Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Selected problems in Canadian ideas and attitudes on such topics as the arts, religion, education, minority and native cultures, nationalism, and Canadian historiography.

COURSE DETAILS:

Problems in the Cultural History of Canada: History of Canadian Tourism, Vacationing, and Travel

Social scientists argue that mobility is a crucial concept in our increasingly globalized world, making tourism a particularly important field of study. Mass tourism as opposed to elite travel began with the era of steamships and railways, and is now a major global industry – the largest in the world in terms of employment and trade. But was it a modernizing force that fostered ‘a sense of fragmented identity and uncertainty’ (Cecilia Morgan) or did it help to transcend the chaos and confusion of modernity by ‘integrating its fragments into unified experience’ (Dean MacCannell)? Has it been a colonializing force in Canada, one that has reinforced demeaning cultural stereotypes of the First Nations and others, or has it served as an important contributor to economic development and national unity? This course will address these questions, among others, as we examine recent works in this new and important field of history, a field that draws upon post-colonial, environmental, Indigenous, literary, economic, travel, leisure, gender, and other approaches to history. Three of the weeks will be set aside for student presentations of published travel narratives.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Learning objectives: Students will gain insight into how travellers/tourists have helped to define Canada’s image and the impact it has had on economic and social development by studying primary sources of various genres as well as scholarly studies. They will gain experience in delivering an oral presentation based on the analysis of a documentary source, as well as in writing a research paper that develops a clearly defined thesis in a coherent fashion.

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