Natural Selections

I know you all just finished your first assignment but it is already time to start looking towards the horizon for your upcoming book review of Alan MacEachern's, Natural Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada, 1935-1970.  For this assignment, proper citation and documentation will be imperative for a successful grade. Please adhere to the Chicago school of documentation. Below I will post examples of how you will cite MacEachern's work in your essay and in your bibliography as well. In addition, simply for readability, please use footnotes instead of endnotes. 

Footnote citation should appear exactly like this:

Alan MacEachern, Natural Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada, 1935-1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005), 15.

Bibliographic:

MacEachern, Alan. Natural Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada, 1935-1970. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005.

As the deadline for the assignment approaches, I will also post examples of how book reviews should be cited.

"Remembering Armageddon"

Hopefully you all were able to access the blog earlier this week and noticed that we will be discussing "Remembering Armageddon" tomorrow. We will also examine Cynthia Commachio's article as well. For both, please consider the following questions before tutorial.

1. What are the thesis arguments?
2. How do the scholars support their cases?

In regards to Vance's article, it is my hope that this article will spark interest in a general discussion about Canada's role in the Great War and what this had on the nation's collective memory. We still commemorate the sacrifices our fallen soldier's have made so we can all bring something to the table based on our own experiences growing up with Remembrance Day. I understand that some of may not have read this article because it was not required for tutorial but it is a really great piece and I hope we can discuss tomorrow. Also, for those of you that were snowed in two weeks ago, we can still potentially discuss the articles from that week tomorrow as well.

Readings this Week

As of right now we will be basing our discussion on Jonathan Vance's article, "Remembering Armageddon" and Cynthia Comacchio's article, "Dancing to Perdition: Adolescence and the Problem of Modern Leisure of Interwar Canada." For those of you that have the textbooks, please do all the appropriate readings as I still might be able to get a copy of it by Wednesday. If you do not have the textbook yet you can find the Vance article on Avenue to Learn and you can find the Comacchio article online in the Journal of Canadian Studies, Fall 1997.

Essay Time!

We have all gone through the painful experience of writer's block or many of the other essay frustrations, so don't sweat it if you are experiencing these symptoms.

Don't stay in the same position or area for too long. I find that if you get sedentary it gets harder to focus, which inevitably leads to the desire to catapult your computer out of your office window.

Grab a snack, take a walk or throw on one of your beats. I recommend going to, http://nevernothouse.com Nothing gets the blood flowing and the mind thinking like a 2 minute dance party.
 If you have any questions/concerns or would like me to read a sample, please feel free to contact me via email.

Upcoming Business

There are no tutorials this coming week as your first writing assignment is due. If you need any help or assistance please email me through my McMaster account. We will resume tutorials on February 16. You will need to do the following readings for that session:

The Peoples of Canada, Chapter Eleven, 254-286

Nation and Society, Cynthia Comacchio, “Dancing to Perdition: Adolescence and Leisure in Interwar English Canada,” 221-237.

Nation and Society, Denyse Baillargeon, “Indispensable But Not a Citizen: The Housewife in the Great Depression,” 257-271.

However, you still need to read the articles listed below for next week's lectures.

The Peoples of Canada, Chapters Nine and Ten, 206-227 and 228-253.
Nation and Society, Jonathan F. Vance, “Remembering Armageddon,” 200-215.

If you would like, we could also include these readings in our next discussion as many of you have indicated an interest in the Great War.

What's Important in Canadian History?

Here are the results from a survey that I took in my first tutorial meeting. The majority of those who undertook the survey placed paramount importance on the First and Second World War. Yet, I was happy to see that some had also attached significance to other themes such as immigration, political equality, and technology. I will use these findings when structuring tutorials, hopefully we will hit on all these major notes.

HIST-2TT3 Article