Since the 1970s students and faculty at the University of Guelph have developed systematic understandings of the past and long-term change in economy, society and culture. The Historical Data Research Unit was created in 2007 to support this work.

News in 2011

March 29: A photo exhibit by Graeme Murdoch, This Is Who We Are, Part 2. The Diaspora Lines opens in the University Library to mark Canada's Tartan Day and Scotland Week for 2011.

March 29: Associate Dean Stuart McCook leads the Rural History Roundtable in a discussion Death and Resurrection of an Agricultural Landscape: Coffee in Indonesia, 1870-1930 in the OAC Boardroom at 14:30

March 29: Dr Bruce Durie, Course Director of Genealogical Studies at Strathclyde University, speaks to a Scottish Studies Roundtable 13:00-15:00 in Mackinnon 132

March 15: Computer scientist Ramona Tutra joins the HDRU's People in Motion project as an Assistant Software Architect

February 20: John Cranfield and Kris Inwood present Stayers and Leavers, Diggers and Canucks: The 1914-1918 War in Comparative Perspective at the Asia-Pacific Economic History Meeting in Berkeley.

February: Applications are being accepted for summer assistant positions to work on two research projects: Early Life and Family Origins of Adult Health: An Historical Perspective and Health, Food and Productivity over the Long Run. For full consideration please apply by February 22.

February 8: The 1891 census project today delivers a sample of the 1891 Canadian census to the North Atlantic Population Project and a number of interested researchers. The sample has records for 433277 people enumerated in 1891. The project was begun in 2003 and completed earlier this year.

January 27: PhD candidate Mehmet Pinar presents his thesis "Stochastic Dominance Efficient Welfare Indices in Development" at an internal defence 10:00am in MacKinnon 720.

January 21: The Canadian Foundation for Innovation announces a grant of $374,821 to the HDRU's People in Motion project. In the same announcement Peter Baskerville at the University of Alberta receives $393,802 for The Last Best West: The Alberta Land Settlement Infrastructure Project. The two projects will collaborate in the creation of longitudinal data from historical census, land and military records.

January 18: Dr. Douglas McCalla leads the Rural Roundtable with his paper Why Buy a Local Product from an Importer? Local Goods and Local Exchange in Rural Upper Canadian Charge Account

January 15: PhD student Jody Nurse reinterprets 19th century rural fairs by linking participants to the 1871 census in a paper presented to the Guerrilla Grads Alternative Histories Conference at the University of Guelph.

January 10: MA student Rahela Dina presents for discussion her MA research paper Factors Affecting the Rate of Obesity In Canada and the USA:- Evidence from the Joint Canada USA Health Survey.

January: Professor Catharine Wilson has posted to the Rural History web page data files used in her award-winning book Tenants in Time: Family Strategies, Land, and Liberalism in Upper Canada, 1799-1871. The data are available to other researchers.

January: Emeritus Guelph Professor Richard Reid publishes the first systematic survey of black British North American Sailors in an article published this month in the journal Northern Mariner.

News in 2010

December 6: Postdoctoral fellow Luiza Antonie presents her poster An Automated Record Linkage System for the Canadian Census at the Workshop for Women in Machine Learning in Vancouver.

December: Peter Baskerville (U of Alberta) and K. Inwood prepare for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council a Knowledge Synthesis Report on the Digital Economy entitled: Canada's Digital Heritage: The Nation's Historical Data in an International Context.

December: Evan Roberts at the University of Minnesota and Guelph professor Kris Inwood publish their paper Longitudinal Studies of Human Growth and Health in the Journal of Economic Surveys.

November: Guelph doctoral student Nicholas Van Allen presents his paper Liquored Londoners: A Geography of Drink in 1881 London, Ontario to the Social Science History Association in Chicago.

November: Post-doctoral fellow Andrew Ross and Kris Inwood present a paper A First Look at Occupational Change during the 1870s (with Luiza Antonie and Peter Baskerville) at the Social Science History Association meeting in Chicago.

November: Graeme Morton publishes St Andrew’s Societies and the Scottish Diaspora in 175th Anniversary of the St Andrew’s Society of Montreal, ed. Jennifer Cassar (Montreal, 2010)

November: Evan Roberts (U of Minnesota), Les Oxley (U of Canterbury) and Kris Inwood publish Physical Stature in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand in the Australian Economic History Review.

October: The 1891 project completes coding of its page-based sample of the 1891 Canadian census and begins beta-testing.

September: Former post-doc Michelle Hamilton publishes her monograph Collections and Objections: Aboriginal Material Culture in Southern Ontario with McGill-Queen’s University Press.

September: Jody Nurse presents her MA research paper Reaching Rural Ontario which reinterprets 19th century rural fairs by linking participants with data collected in the 1871 Census of Canada, as well as a family farm diary and numerous newspaper accounts

September: Former post-doc Karly Kehoe publishes her monograph Creating a Scottish Church: Catholicism, gender and ethnicity in nineteenth-century Scotland (Manchester University Press).

September: Recent PhD graduates Andrew Hinson and Josh MacFaydeen take up their SSHRC post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Toronto (Hinson) and the University of Western Ontario (MacFaydeen).

September: Graeme Morton publishes the 35th volume of the International Review of Scottish Studies.

August: Trevor Griffiths at the University of Edinburgh and Guelph professor Graeme Morton publish their book A History of Everyday Life in Scotland 1800-1900 (University of Edinburgh Press).

August: Guelph professor Elizabeth Ewan has updated and relaunched her Women in Scottish History bibliography and web page on August 10 with the help of TannerRitchie Publishing.

August: Andrew Hinson defends his U of Guelph doctoral thesis Migrant Scots in a British City: Toronto's Scottish Community, 1881-1911. The thesis examines associational culture in in Toronto's Scottish community using the census and records of the Presbyterian Church and Scottish cultural associations.

July: History graduate student Kris Gies defends his doctoral thesis Amateur Soldiering in Industrial Britain: The Early Territorial Force in Glasgow, 1908-1914.

June: Guelph professors John Cranfield and Kris Inwood compare the stature of British emigrants in the WWI armies of Canada and Australia at the Oceanic Passages meeting in Hobart.

June: Post-doctoral fellow Andrew Ross presents The Borders of Size: Height, Weight and Body Mass Index of Major League Hockey Players, 1876–1990 at the Hockey on the Border Conference in Buffalo.

June: Guelph geographer Evan Fraser and co-author Andrew Rimas publish Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations with Free Press/Simon and Schuster (US) and Random Books/Random House (UK).

June: Luiza Antonie, Andrew Ross, and Peter Baskerville participate in MIND THE GAP: A Multidisciplinary workshop bridging the gap between High Performance Computing and the Humanities at the University of Alberta.

May: Chris Minns (LSE), Mary MacKinnon (McGill) and Kris Inwood (Guelph) present their paper Labour Market Dynamics in Canada 1891-1911 to the Canadian Economics Association in Quebec City.

May: Guelph professor Femi Kolapo presents his paper Slavery, Ethnicity and the 19th century Nupe jihad to the Canadian Association of African Studies in Ottawa.

May: Guelph professor Catherine Carstairs and coauthor Paige Schell present their paper Making the Perfect Food Safe: Compulsory Pasteurization in Ontario to the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine in Montreal.

May: An international workshop Longitudinal Analysis, Historical Sources and Generational Change takes place in Guelph May 24-25.

May: Luiza Antonie and Andrew Ross introduce the computer-assisted linkage system at SHARCNET Research Day 2010 at York University. The paper An Automated Record Linkage System for the Canadian Census, 1871-81 was developed with the support of a fellowship and high powered-computing from SHARCNET.

April: Catherine Carstairs has given a paper to the Montreal History Group Progress or Pollutant: Montreal's Fluoride Debates.

April: Evan Fraser in the U of Guelph Geography Department publishes Can economic, land use and climatic stresses lead to famine, disease, warfare and death? Using Europe's calamitous 14th century as a parable for the modern age in the journal Ecological Economics.

March: Dr. Catherine Carstairs in History has published from her flouridation project the article Cities without Cavities: Democracy, Risk, and Public Health in the Journal of Canadian Studies.

February: Guelph professors John Cranfield and K. Inwood present Long run changes in the body mass index of adults in Canada to the Asia-Pacific Business & Economic History meeting in Wellington.

February: Evan Roberts (U of Minnesota), Les Oxley (U of Canterbury) and Kris Inwood have won best paper prize at the Asia-Pacific Business and Economic History Conference in Wellington for The Stature of the New Zealand Maori Population, 1800-1976.

News in 2009

November: Christina Wakefield defends her History MA thesis at the University of Victoria Talking on Their Fingers: A Study of the Ontario Deaf According to the 1891 Canadian Census. Christina contributed to the 1891 census project in its early stages.

October: Josh MacFayden successfully defends his U of Guelph PhD thesis Fashioning Flax: Industry, Region, and Work in North American Fibre and Linseed Oil, 1850-1930. The thesis examines the flax, fiber and linseed oil commodity chain and the millers, farmers and First Nations who participated in it.

September: Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton, along with colleague Tanja Bueltmann publish their collection of paper Ties of Bluid, Kin and Countrie: Scottish Associational Culture in the Diaspora (Guelph Centre for Scottish Studies).

August: Derek Murray's MA research project A Socio-economic History of Brudenell Township Ontario through the 1871 Census of Canada uses complete count data from the 1871 census to reveal the socio-economic structures of life in Brudenell Tsp, a community on the 'margins' of mainstream Canadian society.

August: Paul Lirette defends his MA research report Stock Return Predictability: a comparison of two seemingly similar markets using long-run Canadian financial data.

July: Guelph professor Catharine Wilson publishes her award-winning book Tenants in Time: Family Strategies, Land, and Liberalism in Upper Canada, 1799-1871 (McGilI-Queen's University Press).

June: Post-doctoral fellow Greg Kennedy and Kris Inwood present their paper A New Prosopography: Enumerators and Census Commissioners to the Canadian Historical Association in Ottawa.

May: History professor Dr. Catherine Carstairs and coauthor Brianna Greaves present "Fluoridation: A Magic Bullet for Dentistry and Public Health" to the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine in Ottawa.

April: Guelph economist Ross McKitrick and Olavi Kärner publish Long Term Persistence and Nonstationarity in Geophysical Data In McKitrick's Critical Topics in Global Warming (Fraser Institute).

April: An international workshop Longitudinal Records from Historical Sources is held in Guelph April 6-7.

February: Guelph professor Thanasis Stengos and co-author Andreas Savvides publish their book Human Capital and Economic Growth with Stanford University Press.

February: Guelph economist Ross McKitrick and Stephen McIntryre contest the paleoclimate reconstruction of global warming over the past millenium in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science: Proxy inconsistency and other problems in millennial paleoclimate reconstructions

January: Jim Irwin and Catherine McDevitt (Central Michigan University) and Kris Inwood publish their paper Gender Pay Gap, Productivity Gap and Discrimination in Canadian Clothing Manufacturing, Eastern Economic Journal v35 n1 (2009), pp. 24-36

News in 2008

Asylums and the Insane: The View from the Census is the topic of Chelsea Jack's MA major paper. Chelsea is database manager for the 1871 Census project.

Guelph professor Richard Reid publishes his new book Freedom for Themselves: Black North Carolina Soldiers and Their Families in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).

Graeme Morton publishes Scotland is Britain: the Union and Unionist-Nationalism, 1807-1907 in the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, v1 n1 (2008), pp. 127-141.

Guelph professor Douglas McCalla publishes Economy and Empire: Britain and Canadian Development, 1783-1971 in Canada and the British Empire, edited by Phillip Buckner (Oxford University Press).

Guelph professor Douglas McCalla publishes Des Pays d'En Haut au Haut-Canada: la formation d'une économie de colonisation in Histoire, économie & société v28 n4, pp. 87-107.

Post-doctoral fellow Michelle Hamilton publishes Borders Within: First Nations and Anthropology in Victorian Ontario in Lines Drawn Upon the Water: The First Nations Experience in the Great Lakes Borderlands, ed. K. Hele (Kitchener: Wilfrid Laurier Press), 191-204.

Dr. Stuart McCook in History has published Chronicle of a plague foretold: crop epidemics and the environmental history of coffee in the Americas in the journal Varia Historia (2008).

Guelph professor Kevin James publishes Outwork in Ireland: New Perspectives in Essays in Irish Labour History: A Festschrift for Elizabeth and John W. Boyle, ed F. Lane, F. Devine and N. Puirseil (Dublin: Irish Academic Press), 103-17.

Ian Keay of Queen's University and Kris Inwood publish The Devil is in the Details: Assessing Early Industrial Performance across International Borders in Cliometrica v2 n2 (July 2008) pp.85-117.

Guelph faculty Catherine Carstairs and Norman Smith have published a special issue of the journal The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs with selected papers from a meeting hosted at Guelph last year.

News in 2007

Post-doctoral fellow Michelle Hamilton publishes her ground-breaking article 'Anyone Not on the List Might As Well Be Dead': Aboriginal Peoples and the Censuses of Canada, 1851–1916 in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 18 (1): 57-79.

Asher Kirk-Elleker completes his History MA thesis in 2007 on the topic A Measure of Well-Being: An Anthropometric Study of Living Conditions in Canada at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Asher is contributing to the construction of the 1891 census sample.

Guelph professor Kevin James publishes his definitive study Handloom Weavers in Ulster's Linen Industry, 1815-1914 (Dublin: Four Courts Press).

John Cranfield and Kris Inwood publishes The Great Transformation: A Long-Run Perspective on Physical Well-Being in Canada in Economics and Human Biology v5 n2 (July 2007), pp. 204-228.

Guelph professor Richard Reid's article “Black Veterans in Post-Civil War North Carolina” has appeared in L.M. Loague and M. Barton, ed., The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader (New York: New York University Press).

Guelph professor John Cranfield releases his paper Factors Influencing the Body Mass Index of Adults in Canada as an Agricultural Policy Research Network report CMD-07-08.

Guelph professors Henry Thille and Kris Inwood, along with co-author Herb Emery from the University of Calgary, publish Hecksher-Ohlin in Canada: New Estimates of Regional Wages and Land Prices in the Australian Economic History Review v47 n1 (Feb. 2007), pp. 22-48.

James Yool defends his Economics MA research paper An Anthropometric Study of the Standard of Living and Degree of Marginality in Ontario and Quebec, 1870-1900.

Guelph professor Femi Kolpao has released three books: The Aftermath of Slavery: Transitions and Transformations in Southeastern Nigeria (ed w Chima J Korieh, Trenton NJ: Africa World Press), African Agency and European Colonialism: Latitudes of Negotiations and Containment (ed w Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry, University Press of America) and The Aftermath of Slavery:Transitions and Transformations in Southeastern Nigeria (co-ed w Chima J Korieh, Trenton NJ: Africa World Press).

An international workshop The Generation of Record Linkage from Systematic Sources is held in Guelph March 5 and March 6.

modified January 2011