Essay Assignment
You will write an essay on one of the five topics below. It should be about 2000 words (approximately 7-8 double spaced pages). It must be referenced effectively using Chicago Manual of Style Footnotes. After reading all the articles listed in the topic, you must decide on a thesis for your analysis. A thesis is not a topic statement nor a statement of fact.
Rather your topic should be a debatable position that deals with the broad patterns of continuity and change that link the articles together. In this regard, you should also draw upon your textbook to help you understand the broad patterns of change.
Address some aspect about the nature of changes that these articles illustrate and how you understand the pattern of response. Do not treat the assignment as a five-paragraph paper with each article as a case study.
Rather, identify a theme that might link the articles and then use the evidence from the articles to illustrate that theme. In other words, use the articles for specific examples that justify your position and use your textbook as a source for background information.
Topic 1: Canada and Indigenous People
Binnema, Theodore and Melanie Niemi. “Let the Line Be Drawn Now: Wilderness, Conservation, and the Exclusion of Aboriginal People from Banff National Park in Canada,” Environmental History 11 (2006): 724-750.
Carter, Sarah. “‘We Must Farm to Enable Us to Live’: The Plains Cree and Agriculture to 1900.” In Indigenous Experience: Global Perspectives, edited by Roger Maaka and Chris Andersen. 219-244. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2006. Ereserves
Coutts, Robert. “’We See Hard Times Ahead of Us’: York Factory and Indigenous Life in the Western Hudson Bay Region, 1880-1925,” Journal of Canadian Studies 51, no. 2 (2017): 434-460.
St. Germain, Jill. “Feed or Fight: Rationing the Sioux and the Cree, 1868-1885,” Native Studies Review 16, no. 1 (2005): 71-90.
Topic 2: War and Peace, 1914-1919
Cook, Tim. “Grave Beliefs: Stories of the Supernatural and Uncanny Among Canada’s Great War Trench Soldiers,” Journal of Military History 77 (April 2013): 521-542.
Humphries, Mark. “The Horror at Home: the Canadian Military and the Great Influenza Pandemic, 1919.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association/Revue de la Société Historique du Canada 16, no. 1 (2005): 235-260
Issit, Benjamin. “Searching for Workers’ Solidarity: The One Big Union and the Victoria General Strike of 1919,” Labour/Le Travail 60 (Fall 2007): 9-42.
Keelan, Geoff. “Canada’s Cultural Mobilization during the First World War and a Case for Canadian War Culture,” Canadian Historical Review 97, no. 3 (2016): 377-403. doi: 10.3138/chr.97.3.Keelan
Topic 3: Depression and Reconstruction: The Welfare State
Houston, C. Stuart, and Merle Massie. “Four Precursors of Medicare in Saskatchewan.” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 26, no. 2 (December 2009): 379–93. doi:10.3138/cbmh.26.2.379
Marchildon, Gregory. “Douglas versus Manning: The Ideological Battle or Medicare in Postwar Canada,” Journal of Canadian Studies 50, no. 1 (2016): 129-149
Strikwerda, Eric. “The Anatomy of City Relief.” In Eric Strikwerda, The Wages of Relief: Cities and the Unemployed in Prairie Canada, 1929-1939. Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2013: 57-92. Ebsco Ebook Collection and AU Press ebook
Tillotsen, Shirley. “Citizen Participation in the Welfare State: An Experiment, 1945-57,” Canadian Historical Review 75, no. 4 (1994): 511-543
