Historical Object-ivity

It’s with some reluctance that I bid farewell to writing in downtown Kitchener at the public library and at one of my favourite cafes, A Matter of Taste. For the rest of the summer I’ll be writing in a beautiful part of rural PEI, close to beaches, bucolic scenery and Charlottetown’s vibrant summer scene, but there’s something about the closeness and excitement of downtown Kitchener that I’ll miss.

This urban environment has provided inspiration and a useful combination of wireless connections, fine caffeinated beverages, and a quiet place to write. My academic interactions in this neighbourhood are usually virtual and text based, but occasionally I’ll meet one of my advisory committee members here and even while writing this post I bumped into a colleague from the Tri-University PhD program. The stimulus for writing also comes from a closeness with a wide range of people and problems, and they remind me of the larger questions that make up the human experience and the reasons for academic writing. For instance, Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I received an interesting question from someone in New York City. She came across a reference to a “flaxwife” in The Magna Carta Manifesto by Peter Linebaugh (2008), and asked if I knew what it meant.

The word is pretty rare, and I hadn’t come across it before now.  It’s not in the OED, but I notice that Words, Names, and History by Cecily Clark (1995, 66) includes it in a list of medieval English surnames based on female trades. Perhaps Linebaugh’s reference is to a rather fun Elizabethan story of community vigilantism, where a “flaxwife” and sixteen of her female friends cudgel a cozening collier (see Alexander Smith, Key Writings on Subcultures, 1535-1727, 2002, pp. 146-148).

Presumably a flaxwife was any woman who was skilled in linen making, i.e. scutching, hackling, and spinning flax, and who did it for a living. The word likely took other meanings, and may even have been connected to the word “flaxen” which meant blond or white. Thanks for the question, and I would be happy to get any suggestions for additional meanings or references.  Feel free to add a comment to this post or send me an email.

On Saturday, 10 November 2007, the Tri-University History Conference was held in Waterloo. I was able to see the plenary address by Geir Lundestad, Professor of History at Oslo University and President and Director of the Nobel Prize Institute, and some of the few but excellent papers on Canadian history. Prof. Lundestad spoke about his specialty, American-European relations after the end of the Cold War, describing NATO’s formation and purpose as an attempt to keep the Russians out, the Germans down, and the Americans in and the difficult trans-Atlantic relationship in the post Soviet period and during the war on terror.

Perhaps as interesting to Canadianists was a panel on “Untangling identities: religion, ethnicity and multiculturalism in Canada.” The most tangled identities, those of Aboriginal converts to Christianity and Mennonites in Canada, were Read the rest of this entry »

As today is Halloween, I couldn’t resist echoing Dr. Royden Loewen’s “Tick or Treat” title suggestion for Dr. Claire Strom’s recent talk at the University of Guelph’s informal Rural History roundtable. She presented a chapter and general methodology for her upcoming book Making Cat Fish Bait out of Government Boys: Politics, Class, and Environment in the New South. The story uses Max and Will Carter’s murder of local cattle inspectors as an example of southern yeomen resisting the eradication of tick borne babesiosis.

The disease also known as Texas fever began to spread with the internationalization of the cattle trade and the close confinement of cattle herds. Some of the early efforts to eradicate the disease include the scientific research of Theobald Smith, and the USDA Bureau of Animal Industry’s establishment of a quarantine line (essentially along the Mason-Dixon line) which marked the northern boundary of the disease’s cure. A common treatment involved dipping cattle in vats of arsenic to eliminate ticks, but this solution was expensive, extremely time consuming, and environmentally problematic.

Yeomen opposed eradication because they disbelieved the diagnosis and saw little benefit for the high costs of treatment. Murdering inspectors was only one form of violence employed as a solution. Inspectors were threatened, attacked, and even arrested for trespassing, and state owned dipping vats were dynamited regularly - as many as 63 were destroyed in one night. The federal government had to force counties and states to continue with eradication campaigns, and sometimes the only way to lessen opposition was to employ ringleaders themselves as inspectors. The first major inroads against babesiosis were made during the Depression as a result of the New Deal and by the 1940s the disease had been generally removed from cattle in the south. It is a triumphant story for progressive science, but in the end it failed to make the South a competitive livestock region.

The talk was very well attended by grad students and faculty from History and other departments such as Animal Science. The interest generated by Dr. Strom’s talk and the discussions that followed are testament to her research but also to the international and interdisciplinary scope of the discourse in rural history. To me it suggests Guelph may be an excellent place to one day host the increasingly stimulating symposium of the Agricultural History Society.

Two weeks ago, Shawn Day, a Guelph alumnus and PhD Candidate at McMaster, impressed a full house at the Wellington Brewery’s Iron Duke lounge with his perceptive thoughts about the city’s relationship with alcohol. The fundraiser for Guelph Museums attracted a young, professional, and very engaged audience — perhaps as much for the beer tasting as for the talk, but I think Shawn had them at his subtitle, “Was Guelph a Drinkin’ Town?” The material he used to answer this question came from his MA at the University of Guelph and his current doctoral work on the larger history of liquor and licensing. He found that Guelph had an unusually high concentration of taverns and hotels for a town of its size, and perhaps not surprisingly, a proliferance of temperance groups who brought prohibition briefly to Guelph in 1885, thirty years before Ontario’s provincial prohibition.

Although this research presents a story of local interest there are far wider implications for the history of urban alcohol and other consumption and the importance of the hotel as gathering place for people and goods. He fielded some good questions about temperance but also some intriguing ideas from the audience pertaining to tavern density and street culture then and now.

The larger paper is available on his research page and includes some of the great visualizations he prepared for the talk. Shawn is likely blogging a talk at McMaster U at this moment, one which I was sorry to miss and am anxious to hear the synopsis.

I recently found my notes from Catharine Wilson’s talk to the 1891 Census Series, long ago on 24 July, 2007, and was reminded what an excellent precis it was to her upcoming book on tenancy in Upper Canada. Given the audience, she focussed on the challenges of finding tenants in the 1842 Census of what later became Ontario. Her larger project reexamines that aspect of the liberal ideal that considered Upper Canada’s free holding society the preferred system. Tenancy was associated with feudalism, insecurity, transiency, and even immorality. Yet (without giving too much away before the publication) Prof. Wilson discovered that thousands of Upper Canadian farmers rented and that tenancy was far more common than most historians recognize.

The book reminds us that tenancy was only considered acceptable in the early stages of a farmer’s ascent of the ‘agricultural ladder.’ Most tenants were the young and newly arrived and used tenancy as a starting up strategy. However, older tenants also used it as a way of ‘winding down.’ The renters usually lived closer to towns, but they were also drawn to the clergy reserve land in the back township. Prof. Wilson used a variety of records to link tenants in one township through generations and found that a third eventually became land owners, another third - usually younger tenants - left the township, and the final third remained tenants for life. These ‘lifers’ had the option of selling or renewing their 21 year leases, or transferring them to their children.

The tenant’s voice was particularly elusive and required a fastidious study of census evidence and municipal records - a process which she gave us a glimpse of at the talk. The book will be out shortly and will challenge how we have thought of renting.

Dr. Gordon Darroch was happy to fulfill some of the Canadian Census Research Infrastructure’s outreach mandate at a seminar at the University of Guelph this morning, but his main purpose was to discuss his experience with the 1871 Census. His work with this document in the 1970s created a sample of the first Census of the Dominion of Canada and spearheaded most of the other national microdata sampling projects that have cumulated with recent initiatives such as the CCRI/IRCS and the 1891 Census Project at Guelph.

He was trained as a sociologist and began to use the census around the same time as the ‘new social historians’ were reconsidering the value of this and other routinely generated sources. It was a time when historians were fascinated with the primary document, the ordinary anonymous ‘folk,’ and the bottom-up approach that came to define a discipline. A seminal work, according to Dr. Darroch, was Stephen Thernstrom’s Poverty and Progress (1969) which used censuses to study a small case study of labourers in a 19th century American town. It was considered a sort of academic wizardry in its time, a meticulous ante-computer tale of people’s fates.

With equally arduous research and nascent punch-card technology, Canadian scholars began to uncover the voices of ordinary people in places like Peel County (David Gagan) Saguenay (Gérard Bouchard) and Hamilton (Michael Katz). Their findings revealed, among other things, that Canadians were surprisingly transient, and they attacked the persistent image that the past was more stable than the present. Dr. Darroch wrestled with the major limitation of these case studies, their local or regional focus, and sought to use the census to generalize more broadly across the country.

His talk this morning dealt with some of the problems of creating a national microdata sample, especially attracting funding which was surprisingly difficult, even when the Canada Council and SSHRC funding agencies were created. But there was also the major problem of deciding how to form a sample and how to make it representative. He found that linking people between census years was impossible with a randomly sampled dataset. Choosing all the people with surnames beginning in T and R was actually very representative as French researchers found in the “TRA sample” of censuses in France. An even better approach was to sample names in certain phonetic pockets and compare them for accuracy to the 1881 census, fully indexed by the Church of the Latter Day Saints. Some groups were oversampled such as Atlantic Canada, urban areas, and certain ethnic groups, and the final project represented 60,000 records, or almost 2 percent of the total Canadian population in 1871. A final challenge was to make the sample usable, but because funding was inadequate for full documentation many potential scholars have been dissuaded and Dr. Darroch feels that more use could be made out of the dataset.

I’ve finally decided to get blogging!  I hope it will be a good way to increase the virtual presence of my university website and facilitate contributions from me and others.  I will use wordpress to present updates and ongoing ideas, and then direct more curious readers back to my university domain for actual documents.  It may be the only way to really encourage dialog on these things and still provide the more static content.