Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

A survey of major themes in Canadian social history, which is the examination of past lived experiences. Particular attention will be paid to developing an anti-racist and feminist historical analysis of how race, gender, sexuality, and class shape everyday life, and how and why lived experiences change over time. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Social history is a distinct mode of historical inquiry that takes as its primary interest the lives of everyday peoples – how they lived, worked, and engaged in social and other activities, both formal and informal. Born of 1960s and 1970s radical left movements which maintained that the nation was made not by politicians and capitalists but by the labour, including reproductive labour, of White, Black, Indigenous, and people of colour, and by the genocide of Indigenous peoples, it pays particular attention to race, class, gender, sexuality, indigeneity and colonization as lenses through which to examine historical experience and understand change and continuity. This course focuses on the early 1800s to the present. Students are introduced to and apply social history theories and methods, which are now common across the history discipline.

Topics to be covered may include:

• Coast Salish and other northwestern Indigenous peoples
• Fur trade and gold rush societies
• Impacts of industrialization
• Women’s changing social and familial roles
• Early 20^th century immigration  
• WWI
• Social responses to the “Spanish Flu”
• The Social Life of White Supremacy
• Changes in post-WWII family life
• Black Canadian experience
• Gay and Women’s Liberation
• #IdleNoMore, #MeToo, #BlackLives

Grading

Materials

RECOMMENDED READING: