The Department of History and Classics is pleased to present:
Sojourners or Settlers?: Homesteaders on the Move, Alberta, 1871-1916.
12:30 - 1:50
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Rm 2-58 HM Tory Bldg.
Alberta's population grew extraordinarily quickly from 73,000 in 1901 to 496,000 in 1916. The prairie west jumped from nine percent of Canada's population in 1901 to 22 percent in 1921. Clearly this was a foundational era in the Nation's history. Homestead mythology accords homesteaders a starring role in the drama of European settlement. Yet analysis of ~200,000 Alberta homestead files suggests that a surprising number of homesteaders did not seek a permanent home. Recasting homesteaders as sojourners who came to speculate leads to reimagining life on Canada's prairie frontier. It is often asserted that Canada's frontier was more peaceful, more regulated and less speculative than that of the US. This paper suggests, however, that Canada's prairie frontier was more a site of unregulated, disruptive speculation fueled by hordes of petty capitalists.
All are welcome to attend.
Dr. Peter Baskerville, holds a Research Chair in Modern Western Canadian History at the University of Alberta and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria.
He has written on 19th and 20th century Canadian gender, business, labour and social history. He published A Silent Revolution?: Gender and Wealth in English Canada, 1860-1930, (McGill Queen's Press, 2008), co-edited Lives in Transition: Longitudinal Analysis from Historical Sources ( McGill/Queens 2015) and is currently writing a book on social/economic relations in 19th and 20th century Perth County, Ontario.
He is the lead researcher on the Alberta Land Settlement Infrastructure project which has digitized some 680 reels of homestead records (some 200,000 plus records) and created several large machine readable databases from those files.