The Past Speaks

First-Year Course (Canadian History Survey)

On Monday, I spoke in lecture about the 1885 Rebellion. I showed this video clip.

I also asked the students to look at this “Heritage Minute” about the execution of Louis Riel.

On Wednesday, the class was visited by a guest speaker, Ashley Thomson, the university librarian responsible for history and allied subjects. Mr Thomson gave a very useful talk on techniques for researching an essay. I think that the students profited from his discussion of library databases.

4th Year Seminar on Canada in the Era of Confederation

The focus of this week’s seminar was on the place of religion in British North America. We listened to student presentations on the lives and times of John Strachan, the Anglican Bishop of Toronto, and Ignace Bourget, his Catholic counterpart in Montreal. I showed the students some pictures of Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal.

We then discussed Roberto Perin, “Elaborating a Public Culture: The Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Quebec” in Religion and Public Life in Canada : Historical and Comparative Perspectives edited by Marguerite Van Die (Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 2001), 87-105 and William Westfall, “Constructing Public Religions at Private Sites: The Anglican Church in the Shadow of Disestablishment” in Religion and Public Life in Canada : Historical and Comparative Perspectives edited by Marguerite Van Die (Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 2001), 23-49.

Caricature of Charles Darwin, 1871

We also talked about how Canadians reacted to the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859.  This part of our conversation as based on Suzanne Zeller, “Environment, Culture, and the Reception of Darwin in Canada, 1859-1909” in Disseminating Darwin: Place, Race, Class, and Gender, ed. Ron Numbers and John Stenhouse. (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91-122.

I helped to frame our discussion of the article by showing a trailer of the new film Creation.

Graduate Teaching

In my graduate seminar, the students discussed the following readings: J.M.S. Careless, The Union of the Canadas : the Growth of Canadian Institutions, 1841-1857 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967); Jean-Guy Rens, translated by Käthe Roth, The Invisible Empire : a History of the Telecommunications Industry in Canada, 1846-1956 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s, 2001), chapter 1;  Brian Young and Gerald Tulchinsky, “Sir Hugh Allan,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

I also met with my MA student  to discuss Pat Hudson’s History by Numbers: an Introduction to Quantitative Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).  I’m teaching this student some quantitative techniques she can apply to the records of the trading post she is studying.