When it comes to the making of a hero, timing is everything, and it’s all about location, location, location, says Brian Owens, UWindsor archivist and librarian responsible for rare books and special collections.
Dr. Owens has spent the past five years studying and amassing a large collection of materials in anticipation of the bicentennial of the War of 1812, and he has a surprising take on the big three legends of the conflict – General Isaac Brock, Chief Tecumseh, and Laura Secord.
A UWindsor history professor says that a staged reading of his new play, The Metropolitan, combines his own area of research with nursing, drama and social justice.
“It’s a great University of Windsor story where you can get these inter-disciplinary collaborations that are products of a close-knit campus,” says Steven Palmer, who holds the Canada Research Chair in History of International Health.
The War of 1812 was a turning point in Canadian, American and First Nations histories, says Marshall Bastable, yet, like the recent war in Afghanistan, deciding how to remember and commemorate it is a problem.
“Much attention is given to which side won, but there are other important questions too,” says Dr. Bastable, a sessional instructor in the history department. “How did the various people at the time see the war? Was it a popular war? Was it a civil war? Was it glorious or a war full of terrible suffering and atrocities?”
In November 2010, Johanna Skibsrud’s novel The Sentimentalists was announced as the winner of the Giller Prize, which promptly embroiled the work, its author, and its publishers in a clash between different modes of book publishing.
“The novel’s publication as a limited-run book from a small press, then as an e-book, then as a mass-market paperback sparked public interest in the kinds of questions usually asked by bibliographers,” says Alan Galey.
In her book Moving Beyond Borders: A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora, historian Karen Flynn uses oral narratives to examine the experiences of Black women who trained as nurses in Windsor and Chatham hospitals following the Second World War.
Until the mid-1940s, Black women were prohibited from training as nurses in Canada. The first cohort of Black registered nurses integrated Canadian nursing schools in the early 1950s.
A PhD student who came to Canada in 1883 was so inspired by how settlers were dealing with Aboriginal peoples in the west that he travelled home to Germany to convince authorities there to use the same methods with Poles who had settled in the eastern part of their country, according to History professor Rob Nelson.
Southwestern Ontario was a front in some of Canada’s defining wars, and that history will come under exploration during the seventh Windsor Military Studies Conference, this weekend at the Major F.A. Tilston VC Armoury.
Titled “War & Memory,” the conference is a collaboration between the UWindsor Humanities Research Group, the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies, the Essex and Kent Scottish Regiment, the HMCS Hunter, the Windsor Regiment, and 21 Windsor Service Battalion.
An awards ceremony Thursday celebrated the achievements of students and faculty in the Department of History. The event was held in a first-year class taught by professor Rob Nelson, said department head Miriam Wright.
“It was an occasion for us to let our new students know about the quality of a degree in history from the University of Windsor,” she said. “Our faculty are talented, highly-respected scholars who have works published by the world’s top academic presses and journals.”
