Teaching Labour History

Abstract

I WOULD SIMPLY LIKE TO REFLECT on some of my experience in teaching labour history. I interpret the scope broadly and so I will make some comments on the satisfactions and frustrations of teaching labour history in three areas — the university, the labour movement and the wider public sphere. ' In the early 1970s the only undergraduate course in labour history available to me at the University of Toronto was Bill Dick's course in American labour history at Scarborough College. It was a fine course and even included a visit by a then little-known American historian named Herbert Gutman. By the 1980s labour history had become an established teaching field at many universities. In my own case, I was brought to the University of New Brunswick not only to teach Canadian history and edit Acadiensis, but also to encourage work in labour history, which my department viewed as an exciting and welcome new subject in Canadian history. At the graduate level, this has largely taken the form of encouraging MA theses on various aspects of labour and social history in New Brunswick. My first two graduate theses turned out to be about New Brunswick workers in the 1930s — Patrick Burden's study of the New Brunswick Farmer-Labour Union and Carol Ferguson's study of unemployed workers in Saint John. The department has long emphasized the study of Atlantic Canada and specifically of the province. I felt that I was able to help open up a new area in New Brunswick history and, importantly, that the department welcomed my doing so. On the other hand, there has been an element of frustration as well in the graduate field. Arriving in New Brunswick fresh from graduate studies about industrial Cape Breton and from teaching assignments at the (then) College of Cape Breton, it was unrealistic to expect students at the University of New Brunswick to share all my interests. Most of them came with topics already decided and were not looking for me to assign them topics. In addition to various New Brunswick topics, I also supervised one in American labour history and, most recently, a fine study of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. At the same time I have been fortunate to have had two excellent graduate students who followed up neglected aspects of my own earlier work. There is