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.