No, I don’t plan to write the definitive history of eggplants, but I have developed an interest in urban gardening and local food and found this interview and photo collection in the New York Times particularly elegant.  Buster English is featured in the paper’s “One in 8 Million” series, and has a wonderful story of growing and giving his produce and advice to neighbours in Brooklyn.

Mr. English calls his small garden plot the Cabbage Patch and uses it to supplement his family’s diet.  When he was showing his plants to a local kid he came to the eggplants and the confused child innocently inquired whether this was where his family got their eggs.

This garden is part of a growing movement in urban gardening and supporting local producers.  Economic pressures are making people examine their grocery bills and contemplate growing something edible in backyards, rooftops, or even windowboxes.  The worrisome environmental impact of shipping food around the world is also causing people to wonder if certain items should be sought closer to home — say within 100 miles, from local farmers, or even within city limits.  Buster English is in some ways ahead of the curve and sees a different kind of importance in growing and sharing food locally.

The Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE) has recorded several talks from the Canadian Historical Association’s 2009 annual meeting at Carleton University and made them available as podcasts.  My paper was titled “Mennonites and Mixed Paint: Canada’s Flax Commodity Chain, 1850-1900.”  It examined how the image of flax production as a Mennonite folkway and quest for self sufficiency was created in the late nineteenth century, and how participation in markets for luxury goods like linseed oil and paint allowed Mennonites to maintain a distinct culture.

A direct link to the audio file (.mp3) is available here.

The CBC has made the brilliant 1966 documentary on Leonard Cohen available on their website.  The film by Donald Brittain confirms the literary legend’s restless youth and wandering lifestyle.  We’re told that Cohen listened mostly to pop music, lived on a small inheritance and little else at some times, inhabited the safety of small hotels, and wrote several hours a day.  He once argued that a hair museum should be created for the victims of so many hair removal services. Although Cohen’s hair, words, or even this documentary skirt the boundaries of historical objects, the link is included here: perhaps he will continue to inspire another generation.

This website has been dormant since the summer of 2008, due to some sudden family expansion, but now it’s time to revive historical object-ivity with updates from my travels and recent work in the flax-paint commodity chain.  A good prompt was a recent comment recieved here from a woman who found a “mastere oljeslagaren” in her family history.  Sounds mysterious, but the occupation was named something similar in North America: linseed oil crusher.  I also kept quite busy last year with conferences around Guelph and abroad, and this semester kicks off a new series of the rural history roundtable.

The roundtable is a florescent discussion of historical objects and rural history at the University of Guelph.  In the first talk of 2009, Dr. Catharine Wilson introduced the plow as an object valued for its function more than its fashioning; its main role might have been turning sod for commodity production, but it was also used to create and perpetuate rural masculinity.  Plowing matches became a celebration of a man’s physical strength and agricultural skill, and a way to teach boys what Wilson calls a gendered art form.

The series in 2007-2008 included talks by Guelph professors Dr. Doug McCalla and Dr. Susan Nance, visiting scholar and PhD candidate Claiton de Silva, and professors of history Dr. Ruth Sandwell (OISE/Toronto), Dr. Joy Parr (UWO), Dr. Royden Loewen (U Winnipeg), and finall Dr. Marvin McInnis (Queens).

One of the talks that I’m using now, these many months later, was McCalla’s paper, “Iron in a ‘wooden age’: Hardware purchases by some Upper Canadian country buyers, 1808-1861.”  His recent material is built around the purchases of 750 people who bought over 400 different commodities in country stores, and it corrects the oft-told story of self-sufficiency in pre-Confederation Canada. People bought a surprising amount of what they used, and they changed their buying patterns very little over this period.

Of all the hardware and chemical items discussed, the most important to my thinking was paint, and the linseed oil, lead, and colours used to make it. It seems these commodities were actually rare in all but the richest urban homes, as mixing and applying paint was a skilled trade and pre-mixed paint was unavailable before mid century. Even linseed oil was sold in surprisingly low quantities and suggests that wooden age’s wood was rarely painted or protected. The consumption talk quite coincidentally fell on Buy Nothing Day 2007, an event that I find a welcome protest to consumer excess but one sometimes built on historical misconceptions of a time when people bought nothing.

If people didn’t buy much colour, or at least not in the way paint is selected and applied today, it wasn’t because they were mixing it up at home.  My research has found that even in the late nineteenth century, mixing and applying paint from linseed oil and pigments was beyond what the average farm family had time, skill, or money to afford.  If they did spend money on coverings it was probably for small or high traffic surfaces such as window sashes, doors, and floors, and for expensive vehicles exposed to the weather like carriages and sleighs.

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, in the span of an hour I’ve seen homeless people getting hassled by police for sleeping in public, local news crews interviewing street youth and crack addicts, prostitutes getting to work before noon, minors buying cigarettes from patio coffee patrons, and a low speed chase ending in scuffles and arrests on the city’s main street. Nothing brings the city out onto the sidewalks on a sunny fall day like an arrest, and nothing inspires the intellect quite like a crowd.

Other questions are more subtly raised through some of the city’s architecture and its proximity to a range of excellent visual and especially performed art. I’ve been fortunate to see Christopher Plummer as Lear in my favourite Shakespeare play, as well as some diverse music and poetry ranging from spoken word artist Motion to the grey haired and golden penned Leonard Cohen. That magical evening with Cohen was just last night at Centre in the Square, where the 75 year old literary and musical icon performed an astounding 3 hour concert. Of course the small venue sold out in a couple hours, and I only chanced upon the ticket queue because of my regular downtown commute on foot. I could ask for no better departure from living in this exciting community.

When thinking of my upcoming succession of new environments — Kitchener, PEI in the summers, Waterloo this fall/winter, and wherever work and writing take me beyond that — I am reminded of my next conference presentation, a semi-plenary panel on environmental history at the Western Canadian Studies Conference in Edmonton. Our panel will be discussing “settlement” from an environmental history perspective, asking if it should be thought of as “resettlement” or some other term that acknowledges first peoples. My reading in this area has suggested that “settled” is an inaccurate way to think of rural people anyway. Supposedly sedentary farmers were often on the move, especially in the semi-arid Prairies, and were involved in processes of settlement, re-settlement, and de-settlement. Many were simply unsettled. Perhaps the peripatetic lifestyle of an emerging academic lends itself to an understanding of everyday life for rural people, and the new environments on my horizon will help situate my thoughts as I write more broadly about life for newcomers on the Great Plains and Prairies.

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 presented in the second and third papers. Dr. Susan Neylan, Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, examined notions of identification and dialogue in the journal of Arthur Wellington (Clah), a Tsimshian Christian who ministered to his own people using elements of cultural spirituality that sometimes incensed Protestant clergy. Neylan found that Aboriginal Christianity reflected integration not replacement and that the best way to observe it was to look for points of meeting, not points of difference. Unfortunately, there was no time for Q&A but I was intrigued by the way First Nations people entered the ministry and will hopefully have an opportunity to ask Prof. Neylan how it compared to the normal path of becoming a Shaman. Clah argued that his training was from God and was as effective as any clergy’s. Did his sense of leadership reflect the nineteenth century Evangelical move to lay ministry or was it a cultural transfer from Aboriginal spirituality?

Dr. Royden Loewen, Chair of Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg and visiting scholar at the University of Guelph, discussed “Fragmenting an Ethno-Religious Identity: The Case of Canadian Mennonites.” In this paper he distilled his research on Mennonite identities (presently slotted for a publication on identity formation in North American ethnic groups) to six discourses or typologies of Mennonites today. I have heard Prof. Loewen present on other elements of the Mennonite diaspora and read some of his writing, and it was wonderful to hear this synopsis of Canadian Mennonite history. He identified secular Mennonites who embraced their ethnicity but not its religion; evangelicals who had adopted a non Mennonite Evangelicalism; Neo-Anabaptists who saw traditional Anabaptist faith as a tool for transforming postwar society; old order Mennonites, the sort who use very visible markers to define ethnic and religious identity; the most common Mennonite who found meaning in parallel but incongruous streams of Mennonite religion and ethnicity; and Asian Mennonites who had immigrated, often from Korea, to urban areas and found the Mennonite faith. The research reveals a fascinating fragmentation of identities within one part of the Mennonite diaspora.

Adam Stewart a graduate student at University of Waterloo presented a stimulating and timely discussion of the history of public education and multiculturalism in Ontario, especially the school system’s implementation (or lack) of federal multicultural standards in the late twentieth century. Not surprisingly, his paper attracted most of the questions as his coverage of education policy before WWII required clarification and support. The conference was well attended and overall a big success. Congrats to the two doctoral students who won awards for historiographical and research papers!

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.