We’re back today with everyone’s favourite series, Historian’s Histories! If you’d like to see more posts from this series, you can do so here. This latest entry features fellow awesome Jewish-Canadian woman and historian, Blair Stein. I have been (not-so) secretly in love with her research for years, so I’m super excited to bring you this interview today. Enjoy!
Blair Stein is a doctoral candidate in History of Science at the University of Oklahoma. She’s especially interested in technology, the environment, identity, and the uneven experiences of modernity. Her dissertation uses Trans Canada Air Lines’ (TCA, now Air Canada) public-facing material as a way to explore postwar concerns with nature, culture, nation, and technology in Canada. Her work has appeared in Technology and Culture, the Journal for the History of Astronomy, and an upcoming book onMade Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History from UBC Press. She also blogs occasionally for the nice people at NiCHE, Technology’s Stories, and Activehistory.ca, is the graduate student representative of the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association, and tweets about airplanes, pedagogy, dogs, and Star Trek.
What is your background (education, life experience, etc..)?
I grew up in Ottawa. I loved to read and write and talk and talk and talk, and so I was drawn to activities that allowed me to do those things. So, naturally, I was a drama kid. I also did debate for almost a decade – anything that would get me in front of a crowd.
I have a Bachelor of Journalism from Carleton University, where I specialized in radio broadcasting, community news, and arts reporting. My favorite stories involved Canadian culture, history and heritage. In one, I followed some new Canadians learning to skate on the Rideau Canal on a -25-degree day. In another, I dissected the symbols chosen for the Vancouver Olympics with the help of some Canadian Studies grad students. I freelanced for some small publications, but I wasn’t cut out for the precariousness and competitiveness of a journalism career, so I looked towards academia. (LOL! I didn’t know anything about academia.)
I had minored in history, dabbling in a bit of everything – American history, history of science, food studies, women’s history – and I was initially interested in working with something at the intersection of gender, technology, and media. I ended up doing a 12-month MA in History at Queen’s, researching TCA’s history of advertising to the “women’s market.” I applied to several History PhD programs, but was unsuccessful until one of my professors suggested I look into History of Science programs instead, given my interest in technology.
I returned to Ottawa and the Canada Aviation and Space Museum, where I had worked since high school, for a year and then came to the University of Oklahoma for an MA and PhD in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. My MA thesis looked at the Canadair DC-4M2 “North Star” as a technological manifestation of postwar Canadian national identity. My dissertation, hopefully to be completed in the next year, does a deep dive into TCA’s publicity material to show how it reflected changes in perceptions of environment and nation in Canada.
What drew you to history in the first place?
Like a lot of folks, my dad is an armchair historian with a special focus on WWII, technology, and historical biography. More importantly, I think, is my family background. I’m Jewish, and my mom’s parents came to Canada from Poland in 1948 after hiding from the Nazis. My paternal grandfather was a Juno Beach First Waver on D-Day. This, I was told over and over, is a hell of a family history. Can you imagine the contingencies necessary for me to even exist? I liked history class in school too, because I had some great teachers (Hi Mme. Adams!) and I got to read and write and talk and talk and talk.
Why did you decide to become a historian?
To tell stories about the past. I went to grad school without knowing what historians actually do. I was never exposed to the book-writing, archive-surfing, Reviewer #2-ing historian. My only exposure to historians came from large and mid-sized lecture classes, and that’s what I wanted. Bad history jokes! Fumbling with the projector! Being the center of attention! Puns!
I decided to become a historian of science once I learned that it was a discipline separate from history. I took one history of science class in university, which I loved, but it wasn’t until I was looking seriously at doctoral programs that I realized that studying science and technology might involve different questions and methodologies than other fields. I also particularly liked that history of science was specialized while still being interdisciplinary.
Why did you decide to focus on your particular area of study?
This happened sort of by accident. Ontario high school students are required to do some volunteer work before graduating. I volunteered at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum’s (CASM) summer day camps, mostly because it was close to my house and I liked kids. I kept it up during the school year and started working as a camp counselor and educator when I was old enough. I basically never left, since most of my research takes place there now.
I fell head over heels for the museum environment first – sharing stories about history, incorporating interactivity and multimedia, doing crafts – and the actual aerospace history came second. The material was intriguing because it was three-dimensional and wasn’t anything like what I was learning in history class. I began choosing aerospace-related research projects. In an attempt to make things as difficult as possible for myself, I wrote my grade 12 history summative about the Avro Arrow.
I had no intentions of studying Canadian history at university, although I still wrote about aerospace wherever I could, including essays about flight attendants, Sputnik, and aerial bombing during the Spanish Civil War. I planned to study the first generation of American flight attendants in grad school, but it was suggested I choose a topic that required fewer resources to research. I knew that CASM had all these cool airline advertisements in their archives, so I fell backwards into doing Canadian history. Moving to Oklahoma and encountering the odd Canadian stereotypes from the outside got me interested in nationalisms and expressions of belonging more broadly. Where do these stereotypes come from, I wondered? What supports them across space and time? Why can’t I find a decent cheese curd?
If you didn’t go study your chosen area, why kind of history do you think you would want to do?
I wish I knew more languages and paleography so I could study early modern cartography and weather. The University of Oklahoma History of Science collection has all these amazing old rare books and we’re spoiled by how much we get to use them. There’s just something about touching a 400-year-old book with your own hands, and there’s especially something about maps!
What kind of work do you do as a historian?
I’m still a graduate student, so I mostly work feverishly on my dissertation. But I also teach! This is my second semester teaching my department’s freshman-level history of science survey, and I love it. I like my classrooms to be really interactive and immersive, so I enjoy dreaming up activities for my students. Last week we learned about colonial botany and I brought in bitter raw cacao so we could taste what the Spanish conquistadors did. This week we’re finding primary sources about spices!
What is the coolest and/or strangest thing you’ve ever found or learned while doing research?
Credit: Canada Aviation and Space Museum Archives.
One of my dissertation source bases is TCA’s employee newsletter from the 1940s and 1950s. They’d often report on interesting people or things that TCA carried that month, and there are some amazing ones, like a seeing-eye dog for a little boy, ice cream, Barbara Ann Scott, and a guy with an especially big mustache. When TCA celebrated its 10th anniversary in 1947, the airline found the “smallest” and “largest” people flying out of Montreal to cut the cake: a 7-year-old-girl and a famous wrestler.
What is your favourite part about being a historian? And what is your least favourite part?
Storytelling. I like reading and writing stories about the past. I like telling stories about the past to other people. I especially like going to conferences and listening to everyone else tell their stories about the past. There’s just so much history out there and historians are so enthusiastic about what they do!
My least favorite part is grading.
What is the most surprising thing you’ve ever learned about history?
That everything has one. I realized this when I was assigned a book for a women’s history class that looked at sanitary pads, bras, and deodorant. I don’t work with gender too much anymore, but I still try to show my students that all the stuff around them got here somehow.
Why do you think we, as a society, should study history?
The world looks how it does because of infinite numbers of choices made by infinite numbers of people across space and time, not to mention the influences of non-human actors. Dissecting even a miniscule fraction of those choices and influences might not entirely explain the current state of things, but it at least reminds us of what was necessary to get here. History of science is especially concerned with how humans come to understand how the world around them works, which makes it important too.
Also, we should study history so more history PhDs can have jobs.
If you could go back in time, whether to live or just visit, which time and place would you pick and why?
Because my maternal grandparents lost their families in the Holocaust, most of my family tree is pretty blank on that side. I’d like to visit their villages a generation before in order to record as much information as possible. I want to know my great-great-great grandparents’ names! I’d tell them that I can’t change the past, but the fact that I exist is proof that they have an effect on the future.
More selfishly, I’d want to fly on some of the airplanes I study. I’ve been inside some of them, thanks to my old museum tour guide life, but I’d like to feel what it’s like to fly on a TCA DC-8 in 1960 or a Lockheed Electra in 1937. According to my grandmother, all the passengers were drunk all the time! Some of that embodiment would make me a better aviation historian, I think.
What is your favourite historical book/film/museum/etc, and why?
I don’t consume a lot of historical fiction, but I love museums. I obviously have to mention the Canada Aviation and Space Museum. That place still has a tight hold on the way I think about technology and history, as does the newly renovated (and endlessly cool) Canada Science and Technology Museum, but my all-time favourite museum is probably the Newseum in Washington, D.C. It deals with the history of news media themselves – print, television, Internet – and also critical explorations of the role they play in major historical events. The exhibits are interactive, the focus is global, and it doesn’t take “freedom of the press” for granted. A new favorite for me is the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, OK. It’s a lovely little folk music museum that uses Guthrie’s life and work to explore Oklahoma history, the Dust Bowl, the politics of music, and labour history. Bonus: it’s right by an outdoor performance venue that’s got live music all the time in the summer!
In your opinion, what is the most important event or person in Canadian history that everyone should know about?
I teach and work in the United States, so for me it’s “Canadian history” in general. I shoehorn as much Canada into my teaching as I possibly can!
I think everyone should know that the “Canadians are impervious to and love the cold” stereotype has its roots in neo-Hippocratic climatic sciences. It serves double-duty for my interests: I get to throw some history of science at unsuspecting people, and it calls bullsh*t on an aspect of Canadian nationalism.
Special thanks to Blair Stein for this fantastic interview! Don’t forget to follow her on Twitter @blairstein9! Clearly I picked the wrong field to study, because Blair’s work sounds way more interesting! I hope you enjoyed this week’s blog post. If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice. And don’t forget to check back on Sunday for a brand new Canadian History Roundup. See you then!
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