Distinguished Research Professor and Professor Emeritus David Dean has a new book, .

Abstract:

Performing Public History explores history-telling as a performance across a wide range of media, including theatre and film, historical re-enactments and living history performances, operas, and video games. Taking historians as storytellers, this book illustrates how the choices they make shape historical meaning. While historians may strive to be objective when they research and write the past, they inevitably draw on their imagination, emotions, and creativity, aligning them with others who make history in public. The book explores issues such as the nature of archives, realism, fact and fiction, accuracy and authenticity, and actants and audiences. It draws on case studies from all parts of the world, offering global perspectives that invite a rethinking about what history is, and how and why we do it. Sharing work by graduate students, the author also offers an appendix of classroom exercises that instructors will find valuable.

Written accessibly for students, this volume offers a succinct account of the discipline of history, the field of public history, and how performance is a useful concept for thinking about history work.

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Congratulations to History ProfessorĚýSonya Lipsett-RiveraĚýwho has a new book published:Ěý, edited by Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Volume 5 in the Cultural History of Love, published by Bloomsbury.

Drawing upon both visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Love in the Age of Empire presents an overview of the period and examine key cultural case studies on the themes of romantic love; love in families; friendship; love in communities; love and the divine; love in politics; physiologies of love; and love in art and material culture.

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Jennifer Evans was featured in an article in Oxford University’s . The essay, written by Eliott Johnson (MPhil Politics and Political Theory, 2022), takes up her recent book (Duke UP, 2023) which won the 2023 GSA Best Book in Literature and Cultural Studies.

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Jennifer EvansĚýis pleased to announce aĚýnew book series with Manchester University Press on Queer and Trans Histories. She is excited to work with fellow series editors Matt Cook (Oxford) and Patricio Simonetto (Leeds) and the excellent advisory boardĚýto bring new and important work into the world.
TheĚýĚýseries aims to serve as a go-to place for cutting-edge stories onĚýearlier and existing LGBTQ+ formations and encourages work on queer and trans lives that challenge identity frameworks. Spanning premodern to modern eras, global perspectives, and across genders and sexualities, it explores intersections of age, race, class, religion, dis/ability, and more.
Key areas of interest include:
The relationship between urban and rural spaces, local to global, and the way migration, mobility and circulation has shaped queer and trans experience over time.
New perspectives on the rich tradition of exploring legal and medical frameworks that have shaped categories of normalcy and deviance.
Studies of mutual aid, DIY practices, arts-based initiatives, and public historical work.
Histories of emotion, affect, orientation, desire and care.
More information is available here:

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Adjunct Research ProfessorĚýJean-Michel TurcotteĚýhas published a new article in the Journal of Military History, “”

Abstract

From January to July 1973, Canada participated in the International Commission of Control and Supervision on ending the U.S. war in Vietnam. The ICCS investigated accusations of violations and supervised prisoner of war exchanges. Although fraught with complexity, contradiction, and lack of cooperation, and based on blurred mandates, the ICCS was a partial success because of the help provided to the American ally. The analysis suggests Canadians remained committed to the international commission despite major political and ideological struggles. The Canadian military thus learned important lessons on Cold War peacekeeping missions in decolonized spaces, on cooperation with U.S. forces, and about international peace mandates.

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ProfessorĚýRod PhillipsĚýgave a paper at an international symposium; “Le vin et l’eau, toute une histoire!”/“Wine and Water, What a Story!” at the UniversitĂŠ Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, in Toulouse, France.

Papers at the symposium focused on the historical and current relationships of wine and water, including the dynamic symbolism of the two in Christian thought, the importance of waterways for shipping wine, and the influence of lakes and rivers on viticulture.

Rod’s paper addressed the common belief that from the Middles Ages until the 1800s – generally expressed as ‘in the past’ – people drank wine and other alcoholic beverages because they were safer than the often-polluted supplies of drinking water from rivers, lakes, and wells. (The process of alcoholic fermentation kills off some bacteria.)

Many early modern physicians recommended against drinking water, but Rod pointed out that the reason they gave was not that the water was unsafe because it was polluted, but that it was water.  In the humoral system that was then influential in explaining health and illness, water was considered a ‘cold’ food, and these physicians thought that drinking it undermined the natural warmth of the body.  They argued that water-drinking cooled the body until it reached its ultimate coldness, death.

Rod also looked at the wine available on some urban markets in early modern France and showed that there was not enough to rehydrate everyone.  Children did not drink wine, women drank much less than men, and the poor could not afford to buy alcoholic beverages. There just might have been enough to rehydrate most adult men, but it is likely that some men drank more than the average, leaving others with not enough for rehydration.

If most people (children and the poor made up a majority of early modern populations) could not rehydrate with wine, they must have done so with water.  There were no fruit juices or soft drinks, and coffee and tea were luxuries. Thus most people drank only water, some drank both water and wine, while a few might have drunk only wine.  If the local water happened to be unsafe, it contributed to illness and the low life expectancy of the period.

Rod concluded by pointing out that if it’s not true that people drank wine to avoid polluted water in the past, the reverse is somewhat true today. Alcohol is now widely considered unhealthy, and many people instead drink water and beverages, like juices and soft drinks, that are almost wholly water.

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Professor Rod Phillips’s latest book, Un curĂŠ dans les vignes (A Priest among the Vines), has just been published in France by Éditions Universitaires de Dijon.  It is co-authored by Jean Bart, an old friend of Rod – they met in Paris in 1989, at a conference for the bicentennial of the French Revolution – who is professor emeritus of the history of law at the University of Dijon.

Un curĂŠ dans les vignes is based on the records of François Delachère, who was the priest in Volnay, a small Burgundy village now famous for its red wines, from 1726 to 1781.  For more than half a century, Delachère kept detailed annual records on the weather, the vines belonging to his parish, the quality and size of the grape harvest, the types of wine produced, and the prices the wines fetched. (The priest kept the revenue from selling the wine to augment his salary.) Delachère editorialized generously, and he recorded his dealings with his employees (sometimes dishonest), his family (frequently dishonest), and wine merchants (generally dishonest).

Rod came across Delachère’s records, kept in two registers, while he was researching the history of wine in an archive in Dijon. As far as he knows, there are no other records like them, in that they give us ground-level, granular information on viticulture, wine production, and the wine trade over a long period during the 1700s.  He and Jean Bart discussed the records during many lunches together in Dijon, and several years ago they agreed to prepare a transcription of the main register. They co-wrote a long introduction that discusses Delachère himself and what the records tell us about wine in Burgundy, already a prestigious wine region in the 1700s.

Delachère’s records also provide background to one of Rod’s current projects, a study of the impact of the French Revolution on wine production and wine culture in France (supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant).

Information on the book is here:

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Professor Emeritus W. R. Laird has just published , Archimedes 68 (Dordrecht: Springer Nature, 2024). The two tomes of Francisci Maurolyci Archimedea, ed. Riccardo Bellé, Pier Daniele Napolitani, and Beatrice Sisani, Edizione Nazionale dell’Opera Matematica di Francesco Maurolico, vol. 7 (Pisa, Rome: Fabrizio Serra, 2022), for which he provided the English translations of the introductions to the texts, has also recently appeared.

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Professor Rod Phillips has published a short piece, in the weekly Newsletter of Meininger’s Wine Business International (an important wine trade publication from Germany), on the notion of ‘neo-Prohibitionism’.  This is a term that is becoming widely used in the alcohol business to refer to advice from public health organizations (such as the World Health Organization) that drinking alcohol is unhealthy, and that people should reduce their intake or stop drinking altogether.

In his contribution, Rod argues that the term misrepresents what alcohol prohibition policies were historically and are today.  He suggests that advice to reduce drinking is more akin to Temperance than to Prohibition campaigns, and that the current decline in alcohol consumption around the world reflects social and cultural changes, not the onset of any form of Prohibition.

You can read the article here:

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History Professor Laura Madokoro is pleased to announce the launch of the exhibit “More Than a Face” as part of the new Active History on Display initiative. Interrogating the notion of being Asian Canadian, the exhibit features nine storytellers who selected and then spoke to the significance of photographs or objects they found meaningful. The result is a diversity of stories that parallel the diversity within the very notion of being Asian Canadian.

The exhibit was funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage, with support from the ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Centre for Public History. It was made possible by the amazing storytellers who participated in this project as well as the efforts and talents of Public History students Danielle Mahon and Sam Nicholls (alumni) and Sarah Hart (PhD Candidate). For more information on the Active History on Display initiative and the More Than a Face exhibit in particular, please visit: .

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