Category: oral history

Interviewees wanted: Descendants of the Winnipeg General Strike

Janis Thiessen1 Comment

Do you have a grandparent or other relative who was involved in the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike?

Did that person share stories with you about their experiences?

1919 Strike troops
Troops on Main Street, Winnipeg, 21 June 1919. University of Manitoba Libraries, Winnipeg Tribune Photo Collection, PC 18/7188/18-6233a-010.

Consider commemorating their participation by sharing those stories in a recorded oral history interview.

Interviews so conducted will used in teaching and research, including publications. For further details (including potential benefits and risks), contact Janis Thiessen, History Department, University of Winnipeg, ja.thiessen@uwinnipeg.ca, 204-786-9947.

1919 Strike streetcar
Winnipeg General Strike, 21 June 1919. Archives of Manitoba, Still Images Section, Foote Collection, Item no. 1696, Negative 2762.

 

 

Necessary Idealism: A History of Westgate Mennonite Collegiate

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Mural inside Westgate’s front entrance. Photo copyright Janis Thiessen.

Manitoba Mennonites’ ethno-religious identity was transformed in the last half of the 20th century. As a school situated in the heart of the city, Westgate Mennonite Collegiate‘s history offers a unique means of exploring generational and class differences within the Mennonite community. Westgate has been a significant site of contested power and social integration: authorities (government officials, church leaders, and school administrators) struggled with others (parents, students, faculty and staff, church members, neighbourhood residents, and non-Mennonites) to (re)define Mennonitism for the post-Second World War generations.

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Not Talking Union book launch

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Hot off the press! Please join me for the launch of Not Talking Union: An Oral History of North American Mennonites and Labour.

NTU cover

The launch will take place at Winnipeg’s McNally Robinson on Wednesday, 18 May 2016 at 7 pm.

The book examines why the majority of North American Mennonites rejected labour unions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

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Not Talking Union: An Oral History of North American Mennonites and Labour

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WPA mural depicting a ’30s era lunch counter, Coit Tower, San Francisco. Photo copyright Janis Thiessen.

Not Talking Union: An Oral History of North American Mennonites and Labour is the title of my forthcoming book from McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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Canadian Food History Symposium 2015

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UPDATE: Audio recordings of the five presentations at this event are available online: Andrea Guimond on poverty and diet; Daniel Pastuck on miso and soy; Madison Connolly on wine and Canadian identity; Emily Nikkel on hog farming in Manitoba; and Aisha Entz on the decline of First Nations peoples since European contact.

You’re invited to the third annual Canadian Food History Symposium!

Thursday, 2 April 2015, 9:30 AM

at the University of Winnipeg Oral History Centre

Room 2B23 (Bryce Hall)

CFHS 2015 poster

Manufacturing Mennonites: public lectures and reviews

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Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba has received its first review! Historian James Naylor (Brandon University) reviewed the book for Oral History Forum d’histoire orale, the journal of the Canadian Oral History Association. You can read his review here.

Mfg Mennos

I’ll be discussing the book at public lectures in Winnipeg on the following dates:

4 December 2013, 12:30 PM, Fred Douglas Place (333 Vaughan St.)
10 December 2013, 2:00 PM, The Wellington (3161 Grant Ave.)
7 April 2014, 2:00 PM, The Portsmouth (125 Portsmouth Blvd.)

Manufacturing Mennonites will also be discussed by registrants in Canadian Mennonite University’s theology book discussion group “Take and Read” on 9 April 2014.

UPDATE:
Reviews of the book have been published in Oral History Review, Mennonite Quarterly Review (see pages 131-33), the Journal of Mennonite Studies, The Canadian Historical Review, Great Plains Research, Labour/Le Travail, Canadian Ethnic Studies, and University of Toronto Quarterly.

Share your snack food stories!

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UPDATE: This research is now completed. Thanks to all for sharing your stories! My book on the history of Canadian snack foods will be available from University of Manitoba Press in August-September 2017.

As part of the research for a book on the history of Canadian snack foods, my research assistants and I are conducting interviews with a variety of interesting people… a food scientist who has done useful work on potato chip browning; a former candy maker at Nutty Club; and a man the Globe and Mail refers to as Dr. Freeze.

But we want to interview many, many more people with a variety of connections to Canadian snack foods.

Nutty Club. © Janis Thiessen, University of Winnipeg, ja.thiessen@uwinnipeg.ca.
Nutty Club. © Janis Thiessen, University of Winnipeg, ja.thiessen@uwinnipeg.ca.

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Book launch

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Celebrating the publication of my first book!

Mfg Mennos

The book launch will take place at Winnipeg’s McNally Robinson on Saturday, 27 April 2013 at 2 pm.

The book is a history of 3 workplaces – Friesens, Palliser, and Loewen – and discusses the transformation of Mennonite identity in the second half of the 20th century.

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