Associate Professor
905-688-5550 x 3503
dsamsom@brocku.ca
Daniel Samson is an historian of rural 18th and 19th-century Nova Scotia. I am most interested in the political and social processes that forged modernity in the colonial countryside. At the heart of colonial modernity were the liberal-capitalist ideas and practices of country people. Be they evicted Acadians and Highlanders, marginalised African-Americans and Mi’kmaq, pious Catholics and evangelicals, or modestly capitalised improving farmers, rural people shaped markets, imagined competencies, and debated the various dimensions of liberty and constraint that defined the modern world in settler societies.
My current work focuses on two areas. First, I am writing a book-length biography of a 19th-century Nova Scotia miller. James Barry lived a remarkable life, and left a 56-year-long daily diary. As a miller, Barry was at the heart of his community of Six Mile Brook, Nova Scotia. Millers were contentious people, necessary to convert grain to usable food products, but mistrusted as people whose charges often appeared unjust exactions upon the rural poor. Beyond this rich vein community relations, the diary also offers extended reflections on his domestic life, his radical evangelical politics, his printing and very extensive reading, trans-Atlantic print culture, and his eventual intellectual migration into free thought spiritualism. Barry lived in the middle of nowhere, a miller in a very small rural backwater, but his life illustrates well the emergence of bourgeois, masculine intellectual and social life in the modern countryside.
I have also been active in developing Digital Humanities-centered courses that employ digital tools to enhance critical reading skills. This work offers stimulating new avenues for teaching basic historical thinking skills, and have received over $170,000 in institutional and Provincial development grants. Most recently, together with Dr Tom Peace of Western University and Dr Renée Girard of McGill University, I have produced Digital Disruptions, a five-module (10 weekly lessons) asynchronous, online course that uses archival case studies related to Acadian and Mi’kmaw history to teach digital historical methods. Planned as a mid-size, second-year university course, the course offers a deep examination of 18th-century settler colonialism, provides extensive training in critical digital methods, and creates a repository of rare primary sources. The history of 17th and 18th century Mi’kma’ki/Acadie/Nova Scotia – a space with variable Indigenous, colonial, and imperial meanings – provides a unique opportunity to teach colonial history. By taking as our subject a space that simultaneously meant different things to different people – Mi’kmaw homeland, French colony, British conquest – our course reveals to students both the distinctive nature of the past and encourages them to ask questions about how to understand the histories of colonialism and imperialism.
1P95: Climate Change: A History
2F90: Money and Power in the Atlantic World
3P38: Settler Colonialism in Acadie/Mi’kma’ki
3P98: Colonial French Canada
4P11: People and Environment in the 18th-Century Colonial World
Graduate Seminar on Topics in Colonial Canada
“Touring L’ile Saint-Jean, 1730-1758: Mapping People and Environments”, Workshop: Ecologies, Knowledge, and Power in the Gulf of St. Lawrence Region c1500-Present, UPEI, 25-6 July 2024.
“The mill as habitat: James Barry of Six Mile Brook, Nova Scotia”, Conference: La sueur et la possie: une histoire environnementale des mondes du travail, L’université de Toulouse – Toulouse, France, 20 June 2024.
“Teaching Acadie and Mi’kma’ki: Digital Disruptions in the Colonial Archive”, University of Maine [US], 29 February 2024.
“Climate and Emotion in James Barry’s Diary”, Humanities Research Institute, Brock University, 12 April 2023.
“James Barry, Emotion, Textual Communities and the Body in Exile”, Society of the History of Emotions, Florence, Italy – 30 August 2022.
“Writing and the Body: James Barry of Six Mile Brook”, Atlantic Canada Studies Conference, UNB Fredericton, 27 May 2022.
“A Hard Man with Soft Data: Medium-term Climate Data in the James Barry Diary”, “Digital Humanities, Diaries, and Environment in the Atlantic Region”, Workshop organised by Josh MacFadyen (CRC GeoSpatial Analysis, UPEI), UNB Fredericton, 25 May 2022.
[accepted, Covid delayed] “J.B. Miller & Co: Pirate Publishing, Free Thought, and the Circulation of Ideas in 19th-Century Nova Scotia”, Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Print [SHARP], Amsterdam, 15-19 June 2020.
“James Barry: Books, Traders, and the Circulation of Ideas in Rural Nova Scotia, ca.1850-1900”, Joint session for the Canadian Historical Association and the Bibliographic Society of Canada, University of British Columbia, 4 June 2019.
“Searching for Bell: Finding a Woman in a 19th-Century Man’s Diary”, Rural Women’s Studies Association Conference: Gender, Justice, Power, and Place, Ohio University, 17 May 2018.
“’Tirades’ against Confederation: Radical Presbyterian Dissent in James Barry’s Diary”, Conference: The Other 60s, University of Toronto, 21-22 April 2017.
Daniel Samson, Matt Clare, Mike Driedger, Mike Brousseau, and Giulia Forsythe, “Slow Reading and Big History: Transcribing Early Modern Texts and Learning to Map Early Modern Minds”, Historians Teaching History Conference, Mt Royal University, Calgary, 28 May 2016. [Versions of this paper were also presented at the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education, Waterloo University (1 June 2016), and the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Western University (21 June 2016)]
“James Barry and Print Culture in Rural Mid-19th-Century Pictou, NS”, Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, Carleton University, 6 June 2015.
“Agriculture and the Refashioning of Nature: The Aesthetics of Improvement in Upper Canada and Nova Scotia, 1780-1860”, Conference: Images of Europe: Past, Present, Future, Porto, Portugal 4-8 August 2014.
“Farms, Homes, and Bodies: Metrics of Mi’kmaq Progress and ‘Civilisation’, Nova Scotia, 1815-1860”, Atlantic Canada Studies Conference, Fredericton NB, 2 May 2014.
Humanities Research Institute, Brock University, Faculty of Humanities, “Creating an Open Access Database of an 18th-century French-Canadian manuscript census”, $2181.28, November 2024.
eCampusOntario – Digital Disruptions of the Colonial Archive: Settler Colonialism in Acadie/Mi’kma’ki – Course and Digital Repository – $95,289.46, April 2022.
Humanities Research Institute, Brock University, Faculty of Humanities, “Using MEI to Encode James Barry’s Book Manuscript of Traditional Fiddle Music”, $2958.69, April 2021.
Match of Minds, Brock University with undergraduate Brock student Cal McClelland, “The James Barry Music Books: Building a Website in Collaboration with the McCulloch House Museum, Pictou, Nova Scotia”, $5000, April 2021.
Nova Scotia Museum Research Grant, with Keith Grant, Crandall University, “The Colonial Bookshelf: Tracking the Reading of Colonial Nova Scotians”, $3000, May 2019.
Humanities Research Institute, Brock University, Faculty of Humanities, “The Colonial Bookshelf: Tracking the Reading of Colonial Nova Scotians”, $3900, April 2019.
Match of Minds, Brock University with undergraduate Brock student Naythan Poulin, digital bibliographic and metadata, “The Colonial Bookshelf: Tracking the Reading of Colonial Nova Scotians”, $5000, April 2019.
Brock SSHRC Institutional Grant – “The Colonial Bookshelf: Tracking the Reading of Colonial Nova Scotians” – $4212, May 2018
Nova Scotia Museum Research Grant, with Keith Grant, Crandall University, “The Colonial Bookshelf: Tracking the Reading of Colonial Nova Scotians”, $1738, April 2018.
eCampus Ontario – Interoperable LMS-based Transcription Tool – $20,000, February 2017.
eCampus Ontario (co-applicant with Mike Driedger) – “Transcribing Early Modern Texts”,
$35,000, April 2016.Centre for Pedagogical Innovation, Brock University (co-applicant with Mike Driedger) – web course development, “Money and Power in the Atlantic World”, $15,000 – 1 July 2014
The Spirit of Industry and Improvement: Liberal Government and Rural-Industrial Society, Nova Scotia, 1790-1862 (Kingston and Montréal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).
Editor, Contested Countryside: Rural Workers and Modern Society in Atlantic Canada, 1800-1950 (Fredericton, Acadiensis Press, 1994).
(co-editor) Visions: Canadian History Modules Project, two volumes, (Toronto, Nelson, 2010). Second edition, 2015.
“Flour, sawdust and the mill as habitat: James Barry of Six Mile Brook, Nova Scotia”, in Renaud Bécot, Romain Grancher, et Judith Rainhorn eds., La sueur et la possie: une histoire environnementale des mondes du travail [collection under review]
“Building Research and Community Networks: putting Acadiensis at the centre of a digital community”, Acadiensis V, 1 (Autumn 2021), 49-71.
“’Damn TORYISM, say I’: Dissent, Print Culture, and Anti-Confederation Thought in James Barry’s Diary”, Acadiensis XXXII, 2 (Spring 2017), 177-90.
“A Colony of Miners: Northern Nova Scotia, 1827-1862”, in James Opp and John C. Walsh., eds., Home, Work, and Play: Situating Canadian Social History (Toronto, Oxford University Press, 2014).
“’The Measure of Our Progress’: The Commission on Agriculture, Ontario, 1881”, in Nadine Vivier, ed., The Golden Age of State Enquiries: Rural enquiries in the nineteenth century (Turnhout BE, Brepols, 2014).
“Les élites britanniques d’Amérique du Nord et les améliorations agricoles, 1789-1860”, in Nadine Vivier, ed., Élites et progress dans l’agriculture, 16ème-20ème siècles (Le Mans, presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009), 133-62.