Articles by author: tfriedman

  • Students head to Florence to discover history first-hand

    Saturday, May 16, 2026 | By

    The History Department’s Colin Rose is shepherding a group of students around Florence, Italy, in a new course introducing them first-hand to the social history of the Renaissance.

    The course, MARS/HIST 3F52, is housed in the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and cross-listed by the History Department. Before heading overseas, the students met daily with Dr. Rose to immerse themselves in the city’s past and work with primary sources from the period. Once in Italy, they will learn more about the social, political, and cultural history of Florence and the daily lives of its inhabitants, while also visiting important cultural sites as well as Siena and Bologna.

    Students embarking on the trip bring diverse interests and perspectives to the course. Nick Kester, a History major finishing his fourth year of study, says, “I have wanted to visit Florence since I was 12 years old playing video games set in that city and am so excited to see it with my own eyes.” This won’t be his first hands-on experience: “The History Department and Brock have provided me with several opportunities for experiential learning,” he adds, “and every single one of them have been incredible chances to expand my knowledge base far beyond the classroom.”

    Another enthusiastic participant, Harry Mavromichalis, has just completed his first year as a MARS and Classics & Archaeology major. He points out, “The course presents a really unique opportunity to bring my studies to life and experience the culture and history and see how it has affected modern Italy.”

    Brooke Nolan, a Concurrent Education student majoring in Visual Arts and completing her fourth year at Brock, shares her classmates’ excitement. “I’ve been really interested in the Renaissance since I took a Renaissance art history class, and it focused a lot on Florence,” she reports. “I was really inspired by a lot of the art and how influential it was for its time. I’m excited to see it in person, especially the Ufizzi Gallery and other art institutions, and the architecture as well.”

    Learn more about the Ufizzi Gallery’s holdings here.

    Buon viaggio! We wish you marvelous adventures and lots of learning along the way.

    Categories: News

  • History Department celebrates journal launch, student award winners

    Saturday, April 18, 2026 | By

    On April 6, we had the great pleasure of celebrating the remarkable achievements of our award-winning History majors along with the stellar students who co-edited and contributed to Volume 11 of The General, our undergraduate History journal.

    Congratulations to these talented scholars for their passionate commitment to making sense of the past and sharing their knowledge with the rest of us.

    You can read the new edition of The General here: https://journals.library.brocku.ca/…/bujh/issue/view/274

    Read the full story about the event here: https://brocku.ca/…/young-historians-make-their-mark…/

    Categories: News

  • Highlights of Brock history research now available online

    Tuesday, March 03, 2026 | By

    On February 18, 2026, nine Brock scholars brought their work into the local community with fast-paced, illuminating talks about their research. The participants included six History MA students (Graeme Anderson, Emma Craib, Gary Gardell, Owen McAllister, Ethan Moncion, and Mitchell Woodward); two Ph.D. students in Interdisciplinary Humanities (Lucas Coia and Elizabeth Colantoni); and a SSHRC-supported postdoctoral fellow in the History Department (Alexandra Macdonald). Well done, all!

    The event was part of an annual history lecture series hosted by the Niagara on the Lake Museum. The Brock session was organized in collaboration with the History Department’s graduate program director, Dr. Jessica Clark.

    The presentations are now available virtually for the public to enjoy, so all are welcome to check them out. The link is here.

    Categories: News

  • Mark Spencer to kick off Niagara Parks series on American Revolution, March 22

    Friday, February 27, 2026 | By

    Dr. Mark G. Spencer, the History Department’s own expert on Enlightenment thinking and the American Revolution, will be the first speaker in Niagara Parks’ Heritage Speaker Series at Old Fort Erie, commemorating the Revolution’s 250th anniversary.

    Join history enthusiasts for his talk, “1776: Events and Ideas in the American Revolutionary World,” on Sunday, March 22, at 2 p.m.

    Learn more about the series and reserve your ticket here.

     

    Categories: Events

  • Liz Vlossak to offer Swift History course again in Spring 2026

    Wednesday, February 25, 2026 | By

    Dr. Elizabeth Vlossak will offer her course A Swift History for the second time in Spring 2026.

    Read the full Brock News story here.

    Categories: News

  • Behnaz Mirzai’s book named finalist for publishing award

    Wednesday, February 25, 2026 | By

    Dr. Behnaz Mirzai’s book The Life of an Enslaved African in the Ottoman Empire and Iran: The Autobiography of Mahboob Qirvanian (University of Toronto Press) has been nominated as a finalist for the Association of American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) in the World History category. Congratulations, Dr. Mirzai!

    Find out more about the book here.

    Learn more about the awards here.

    Categories: News

  • Dr. Bryan Palmer to speak on history of colonialism and capitalism in Canada, Feb. 26

    Thursday, February 19, 2026 | By

    Please join the History Department in welcoming the eminent historian Dr. Bryan D. Palmer (professor emeritus, Canadian Studies, Trent University) to Brock. Palmer will be speaking on the history of colonialism and capitalism in Canada, captured in his three-volume study published by James Lorimer & Co.

    Categories: Events

  • Trivia Night, March 10

    Thursday, February 19, 2026 | By

    Categories: Events

  • Book and Plant Sale, March 3

    Thursday, February 19, 2026 | By

    Categories: Events

  • Ali Macdonald promotes education in the building trades

    Thursday, February 19, 2026 | By

    Hamilton Spectator, Dec. 4, 2025

    Opinion: Building a brighter future: Why Canada must value trades alongside higher education
    To solve the housing crisis, Canadians needs to redefine what we value in education and labour.

    Alexandra Macdonald

    Imagine a Canada where housing is affordable again.

    To get there, we need to build millions of homes — and fast. The federal government has promised to do just that. “Build, baby, build!” was the slogan Prime Minister Mark Carney gave us on election night — along with a commitment to “build homes at a scale and at a speed not seen since the Second World War.” But there’s a catch: we don’t have the workforce to do it. And that shortage reveals something deeper about what we value.

    In Hamilton, it is projected that even with new workers entering the labour force between 2024 and 2035, the region will still fall as much as 7,200 workers short of the projected need. Public discussion of the paired housing and labour crises tends to focus on immigration and on education, with increasing attention to the loss of high school trade programs. These are valuable conversations to have, but they miss a bigger question: how did we get here?

    As a historian, I see a pattern.

    For generations, Canada has placed a premium on jobs that require advanced university degrees, while undervaluing other types of work, knowledge and experience — even as we rely heavily on this knowledge and skill to build the spaces where “great thinkers” live, work and innovate.

    The drive to create and support “thinkers,” often at the expense of “doers,” has a long and complicated history.

    One story traces this back to the 19th century as part of the Industrial Revolution. As the factory system took over, society increasingly prized “high-skill” white collar jobs while ushering in low paid, “low-skill,” low respect roles, and hollowing out work that once sat somewhere in the middle.

    But this artificial divide between “thinking” and “doing” jobs, and elevating one over the other, can be traced even further back. My research tracks how in the 17th and 18th centuries elite white men in Britain sought to devalue embodied knowledge held by women and people of colour. Instead, they worked to create new value systems that elevated types of knowledge that, they argued, was the realm of the mind and not the body.

    This process stripped value from deeply significant forms of knowledge — knowledge that was done rather than merely thought. For example, baking, cooking and pickling are all highly sensory processes that require an intimate knowledge of the sights, smells, sounds and textures of the ingredients as they are transformed into food. This knowledge is often deeply specialized and is incredibly hard to learn without hands-on engagement.

    However, to legitimize the “work of the mind,” authors devalued hard-won knowledge like that required to process food as nothing more than “folk knowledge” and, in doing so, contributed to the belief that thinking is knowing and not doing and, importantly for where we now find ourselves, that knowing is more valuable than doing.

    It is hard to debate the fact that Canada needs to find a solution to the housing crisis, but history suggests we also need to rethink some of our foundational value systems around knowledge. Historians, sociologists and anthropologists increasingly argue that doing is thinking, and the past shows us there is immense value in learning and transferring embodied knowledge.

    Most of us will never lay bricks or wire homes ourselves. But we can change how we value the skills that make building possible. If this seems too lofty a goal, think of a time you tried to recreate a meal made by someone who had an intimate knowledge of the sensory nature of food: its smells, tastes, sights, sounds and textures. Even with the recipe in hand, you likely fell short. In that moment you glimpsed the value of embodied knowledge.

    The same thing is true for the building sector. You may not know how to do the embodied work of building your home, but you trust it won’t collapse because someone did have that knowledge. Yet we continue to steer young people around us toward university rather than a trades program.

    Rethinking our value systems around labour and education will not single-handedly solve the housing crisis. But understanding why we value one type of education and work over another may help Canadians realign our values — and give us a fighting chance to “Build, baby, build.”

    Alexandra Macdonald is a postdoctoral fellow at Brock University in the Department of History and a member of the McCall MacBain Postdoctoral Fellows Teaching and Leadership Program at McMaster University.

     

    Categories: News

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