Canadian Historical Association Research Articles

The Canadian Historical Association’s Presidential Addresses, 1922–2022*

On the occasion of the Canadian Historical Association’s centenary, this article surveys continuity and change in 100 years of presidential addresses. Using Penny Bryden’s idea of the nets we weave as historians to research and write history — an idea she developed in her 2021 presidential address — I reflect on my own net, how it has changed, and what it caught in reading every presidential address since 1922: national unity, limited identities, historiography, biography, Indigenous history, and the purpose of a professional association.

The Packaging of Politics in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association: Embedded, Embodied, Splintered, and Repeated

This article examines the political history, broadly defined, that has been published in this journal since its inception, arguing that there has been both change and continuity. While politics is no longer as essential to the history that is published, as was the case in the 1920s and 1930s, nor as driven by biography, as became common following the Second World War, the political history subfield remains vibrant and there are still themes and topics that continue to intrigue and to which scholars return repeatedly.

Unfinished Stories, Incomplete Revolutions: Gender and Women’s History in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 1922–2022

Over a century, the JCHA has published increasing numbers of innovative articles in gender and women’s history. Historians have addressed foundational debates about the connection between public and private spheres, transnational and postcolonial turns, the discursive construction of gender, and the history of masculinity. The expansion of women’s and gender history in the decade of the 1990s consolidated the field, but also created a sense of disquiet as historians challenged national narratives and disciplinary authority in the historical profession. Despite decades of rich historiographical insights, however, powerful and systemic silences remain in the Journal, including the intersection of gender with race and Indigeneity, and articles with a non-Canadian or non–North American frame of reference. New approaches to questions of gender and power will be needed to challenge, enliven, and reinvigorate the field as it moves into the mid-twenty-first century.

“Race” and Racism in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 1922‑2021

With few exceptions, Journal articles have represented “race” and racism in step with the conventional wisdom of the times. Although “race” as a category of analysis has not been prominently on the agenda for most of the Journal’s one hundred years, the evolution of the concept and its role in Canadian historical interpretation can be discerned through the annual volumes. In the early years, “race” was taken for granted; it was accepted that humankind was divided into fixed groups known as “races,” and that “race” could be a causal factor in history. During and after World War II, there were some challenges to the significance of “race,” and even some denials of its existence altogether. In recent decades, articles in the Journal have begun to recognize the racism deeply embedded in Canadian social and economic structures, and its impact in domestic colonialism and in other forms of sanctioned discrimination. Racism, rather than biological “race,” is now being seen as a factor in Canada’s development. This understanding raises questions about prevailing accounts of Canadian history, with consequent calls for new versions of our collective past.

A Glaring Silence: A Critical Reflection on Black Canada in the Pages of the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association

Through a close reading of article abstracts beginning in 1922, this article explores the first one hundred years of the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (JCHA), asking how this journal provides insight into the ways historians have researched and written about Black Canadian history. The author looks at the few published articles on Black Canada in the pages of the JCHA and concludes that the “glaring silence” is symptomatic of a systemic anti-Blackness, seen across institutions in Canada, from kindergarten to grade 12, and even within institutions like the CHA.

To Know the Indigenous Other: A Century of Indians in Canadian History

Celebrating its centenary in 2022, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (JCHA) has been home to scores of articles on Indigenous history within the colonial borders of Canada. Offering a historiography of the past one-hundred years of scholarship appearing in the journal focused on Indigenous topics, this article argues that the JCHA offers a unique case study of the history of the field. While the journal has offered a dearth of scholarship on people of colour, leading to the erasure of Black Canadians as prominent actors in Canada’s past, the zealous study of “Indians” within the journal’s pages is salient. However, much like the larger field of Canadian history, the journal has a fraught and contentious past with Indigenous Peoples, stories, and methods. Unlike the erasure of Black Canadians, the fervent focus on “Indians” in Canadian history has had the significant effect of Canadians coming to “know” the Indians who were produced within the power structures of Canadian imperialism, settler colonialism, and the academy as they sought to identify, classify, and organize the Other. More recently however, there has been a slow trickle of articles produced by historians of Indigenous history that is contributing to an intellectual sovereignty that situates Indigenous history as an independent and unique course of study not tied exclusively or directly to the nation-states of the United States and Canada.

Issue Notes

The following papers were presented to the Canadian Society of Church History in 2008, but were not made available for publication: Julia Rady-Shaw, “Church Front: The Case of Bloor Street United Church’s War Effort, 1939-1945″; Gordon Heath, “When Friends and Neighbors Become Enemies: Canadian Baptists and the War of 1812″; Wolfgang Breul, “Martin Luther’s Development as a Reformer in Light of His own Statement from 1518: New Light on an Old Question”; Douglas H. Shantz, “Pietist Autobiography and the Rise of Secular Individualism”; Sarah Bruer, “Unselfish Devotion: Deaconess Zaidee Stoddard and the Social Gospel”; Kristin Burnett, “Acknowledging the ‘Unacknowledged Quarantine’: Religion, Faith, and Nursing at the Blood Hospital, 1893-1930s”; Renee Lafferty, “The ‘Spirits’ of Religion: Evangelicals and Medical Care for Toronto’s Dipsomaniacs, 1860-1890″; James Robertson, “‘T.T. Shields and the Des Moines Affair’: The Attempted Establishment and Subsequent Collapse of a Fundamentalist University in Des Moines, 1927-1929″; Ian Hesketh, “The Victorian Bible: Ecce Homo and the Manufacturing of a Literary Sensation”; Todd Webb, “‘Popery is Evidently Nodding to its Fall’: Methodism and Anti-Catholicism in British North America, 1837-1860.” Papers from a joint session with the Canadian Historical Association not made available for publication include: Marguerite Van Die, “Practising Medicine and Spiritualism in the 1860s: The Encounters Between Drs. Moses Colby and Susan Kilborn as Problem and Possibility in the Writing of Religious History”; Pamela E. Klassen, “The Holistic Trinity: Body, Mind, and Spirit among Twentieth-Century Protestants”; and Ruth Compton Brouwer, “When Missions Became Development: The Churches and CUSO in the 1960s – Linkages and Tensions.”

Canadian Historical Association’s Wallace K. Ferguson Roundtable

Canadian Historical Association’s Wallace K. Ferguson Roundtable: Editor’s Note / Table ronde Wallace-K.-Ferguson de la Société historique du Canada : note du rédacteur. Un article de la revue Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada (Volume 32, numéro 1, 2022, p. 1-171) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

“Writing to Commemorate their Strength”: Kinship and Gender in Dammed

“Writing to Commemorate their Strength”: Kinship and Gender in Dammed. An article from journal Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada (Volume 32, Number 2, 2022, pp. 1-166), on Érudit.

Camps, Carcerality, and Late Victorian Empire: In Conversation with Aidan Forth’s Barbed-Wire Imperialism

This paper is a brief critical review essay of Aidan Forth’s recent award-winning work Barbed Wire Imperialism, winner of the 2019 Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association. The essay suggests a few potential slightly different emphases, trajectories, interpretive lenses and, perhaps, possibilities. Included among these are the centrality of the slave ship and transatlantic slavery for thinking about the roots of carcerality in the British Empire.

Ramsay Cook: A Life in History

Ramsay Cook (1931–2016) was a respected scholar and a much-loved friend whose scholarship and graduate supervision helped a new generation of historians rewrite the history of Canada. To mark his life and career, the Canadian Historical Association hosted a round table at its 2017 annual meeting which provided the basis for the short essays in this “Life in History” section dedicated to Cook. Donald Wright uses Barker Fairley’s portrait of a young Ramsay Cook as a starting point to consider his career and its animating themes. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto in the late 1960s, Greg Kealey studied with Cook; a few years later, he and Cook discovered a shared interest in the radical Toronto journalist Phillips Thompson, also known as Jimuel Briggs. One of “Ramsay’s girls,” Franca Iacovetta remembers a generous doctoral thesis supervisor who took an active interest in not only her scholarship but the scholarship of a number of feminist historians. Strictly speaking, Adele Perry was not Cook’s doctoral student, but as a graduate student at York University, she appreciated his capacious understanding of Canadian history and his intellectual commitment to historical analysis unhooked from the yoke of nationalism. Robert Fraser was neither Cook’s student nor his university colleague, but he worked closely with him at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (dcb) and came to admire his leadership and his commitment to scholarship during a difficult moment in the dcb’s history.

Canadian Historical Association Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History

Canadian Historical Association Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History

Canadian Historical Association Wallace K. Ferguson Book Prize in Non-Canadian History

Canadian Historical Association Wallace K. Ferguson Book Prize in Non-Canadian History

Reading for Land Susan Hill's The Clay We Are Made Of : Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River

Reading for Land Susan Hill's The Clay We Are Made Of:Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River Audra Simpson (bio) With this issue, we introduce a new occasional feature in the journal that opens up space for extended consideration of noteworthy new works. Audra Simpson contributes a close examination of how Susan Hill's prize-winning book (NAISA Best First Book, Canadian Historical Association Aboriginal History Group Book Prize, and Ontario Clio Prize, all 2018) constitutes a fieldchange intervention in Haudenosaunee and Indigenous studies. Matthew Cohen reviews Lisa Brooks's new book by way of an interview with the author about her groundbreaking methodology. Jean M. O'Brien and Robert Warrior SUSAN HILL'S PRIZE-WINNING BOOK The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River (2017) offers a comprehensive history of land and governance that is rare in its framing, its focus, and its execution, rendering it one of the most important studies to emerge on Haudenosaunee history to date.1 In this book Hill documents the relationships that Haudenosaunee had with lands, peoples, and waters in what is now the North American "Northeast." She moves us through the vicissitudes of the Revolutionary War, documenting Haudenosaunee movement up into the northern points of their hunting territory and their relocation and negotiations with Mississaugas at what would become Six Nations of the Grand River. On the way we run into some of the usual protagonists of Six Nations history: Joseph Brant (Thayendenaga), William Johnson, and John A. MacDonald. Brant's sister and Johnson's wife, Molly Brant, appears briefly, and one of the most chronicled Indigenous women in North America, Pauline Johnson, notably does not make an appearance. These are not ellipses or oversights, as Hill's approach is far from hagiographic; thus, there are very different players in this story. The central concern or protagonist is not a person or an event but a set of [End Page 149] ethics. The ethics of land are the central protagonists in this study, and this makes for a very different kind of history than we have been taught about Six Nations.2 These ethics of land speak through the archives that Hill works with: speeches and letters, council minutes, Indian agent correspondence, and arguments and negotiations. Through Hill's readings we see the process of treaty, of deliberation and decision making regarding property and inheritance in colonial contexts laid bare for us, and it is the burning question—the question of the contradiction between ethics and practice in the teeth of settler-colonial constraint and imperative—that orients her analysis. She asks specifically of this material, "If our relationship to the earth and to land is central why would we negotiate land sharing deals, treaties and, leases and direct sales?" (4). These negotiations over land are in seeming contradiction to Haudenosaunee philosophy and belief. We see how chiefs, clan mothers, and councils tried to maintain land and territory through policy, land tenure practice, and inheritance decisions in the face of rapid and unrelenting attempts to divest them of land and (annuity) money. Gone is the emphasis on militarism, decline and defeat, and then cultural salvage that has marked much of the literature on the Iroquois. Not only is this a sort of story different from the one we have been told, but this is also a model study of how to read archives for Indigenous history, theory, and principle. Hill offers a robust account of the Haudenosaunee eighteenth-century alliance with the British, a relationship based on mutual recognition, on equality. This alliance with the British, however, extends the principles of the earlier seventeenth-century Kaswentha ("Two Row Wampum") Treaty between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee and transposes it onto relations with the British. But eighteenth-century Haudenosaunee not only treated with British, they maintained their relationships to others in the Confederacy and those in the shadow of the Confederacy. As such, they brought with them protectorate nations like the Nanticokes and Tutelos when they moved to what is now Ontario, but they also brought with them their obligations to people and land. Hill demonstrates how these obligations and relationships with other political orders were...

An Introduction to Volume 30: Continuities and Innovations from the Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association

An Introduction to Volume 30: Continuities and Innovations from the Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association / Une introduction au volume 30 : continuités et innovations de la réunion annuelle de la Société historique du Canada. An article from journal Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada (Volume 30, Number 1, 2019, pp. 1-173), on Érudit.

Mothers, Medicine, and Monstrosities: Historicizing Childbirth and Contraception in Nora Jaffary’s Reproduction and Its Discontents — A View from Río Frío

Written as the author’s contribution to a roundtable held at the Canadian Historical Association’s annual conference in Regina on Nora Jaffary’s, Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905, recipient of the 2017 Ferguson prize, the article utilizes a popular nineteenth century Mexican novel, Los bandidos de Río Frío, as a lens through which to reflect upon childbirth, the construction of various systems of medical knowledge, contraception, virginity, monstrosities, the written word, and national imagining in Jaffary’s book. Both authors see a close connection between childbirth and the project of nation building in Mexico: Payno, to foreground the importance of inheritance, and Jaffary, to stress the ways in which laws, learning, institutions, and traditions shaped reproduction and its outcomes. Notable in Jaffary’s work is the eschewing of traditional periodizations of Mexican history in favour of the testing of hypotheses and a focus on the agency of women. Also compelling is Jaffary’s interest in the emergence of the discursive category of the “general public,” a construct that links her work to that of others interested in the “lettered city.”

Still Working in the Shadow of Men? An Analysis of Sex Distribution in Publications and Prizes in Canadian History

This project was inspired by the Canadian Historical Association’s June 2014 awards ceremony at which the majority of prize winners were men. Why, we wondered, are so few women awarded prizes outside the areas of women’s history, the history of sexuality, and the history of childhood and youth? First, we asked who is working in history? To what degree have departments achieved gender parity in hiring? Do women produce work at a rate proportional to their presence in departments? We collected data in three categories: book reviews, other journal content, and books published between 2004 and 2013. We found that women produce fewer books than do men. Women’s books are less likely to be reviewed than are books written by men and few men review books written by women, a fact with significant implications for both advancement and the inclusion of women in the wider curriculum. Women produce a number of articles proportionate to their presence in the discipline; we suggest that this is because articles require less time of one’s own than do books. It is time to revisit openly and explicitly how academic excellence is determined, and how structural forces produce the sexual inequalities documented here and elsewhere.

Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front by Ian Mosby

Reviewed by: Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front by Ian Mosby Kathryn Dolan Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front. By Ian Mosby. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. ix + 255 pp. Figures, tables, notes, index. US$39.95, C$32.95 paper. In Food Will Win the War Ian Mosby argues that during the Second World War, food and nutrition became primary sites where ideals of citizenship, viewed in terms of gender, class, and ethnicity, were confirmed and contested on a national scale. Food, he argues, “created a space for imagining and attempting to enact a different politics and culture of food and nutrition” (211). The book was cowinner of the Canadian Historical Association’s 2015 political history group book prize. Mosby’s meticulously researched food history moves chronologically through the war and into the postwar period, focusing on the home front. He begins with the political and scientific response to the epidemic of Canadians being rejected for military service due to poor health, mainly based on malnutrition. Mosby next discusses the impact of national food rationing and the new—and increased—nutritional standards. Families found the rationing program to be a positive measure in that it provided a feeling of solidarity with the war effort and a greater sense of equality following the Great Depression. Mosby ends with a discussion of the nation’s postwar nutrition studies—an ongoing debate between education and poverty as fundamental causes for malnutrition in Canadian families—and their overall impacts and failures. There were two particularly fascinating discussions in Mosby’s book. First, he analyzes the great amounts of unpaid labor, largely of women “housoldiers,” involved in assisting allied war efforts through food production [End Page 247] and preparation. Later in the work, Mosby describes a disturbing episode in which the dramatic effects of hunger on First Nations, Metis, and Inuit communities were studied, rather than relieved with additional rations, by nutrition experts as a way to advance their scientific research during the early postwar years. While the book focuses on urban Canadian food and nutrition surveys and samples, Great Plains Quarterly readers will benefit from the interest in agriculture and rural communities that permeates the work. Mosby, in fact, enumerates how necessary Canada’s agricultural Plains were to the allied forces. For example, Britain obtained 94 percent of its wheat from Canada in 1941 (212n). Food may not have won the war, he argues, but it made a significant impact on Canada’s experience on the home front. Mosby’s book is an engrossing study of food and nutrition in Canada during World War II, and it should find a ready audience with students of twentieth-century Canada, agriculture, and food studies. Kathryn Dolan Department of English and Technical Communication Missouri University of Science and Technology Copyright © 2016 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

2013 Canadian Historical Association Presidential Address: On Local History and Local Historical Knowledge

This article considers two undervalued aspects of historical production — local history and local historical knowledge. It distinguishes between microhistory as carried out by professionals and local history as practised by vernacular historians, sometimes in collaboration with professionals. Relating his own experience with the genre of local history, the author highlights the importance of local historical knowledge as held and transmitted by community elders. His collaboration with the Elders of the Inuit community of Grise Fiord, Nunavut, is discussed as an illustration of its potential. The collaborative and dialogical character of local historical knowledge is further exemplified by folklorist Henry Glassie’s work with a small Northern Irish community. Noting current challenges of changing demographics, uprootedness and diaspora, the article considers how emerging communities and minorities are recreating new opportunities for local historical knowledge in Canada’s cities. Heeding the advice of senior Elders such as the late William Commanda of the Algonquin First Nation at Maniwaki, Quebec, the author asserts the importance of local historical knowledge to Canadians’ identities as members of communities with a common history, strengthening connections between people, past and present, and positioning us to better face the future.

History, Interactive Technology and Pedagogy: Past Successes and Future Directions

Based on a keynote presentation at the 2012 Canadian Historical Association conference, this paper surveys the state of digital technology and its impact on academic publication and teaching in the contemporary university. Focusing on the dramatic rise of the Digital Humanities in the last few years, the paper examines alternative forms of peer review, academic scholarship and publication, and classroom teaching as they have been reshaped by the adoption of a variety of digital technologies and formats, including open-access, online peer reviewing, use of databases and visualization techniques in humanities work, online journal publication, and the use of blogs and wikis as teaching tools. Examining the digital production and education work of the American Social History Project at CUNY, which he co-founded, and the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy doctoral certificate program that he heads at the CUNY Graduate Center, the author discusses a range of digital projects and approaches designed to improve the quality of teaching and learning in college classrooms.