Unwritten Histories

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Category: Reviews

Reflections on CHA 2019

June 11, 2019 / / 3 Comments

Word cloud

Another year, another CHA Annual Meeting in the books. As I did in 2017 and 2018, I wanted to take some time to reflect on my experiences at this year’s conference.

As always, a big thank you goes to the CHA, the 2019 Program Chair, Michel Ducharme, and the 2019 Program Committee (Barrington Walker, Bradley Miller, Caroline Durand, Damien-Claude Bélanger, David Meren, Denis McKim, Elizabeth Mancke, Eryka Dyck, James Moran, Jo McCutcheon, Jocelyn Thorpe, Lara Campbell, Laura Ishiguro, Paige Raibmon, Pierre-Yves Saunier, and Robert McDonald). In many respects, this was an important Congress for me personally. The first ever CHA Annual Meeting I ever attended was at UBC in 2008. It also happens to be the institution where I am currently teaching a Canadian history course.

 

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Reflections on Made Modern

April 9, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Made Modern Cover Image

When I found out last year that Tina Adcock and Edward Jones-Imhotep were working on a new edited collection about modernity, science, and technology in Canadian history, I was immediately excited. I don’t like to talk about it, but once upon a time I was enrolled in engineering sciences. Earlier this year, I had the chance to speak with Adcock and Jones-Imhotep about their book, Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History, and this blog post is the result of that conversation. Enjoy!

 

Edward Jones-ImhotepEdward Jones-Imhotep is a cultural historian of science and technology and an associate professor of history at York University. He is the recipient of the Sidney Edelstein Prize in the history of technology for his book The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War. He has held visiting fellowships at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and was the Northrop Frye Visiting Fellow at the University of Toronto.

 

Tina Adcock

Tina Adcock is a cultural and environmental historian of modern Canada and an assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University. She has published work in Swedish, Norwegian, Canadian, and American scholarly journals and volumes. She is an associate of the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University.

 

 

 

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Reflections on Beyond Women’s Words

January 22, 2019 / / 0 Comments

A Conversation with Katrina Srigley, Stacey Zembrzycki, and Franca Iacovetta.

Cover of Beyond Women's Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century. Features an image of "Aunt Grace and the Elders," a painting by Daphne Odjig.

Earlier this year saw the publication of Beyond Women’s Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Katrina Srigley, Stacey Zembrzycki, and Franca Iacovetta. As someone who practices feminist oral history myself, and as a big fan of all three editors (who are also some of my academic heroes), I jumped at the opportunity to speak with them recently about their new book, what feminist oral history means, how the field has evolved over the last forty years, and where we go from here. Enjoy!

Katrina Srigley headshot

Dr. Katrina Srigley lives and works on Nbisiing Anishinaabeg territory. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Nipissing University and co-editor of Beyond Women’s Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First century (Routledge 2018). Her Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)-funded projects, developed in partnership with Nipissing First Nation, examine the history of Nbisiing Anishinaabeg through Anishinaabeg ways of knowing, recording, and sharing the past. Dr. Srigley is currently co-authoring a book with Glenna Beaucage (Cultural and Heritage Manager, Nipissing First Nation) titled Gaa-Bi Kidwaad Maa Nbisiing/The Stories of Nbisiing.   

Image of Stacey Zembrzycki
Photo credit: David Ward

Dr. Stacey Zembrzycki teaches History at Dawson College in Montreal, Quebec. An award-winning oral and public historian of ethnic, immigrant, and refugee experience, she is the author of According to Baba: A Collaborative Oral History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community (UBC Press, 2014) and its accompanying website: www.sudburyukrainians.ca, and is co-editor of Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Beyond Women’s Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2018). Zembrzycki’s current SSHRC funded project, Mining Immigrant Bodies, uses oral history to explore the connections between mining, health, and the environment and their impact on postwar immigrant communities in Sudbury, Ontario. She is also completing a book entitled Chaperoning Survivors: Telling Holocaust Stories on the March of the Living, which uses multiple, life story oral history interviews to understand how five Montreal Holocaust survivors give testimony, remember in-situ, and educate others about the horrors they witnessed in Poland.

Headshot of Franca Iacovetta

Dr. Franca Iacovetta is Professor of History at University of Toronto and co-editor of Studies in Gender & History at University of Toronto Press. Besides Beyond Women’s Words (Routledge, 2018), recent publications include a volume in honour of Luisa Passerini and articles on married women’s nationality and migrant children’s health. Now completing a monograph on women’s community-based pluralism, she is involved in a collaborative project on Emma Goldman in Toronto and continues to conduct research on transnational radical antifascists.

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Guest Review: Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, and Adrian Werner with Lawrie Barkwell, Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901 – 1961

November 6, 2018 / / 4 Comments

Cover of Roostertown

Note from Andrea: Ok, blog post change of plans! But we are really excited to be able to bring you this special review of the new book, Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901-1961! Special thanks to Jo McCutcheon for her wonderful review, and to Ariel Gordon at the University of Manitoba Press for providing us with a review copy! You can purchase the book directly from the University of Manitoba Press here.

 

Evelyn Peters, Matthew Stock, and Adrian Werner with Lawrie Barkwell, Rooster Town: The History of an Urban Métis Community, 1901 – 1961 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018, 237 pages).

Jo McCutcheonJo McCutcheon is the Executive Director of the Association of Canadian Archivists and teaches part-time at the University of Ottawa, focusing on digital history, material culture, children, youth and the residential school system and settler-colonialism in records created by the federal government. She has worked as a professional researcher on her own and with a diversity of research firms for more than twenty-years. She is an active member of the Canadian Historical Association (CHA), several CHA committees and on social media sites.  She also serves on several volunteer boards including Minwaashin Lodge in Ottawa. You can find her on Twitter at @jomac_613.

 

When I saw the message asking if there was an interest in undertaking a review of Rooster Town, I was quick to indicate my keen interest. I had heard about this urban Métis community, from David G. Burley’s work published in Urban History Review[1]and again was reminded a few years ago after having read an article from the Winnipeg Free Press.[2]

For those who are not familiar with Rooster town, this was one of the several names applied to a largely Métis urban community that existed just outside Winnipeg from 1901 to the late 1950s, not far from Fort Rouge, St. Vital and St. Norbert. At its peak in 1946, it was home to fifty households. However, beginning in 1951, the City of Winnipeg began targeting this area for suburban development and a new high school. Pressure from the city resulted in a steady population decline, data from 1951 and 1956 showing specifically that the number of families decreased to thirty-seven in total.[3]By 1961, only one family remained listed as community members.[4]

I grew up in Winnipeg and even though I often made the trek from Transcona to Charleswood each Sunday for family dinners, I never heard of Rooster Town. Indeed, when talking to family about this new book, I was met with comments and stories that felt like echoes from the sensational news stories from both the Winnipeg Free Pressand the Winnipeg Tribunethat were so harmful and humiliating to long-time Rooster Town residents, published during the 1950s in particular.[5]

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Conference Reflections: International Federation for Research in Women’s History – Vancouver 2018

October 9, 2018 / / 0 Comments

A book is lying open. There is a lightbulb lying in the centre, filled with list string-lights.

When you live on the West Coast like I do, attending conferences can be somewhat tricky. They don’t tend to come this way very often. And as anyone who is flying out to this year’s CHA knows, it is really expensive to fly across the country. This situation is still more complicated when it comes to international conferences, many of which tend to be held in Europe. So I was pleasantly surprised when I heard that the International Federation for Research in Women’s History would be coming to Vancouver in 2018. For those who have never heard of this organization, the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (or IRFWH) is an international organization dedicated to encouraging, coordinating, and facilitating research on women’s history all across the world. Holding the conference in Vancouver wasn’t originally the plan – the 2018 conference was supposed to be held at Santa Barbara, but ongoing travel restrictions made it impractical to host an international conference in the US right now, so conference organizers, specifically Eileen Boris, moved the conference north. And guess which lucky blogger got to go? Why me, of course. 😉 So, in today’s blog, I’m going to take the opportunity to reflect on my experiences, discuss some of the cool papers I saw presented, and how the theme of storytelling connects us all.

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At the Kitchen Table: The 1940s

June 21, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Two historians of 20th century domesticity in Canada give you the dish on CBC’s Back in Time for Dinner.

Photo of the Campus family dressed in the style of the 1940s, posing in the kitchen.

Image courtesy of CBC.

Note from Andrea: You knew I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to talk about the new show from CBC, Back in Time for Dinner, where one family will experience what life was like over the course of decades, from the 1940s to the 2000s. As some of you may be aware, my actual research focuses, among other things, on domestic life. And of course, I had to ask Kesia Kvill to be a part of this, since she has extensive experience as a historical interpreter for the period in question (she has actually used a wringer washer, folks!). The show will air for a total of six weeks, starting on June 14th., and airs on Thursday nights at 8 pm EST/11 pm PST. We will be posting our reviews for the previous week’s episode on Thursday at 1 pm EST/10 am PST, so that you have enough time to catch up before the next episode airs. Both of us will provide individual reviews (and sometimes even Lee will comment!), followed by a short (possibly silly) discussion and a short list of recommended readings at the end. So without any further ado, enjoy this special summer-time series, starting with the 1940s.

 

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Reflections on the Second Edition of A National Crime

September 5, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Cover of the 2017 edition of A National Crime

Thanks to Maddie Knickerbocker, Leah Wiener, Sean Carleton, Stephanie Pettrigew, and, especially, Melissa Shaw for their help with this post. And special thanks to Ariel Gordon at the University of Manitoba Press for giving me the opportunity to review this book!*

 

Several months ago, when the University of Manitoba Press asked me to review the most recent edition of John S. Milloy’s A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986, I was initially hesitant. Not only am I not a specialist in this field, but I kept wondering whether or not we needed another settler review of a book by a settler historian about Indigenous history in Canada. The jury is still out, but, after I finished reading the book, I do have some thoughts I’d like to share.

A quick caveat. This will not be a traditional book review. I may have literally written a guide to doing them, but since this book is nearly 20 years old and has already been reviewed numerous times, what follows is more of a meditation upon reading this book.

 

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