Fourth year student Sarah Landry put together a zine for her directed study course, HIST 4917A. In her zine she discusses her reflections about majoring in History and what she has learned in her courses.

Check out Sarah’s zine:

Course Information

HIST 4917 [0.5 credit]
Directed Study
Independent study of an historical topic or theme under the supervision of a faculty member. A course outline specifying readings, assignments, and name of faculty member must be submitted to the Undergraduate Supervisor during the first week of the semester.

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This seminar explores the business��of��history through conversations with people whose business��is��history. We’ll explore various sectors where ‘history’ is a business plan, a source of content, or a way of life. Guests in the seminar come from the museum sector, professional research firms, tourism, agri-business, and development. You will draw from these examples, these conversations, these opportunities, to develop your own plan.

This course is taught by Professor Shawn Graham.

Additional information about the course can be found on the .

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What does it mean to be “normal”? How have ideas about disability changed over time? This course dives into the evolving field of disability history, exploring shifting perceptions, lived experiences, and policies that have shaped inclusion and exclusion. We’ll examine powerful stories of resistance and challenge conventional narratives through Critical Disability Studies. Engaging with historical case studies and public history initiatives, you can gain fresh perspectives on what it truly means to be human. 

Image credit (attached): Toronto Daily Star, March 26, 1966. Photographed by Len Sidaway.

This course is taught by Professor Christine Chisholm. Additional information is available on the course description page.

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For the average person, the Aztecs conjure up images of bloody sacrifices. Yet, the Aztecs or Mexica were just one people of a larger culture now identified as Nahuas. Their complex belief systems and elaborate speeches are just a few aspects of their past that are obscured by the overwhelming images of popular culture. The Aztecs often are surprising as a culture. While they were fierce warriors and harsh imperial masters, they were also poets. They appreciated beauty and had a quirky sense of humour as shown in the nicknames they gave to people such as Tochnenemi (He Hops Like A Rabbit) or Maxtlacozhuehue (Old Yellow Breechclout). They built one of the largest cities that existed in the world in the fifteenth century—Tenochtitlan—in a lake. The city was dotted with canals, so a lot of transportation and commerce was done via canoes. Spaniards who first saw Tenochtitlan were in awe and they compared it to Venice. They marveled at how well the huge market at Tlatelolco functioned and at the wealth of the city. Aztec merchants and soldiers traveled thousands of kilometers to trade or make war and yet they had no draft animals or wheeled carts. Aztec priests were astronomers and mathematicians and bureaucrats and yet they wrote everything in a pictographic form of writing that is still somewhat mysterious to scholars.

This course is taught by Professor Sonya Lipsett-Rivera.

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In the Fall 2024, students in HIST 5316: Maps, Mapping, and Historiographical Praxis conducted research into the history of cartography in Canada and cartographic historical storytelling for their capstone course projects. Besides those two subjects, the course’s primary learning objective was that students would think reflexively about their own praxis as historians, how they approach knowledge-making, for whom this knowledge is intended, and why such knowledge-making matters to them and their place in the world.

For one group of students in that class, the subject matter and learning objective led them to choose to share their research in what was, for each of them, a brand new way: ��through the design and construction of a��). ��All three examples featured below are unique from one another, ��but each demonstrates the potential for historians to experiment with their storytelling, to create new kinds of mediated encounters between past and present, and to experience the making of historical knowledge as a mode of cultural production.

Check out the following StoryMap projects:

• Fionnuala Braun, in partnership with the Clementsport (Nova Scotia) Historical Society, ��.
• Charlotte Johnston,��.
• Romy Shoam,��.

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