Necessary Idealism: A History of Westgate Mennonite Collegiate

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

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

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

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

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.

Canadian Food History Symposium, 26 October 2013

UPDATE: Audio recordings of the three presentations at this event are available online.

THE UNIVERSITY OF WINNIPEG

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

presents the second annual

CANADIAN FOOD HISTORY SYMPOSIUM

featuring

Dr. Ian Mosby

Department of History, University of Guelph

A nurse takes a blood sample from a boy at the Indian School, Port Alberni BC, in 1948, during the time when nutritional experiments were being conducted on students there and five other residential schools. (SOURCE: Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN 4111770)
A nurse takes a blood sample from a boy at the Indian School, Port Alberni BC, in 1948, during the time when nutritional experiments were being conducted on students there and five other residential schools. (SOURCE: Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN 4111770)

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Canadian Food History Symposium, 4 April 2013

In what I hope to make a regular event at the University of Winnipeg Department of History, honours and graduate students enrolled in my Advanced Studies in Canadian Social History class recently presented brief summaries of their original research in Canadian food history.

Tony's Canteen at University of Winnipeg. (SOURCE: University of Winnipeg Archives, SC 2 4 A0626-19416)
Tony’s Canteen at University of Winnipeg. (SOURCE: University of Winnipeg Archives, SC 2 4 A0626-19416)

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