available to students at other institutions as transfer credits. AU also offers an Undergraduate Certificate and Graduate Diploma in Heritage Resource Management, and a Master of Arts—Interdisciplinary Studies with a Heritage and Social History focus area.
The Board of Directors of the Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko (UCFTS) is pleased to announce the appointment of Joseph Patrouch to the Endowment Council of the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund (CFWWIRF).
Joseph F. Patrouch, PhD, is Professor of History at the University of Alberta and a specialist in the histories of the Holy Roman, Austrian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. He served ten years as a member of the board of the Austrian Canadian Council in his capacity as Director of the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, Canada’s only academic and cultural institute specifically dedicated to the study of Central Europe. Dr. Patrouch has been a Fulbright Student and a Fulbright Research Scholar in Austria and a Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna. He is the recipient of the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and the Arts, First Class. In addition, Dr. Patrouch is a long-time member and sometime officer of the Czechoslovak Society for Arts and Sciences (SVU). He will serve as the representative of the Austrian Canadian Council.
For more information on the CFWWIRF, please contact Joseph Patrouch @ patrouch@ualberta.ca.
The Canadian Heritage Photography Foundation will be uploading images and a digital exhibition titled “Digitizing and Preserving Historic Images of Canada: CHPF’s 20th Anniversary Photographic Retrospective of Founding Members”. Look for the launch of the exhibition on our webpage in mid-February with historic images of Canada by Canadian photographers including George Hunter, Eric Hayes, Lou Perrin, Tom Bochsler, James Wilson and others who helped to form the CHPF in 2001. Check out the website for more details: www.thechpf.com as well as our Digital Collections page with some amazing newly uploaded images of Winnipeg during the 1940’s https://digitalcollections.thechpf.com/.
The Department is delighted to welcome two new faculty members – Dr. Talena Atfield, Assistant Professor, Indigenous History and Dr. Christopher Taylor, Assistant Professor, Black Canadian and Diaspora History.
Professor Cody Groat gave the 2022 David Neufeld Memorial Lecture.
Western’s Strategic Priorities Fund. Wartime Canada given new life through Strategic Priorities Fund grant. Wartime Canada was originally launched in 2012, to highlight the experience of Canadians during the first and second world war, by digitizing documents related to daily life. This includes posters, leaflets, and booklets, but also includes items such as cookbooks and sheet music. The project gave new life to these documents and made the materials more widely available.
The project co-directors are Jonathan Vance, professor in the Department of History, and Graham Broad, associate professor in King’s Department of History.
With heavy hearts, we announce the passing of our longtime colleague Dr. Christon I. Archer on December 19, 2021. A specialist in Mexican, Spanish, and military history, he was particularly known as a pioneering scholar of Mexico’s military institutions. He contributed to widely-read books on global military history, edited foundational essay collections in Mexican history, and producing numerous essays and articles in English and Spanish on subjects as disparate as Captain Cook’s voyages, guerrilla warfare and banditry in the Spanish colonial world, and Mexico’s independence. Our condolences go out to his family and extended network of academic and personal friends.
New Monographs
Congratulations to our colleagues Lyndsay Campbell, on the publication of Truth and Privilege: Libel Law in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, 1820-1840, and Timothy Stapleton, for his West African Soldiers in Britain’s Colonial Army, 1860-1960.
Congratulations to adjunct and sessional instructor Dr. Kevin Anderson, and co-investigator Dr. Jennifer Tunnicliffe of Ryerson University, on their SSHRC Insight Development Grant for the project “Us and Them: The Federal Social Credit Party and Conspiratorial Thinking in Canada.”
Julia Smith and University of Manitoba undergraduate student Hannah Guenther-Wexler recently published an article about feminist newsletters and the history of women’s labour activism in Manitoba: Guenther-Wexler, Hannah, and Julia Smith. “Feminist Newsletters and the History of Women’s Labour Activism in Manitoba.” Prairie History, no. 6 (Fall 2021): 70–73.
Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy, and Julia Smith recently published a new edited collection, featuring new essays by several Canadian historians, including Alvin Finkel, Kirk Niergarth, Gregory S. Kealey, and Bryan D. Palmer in Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy, and Julia Smith, eds. Dissenting Traditions: Essays on Bryan D. Palmer, History, and Marxism. Edmonton, AB: AU Press, 2021.
The department’s 2021 Western Canadian Lecture was given by Professor Andrew Woolford on 1 December, 2021 titled “With Intent to Destroy a Group: Genocide’s past and present in Canada.” Professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Manitoba, Professor Woolford is also former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. For more information see https://activehistory.ca/2022/01/with-intent-to-destroy-a-group-genocides-past-and-present-in-canada/.
The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies held a gathering and symposium on 20-21 January, 2022, in honour of Dr. Frank E. Sysyn for his 75 birthday and to celebrate his accomplishments. Dr. Sysyn is Director of the Toronto CIUS office. Titled “From Cossack History to the Study of the Holodomor,” the symposium’s international panel of speakers included Olga Andriewsky of Trent University. For more information about the Institute see https://www.ualberta.ca/canadian-institute-of-ukrainian-studies/about/index.html.
Dr. Dagmar Wujastyk of the Ayuryog history and literature of Yoga project is organising two book launches, the first for Patricia Sauthoff’s Illness and Immortality. Mantra, Mandala, and Meditation in the Netratantra http://www.ayuryog.org/event/book-launch, and for her own co-edited translation of The Usman Report. For more information, see http://www.ayuryog.org/event/let-vaidyas-speak-translating-usman-report with registration details here.
For more of our department’s events and activities see: https://www.ualberta.ca/history-classics-religion/news-and-events/events_and_news/2017/index.html.
The Department of History at University of Saskatchewan has named Dr. Valerie Korinek to the A.S. Morton Chair in History for a 5 year term beginning in July 2022.
Erin Morton’s edited volume, Unsettling Canadian Art History will be published with McGill-Queen’s in June 2022.
Sasha Mullally and David Wright launched their book Foreign Practices: Immigrant Doctors and Canadian Medicare, as part of the Canada’s Storytellers series with the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax.
Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy’s book, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (University of Illinois Press, 2020), was awarded the Disability History Association Outstanding Book Award 2021, and her article “‘Had his nose cropt for being formerly runaway’: disability and the bodies of fugitive slaves in the British Caribbean,” Slavery & Abolition, 41:2 (2020), 212-233 won that association’s article prize.
We will host our Sixth Annual Black History Month Lecture on Feb. 3 at 7 pm, featuring Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens, Linda and Charles Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and Director of the Humanities in Medicine program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who will present a talk entitled “‘Why Black History Matters in American Medicine.” The event will stream via Teams LIVE: www.unb.ca/bhmlecture.
The Atlantic Canada Studies Centre will be hosting the Atlantic Canada Studies Conference, May 25 to 28, 2022 in Fredericton, preceded on May 24 with a digital workshop co-hosted with the GeoReach Lab at UPEI.
The 50th anniversary issue of Acadiensis will soon be published (co-editors Erin Morton and Suzanne Morton) Autumn 2021 (not online yet, but should be in a few days): https://www.acadiensis.ca/recent.
Cindy Brown and Lee Windsor are the lead scholars on two multi-year Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society projects. The first, funded through Heritage Canada, considers the experiences of Black and Indigenous soldiers and Nursing Sisters in the Great War. The second, in partnership with Veterans’ Affairs Canada, examines the nature of modern military service on complex Canadian Armed Forces missions since 1949. Both projects engage students, teachers, community partners, and researchers across Canada.
The Department of History is conducting a search for a new tenure-track position in Black Canadian History at the assistant professor level. Professor Matthew Hayday is the new Department Chair.
Public historical work or, as Dr. Murton Stoehr thinks of it in the context of returning knowledge held in universities to Indigenous people, “knowledge repatriation” is vitally important. It inserts historical knowledge, interpretative skill, and expertise into public conversations and, as our Nishnaabeg treaty partners remind us, ensures that we do something with our skills that will impact the present and help set direction for the future.
Dr. Catherine Murton Stoehr’s most recent contributions to public understanding of the Robinson Huron Treaty trial in the Anishnabek News represent the most complete journalistic record of that litigation https://anishinabeknews.ca. On November 5, 2021, Dr. Murton Stoehr was the local organizer of an event to deliver a petition of 5458 signatures to MPP Vic Fedeli’s office. Organized and written by our colleagues at Laurentian University, Elizabeth Carlson-Manatharar and Amanda Deforge, with the assistance of their students Tianna Lavoit, Sarah Lalibert and Brooklyne Hein, the petition calls on the province of Ontario to “become a more honorable treaty partner” drop their legal appeal and negotiate. Once again, this event raised public awareness about historic and present-day treaty obligations.[1]
We highlight too Dr. Murton Stoehr’s 8 January 2022 Letter to the Editor in the Toronto Star which reminds us of the importance of small but powerful ways to push back against destructive narratives about the value of our collective work in universities. Too often we forget to celebrate this work in our profession.
The Lake Nipissing Beading Project (https://www.lakenipissingbeadingproject.com/) is a community collaborative project led by Dr. Kirsten Greer and visual artist Carrie Allison (Nêhiyaw/Cree) in partnership with Dokis and Nipissing First Nations.[2] The project is a 5 meter beaded reimaging of Lake Nipissing and its tributaries created through 444 individually beaded pieces. The project opened in September 2021 at the Treaty Space Gallery at the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design in Kjipuktuk (Halifax) and will travel to Nbisiing Nishnaabeg territory (North Bay, ON) this fall before making its way to Bawating (Sault Ste Marie) and onward.
We congratulate Dr. Amadou Ba on the translation of his book Forgotten History of the Contribution of Black Slaves and Soldiers in the Building of Canada, 1604-1945 to English and Dr. Jamie Murton on the recent publication of his book, Canadians and Their Natural Environment: A History, with Oxford University Press.
[1] Catherine Murton Stoehr with Robinson Litigation Chair Mike Restoule. Photograph courtesy of Carrie Allison.
[2] Photograph courtesy of Liz Lott.
New Publications
Daniel R. Meister, The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-History of Canadian Multiculturalism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021).
JACANZS, Volume 1, Issue 2, December 2021.
Joseph Partouch, “Sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews (and an aunt): The female dynastic contexts of Archduke Ferdinand in the transitional year of 1567,” pp. 149-168 in Sylva Dobalova and Jaroslava Hausenblasova, eds, Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria: A Second-Born Son in Renaissance Europe. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2021.
Alan MacEachern. The Miramichi Fire: A History. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Francine McKenzie. GATT and Global Order in the Postwar Era. Cambridge University Press.
Sarah Shortall, Soldiers of God in a Secular World, Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics. Harvard University Press.
Bruce R. Maxwell, Failed Promise: Five Reasons Why R.B. Bennett Lost the 1935 Canadian Federal Election.