out of focus background, with a close up of the gilded edges of an open book.

Because, let’s face it – who has time to catch up on all the journal articles published in Canadian history?

 

Welcome back to the Best New Articles series where, each month, I post a list of my favourite new articles! Don’t forget to also check out my favourites from previous months, which you can access by clicking here.

Warning: As some of you may already know, Erudit has been down for the last week. Since several of the journal articles I needed were only available through this service, I was not able to include them in this month’s Best New Articles. So this is a partial list, and I will include the missing issues next month.

 

This month I read articles from:

Here are my favourites:

 

Julia Laite, “Schooners and Schoonermen, My Grandfather and Me,” History Workshop (Advanced Article).

Author’s Twitter: @JuliaLaite

Link: https://academic.oup.com/hwj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbz014/5364619

What it’s about:This article is part of History Workshop’s series on “Historic Passions,” which invites historians to reflect on books that inspired them as historians. In it, Laite explores her relationship to history, her Newfoundland grandfather, and a book that was never written. Laite walks us through the history of her family on Silver Fox Island during the middle part of the century, how the inhabitants experienced larger events (Newfoundland joining Confederation, the collapse of the cod fishery), before the community was relocated to the mainland. Her grandfather, Jacob Harrison Button, was a career fisher, who, following his retirement, wrote a manuscript entitled “Schooners of Newfoundland the Men who Sailed Them, 1800-1945.” However, he eventually lost interest in the subject due to the extensive revisions required by a publisher. Laite grew up imagining that this book contained the stories of her community, and it inspired her to become a historian. It was only many years later that she eventually did read the manuscript, only to discover that it was a detailed and traditional history of fishing. Nevertheless, she acknowledges that her love of history stems from the “perpetually unfolding connections between small stories and larger ones.”

What I loved: I kinda feel like I’m cheating a bit with this one, since it’s not really a scholarly article, but I just absolutely loved this piece. As a history of Silver Fox Island, it is beautifully evocative. But more importantly, I think it really pays homage to how our own histories, real and imagined, are essential parts of the self, as both human beings and as historians.

Favourite quote:  “These are the stories that move me; soft and warm like the plaid coat; brittle and slight like the faded cross; heart-breaking and breath-taking moments that are ethereal as icebergs, melting then slowly tipping themselves over into the sea. Stories whose backdrop is an unspoken deprivation and injustice, and whose themes are the incredible things people do to survive and thrive despite them. In every bit of history I read and write I look for these kinds of stories, the ones my grandparents told.”

Suggested uses: I think that this piece is something any historian can read and feel a personal connection to. It’s also just a wonderful story.

 

Ann Shteir and Jacques Cayouette “Collecting with ‘Botanical Friends:’ Four Women in Colonial Quebec and Newfoundland,” Scientia Canadensis, 41, no. 1 (2019): 1-30 (Advanced article)

Link: https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/scientia/2019-v41-n1-scientia04318/1056314ar/

What it’s about: This article focuses on the only four known female contributors to William Jackson Hooker’s Flora Boreali-Americana: Christian Ramsay (Lady Dalhousie), Anne Mary Perceval, Harriet Sheppard, and Mary Brenton. All four were members of the British colonial elite in Quebec and Newfoundland, and collectively they were cited 450 times in this collection. Using correspondence between Hooker and these four women, Shteir and Cayouette explore the history of women in science and the important role that female friendships and trans-imperial networks played in the social, cultural, and scientific life of the North American British elite in the early nineteenth century. In the history of science, women’s participation has largely gone unnoticed, with certain important exceptions. When they do appear, particularly in the early nineteenth century, it is often as part of a “creative couple,” or as a helpmeet. However, this article presents important evidence of the active participation of women as individuals in the field of botany in this period, not only as collectors of plants, but as active intellectual contributors.

What I loved: Obviously I love this article because it highlights an often-overlooked aspect of women’s history. But I also think that it’s important to note that this article is the result of a collaboration between a humanities scholar and a scientist. Shteir is a professor emerita at York’s School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, while Cayouette is a botanist at the Ottawa Research and Development Centre, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. I think this article does a fine job of showcasing the rich work that can arise out of collaboration across the arts/science divide. I also appreciated the nuance present in this article. Shteir and Cayouette emphasize in several places that this activity was due in large part to the social status of these women, and that by participating in botany, they were also reproducing the settler state. I would have liked to see the last developed in greater detail, which I think would have made this piece even stronger.

Favourite quote: “Botanical practices forged informal links in a “new” land, but at the same time anchored these women in familial and genteel activities in Britain. The letters from these “Canadian” women to Hooker demonstrate that sociability, friendship, family, intellectual activity, and links to home came together in a cultural recipe that benefitted colonial, and imperial, science and also benefitted the women who took part. Like any recipe, however, individual differences make for special flavour.” P. 4

Suggested uses: I think this article would be wonderful in any class on the history of science, whether globally or in North America. I also think this would be a great addition to a course on women’s history in Canada. Scholars of both would also be interested in this piece.

 

Fiona Polack, “Corporate and Worker Photographs of the Offshore Oil Industry: The Case of the Ocean Ranger,” Journal of Canadian Studies53, no. 1 (Winter 2019): 152-177.

Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/719554

What it’s about: This article explores the Ocean Ranger disaster and photographs as archival documents, by exploring three archival collections of informal photographs taken by crew members, Lance Butler, David Boutcher, and Lloyd Major. Both in the 1980s and today, photography on board off-shore oil rigs is rigidly controlled. Crew members are often completely forbidden from taking photographs while on board. Instead, the majority of images from off-shore oil rigs are taken by professional photographers employed by oil companies, and images that are released to the public are carefully curated promotional shots. As a result, disasters on off-shore oil rigs seem distant and fail to gain a hold in the public consciousness. However, personal photographs can, in Polack’s words, “onshore” off-shore oil rigs, providing a rare glimpse into a forbidden world, teaching us about what life was like for individuals on board off-shore oil rigs, while also showing some of the human cost of these disasters. Throughout the piece, Polack compares and contrasts images from the three archival collections noted above with relevant promotional images.

What I loved: If you’ve read this blog for a while, you know that one of my issues is that photographs are rarely used as historical documents, rather than simply as illustrations, in academic work. This article is a fantastic illustration of why it is so important to treat photographs as historical documents, showing just what they are capable of teaching us. I have to admit, I did not know about the Ocean Ranger disaster, and I think Polack does a good show of explaining how collective amnesia, compounded by restricted photography, can allow the same disasters to happen again and again. I also think much of the strength of this article rests in the way in which it humanizes and memorializes some of the individuals that died in the Ocean Ranger disaster. The pictures are arresting. I wish I could use one as my quote for this article, so instead below is the explanation for a particularly striking image of an unnamed man.

Favourite quote:  “One of the most compelling of the posed shots in the collection features a dark-haired man wearing a cream cable-knit sweater (and, ironically, given the use of hard hats indoors in Major’s images, no safety gear) on a vertiginously high deck of the Ocean Ranger. There are clouds behind him but from outside of the frame of the photograph the sun casts rays highlighting the right side of the subject’s body and causing a ladder to his left to cast a shadow on the wall behind. This photograph is arresting, not just because of the beauty of the scene, but also because of the man’s exaggeratedly dignified comportment. His back straight, his head upright, the subject’s right hand grips a yellow railing at waist height while his right foot perches on another rail below it just out of the shot. His left hand rests easily on his hip. Everything in this figure’s pose, including his restrained smile, suggests a deliberate decision to exude pride and confidence, […]In the wake of the loss of the rig, this image evokes pathos. Any confidence displayed on the Ocean Ranger, assumed or genuine, was to prove entirely misplaced. In hindsight of the rig’s capsizing, we cannot fail to notice that it is ultimately the sea, stretching to the horizon behind the man’s back, that dominates the composition of the photograph.” P. 168-169.

Suggested uses:I think this article will primarily be of interest to environmental historians, labour historians, gender historians, and anyone who is interested in using photographs as historical documents. I think it would be a great fit in any research methodology class, even at the undergrad level, for showing just what historians can do with photographs.

Also Recommended:

 

I think it’s rather an amusing coincidence that all three of my favourites from the last month deal with Newfoundland. Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something? 😉  Also, my computer auto-corrected “universe” to “university,” and now I’m all creeped out. I think they are watching me…. Anyhoo, I hope you enjoyed the latest look at my favourite new scholarly articles! If you did, please consider sharing this blog post on the social media platform of your choice. And don’t forget to check back on Friday for Stephanie’s monthly look at upcoming publications! See you then!

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