Catharine Wilson
Campus: Guelph
Office: 2015 MacKinnon Extension
Email: cawilson@uoguelph.ca
I am delighted to work with students on topics related to Canadian rural history, Irish immigration to Canada, local history, family history and early settlement. My interest in rural history began when I participated in the Huron County Oral History Project, then shifted to immigration and settlement, and now focuses on family strategies for maintaining a life on the land in the 19th century.
My most recent book analyzes individual tenant families and their landlords, their strategies for survival, and the legal and ideological status of tenancy in a society of freeholders. Using the 1842 census, legal and land records, it focuses on the workings of the household economy and local property markets. A continuing project explores how reciprocal work bees (quilting bees, barn raisings etc.) operated as informal labour exchanges and assisted in defining community in the pioneer era. This topic touches on a variety of issues from gender roles and community dynamics to recreational violence. I am also working on a project about ploughing as a gendered art form and rural masculinity.
Selected Publications
- 2008 Tenants in Time: Land and Farm Families in Upper Canada, 1799-1871, forthcoming Kingston/Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press
- 2001 “Reciprocal Work Bees and the Meaning of Neighbourhood,”Canadian Historical Review, 82:3 (Sept. 2001), 431-464.
- 1998 “Tenancy as a Family Strategy in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ontario,” Journal of Social History vol. 31, #4 (Summer 1998), 875-896
- 1997 “The Scotch-Irish and Immigrant Culture on Amherst Island, Ontario” in H. Tyler Blethen & Curtis Wood, Jr., eds., Ulster and North America: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Scotch-Irish, Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1997
- 1994 A New Lease on Life: Landlords, Tenants and Immigrants in Ireland and Canada, Kingston/Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press
- 1986 “Demographic and Attitudinal Trends on the Irish Islands, 1891-1946,”in D. Akenson, ed., Canadian Papers in Rural History, 5, 235-261
- 1985 With A. Brookes “Working Away from the Farm: The Young Women of North Huron 1910-1930,” Ontario History, 77, no.4, 281-300