Shell Games: Studies in Scams, Frauds, and Deceits (1300-1650) Ed. Mark Crane, Richard Raiswell, and Margaret Reeves

Mark Crane teaches European history and has contributed significantly to our new graduate program. His chief research concerns the impact of the printing press on the scholarly community of 16th-century Paris. He is also one of the editors of, and a contributor to, Shell Games: Studies in Scams, Frauds, and Deceits (1300-1650). The collected essays in this volume

...are concerned with parochial and patriarchal networks of power. They deal with people on the margins of society, pushing and trying to manipulate boundaries; they deal with people at the very centre of power, endeavouring to conserve or enhance their position. They deal with the strong using lies to oppress the weak and the weak using lies as counter discourses. But at their heart, all of the papers in this collection raise crucial questions about the nature of truth as well as its construction and detection for pre-modern men and women.

Shell Games is published by the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies (Toronto).

Creating a Modern Countryside Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia, by James Murton

James Murton is one of Nipissing University's environmental historians, and he teaches the history of food, among other things. His first book, Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia, treats an early twentieth-century effort by a provincial government to reshape a natural environment into an ideal agricultural landscape.

Creating a Modern Countryside is published by UBC Press.

Hilary Earl honoured with teaching award

Acting History Chair Francoise Noel passes along the news announced in today's University Senate:

Dr. Hilary Earl received this year's Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence.

Congratulations!

Towards a Francophone Community, by Robin S. Gendron

Dr. Robin Gendron teaches Canadian political history; his research, past and present, examines Canada as an actor in the wider world. The subtitle of his first book is indicative: Canada's Relations with France and French Africa, 1945-1968.

Towards a Francophone Community is published by McGill-Queen's University Press.

Derek Neal's new book

The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England was on display and on sale at the major international medieval congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan two weeks ago. It sold out! This book is a extraordinarily well-written exploration of what it meant to be a man in England after the plague. If you've wondered what gender analysis can contribute to history, especially pre-modern history, this is not a bad place to start. The Masculine Self is published by the University of Chicago Press.

Graduate Student Success

The year 2008-9 was the first year of Nipissing University's MA program in history. We have had excellent students and they performed very well.

One particular case worth noting is that of Yvonne Hunter, whose research concerns the formation of a Cold War consensus in post-World War II America. She has been accepted into the PhD program at McMaster University, and received a prestigious SSHRC Doctoral Canada Graduate Scholarship.

Congratulations to Yvonne and all of our MA students!

Hilary Earl's new book

April saw the publication by Cambridge University Press of Dr. Hilary Earl's new book, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History.

Devin O. Pendas, Boston College says:

This is a compelling, well-written, and well-researched book. In this imaginative and important study, Hilary Earl both tells the story of the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen Trial, the ‘biggest murder trial in history,’ and paints a fascinating collective portrait of some of history’s biggest killers... she tells us a great deal about the men who perpetrated some of the most brutal crimes of the Holocaust: who they were, what their backgrounds were, and what their motives might have been. Along the way, she sheds new light on the question of whether and when Hitler might have issued a formal order to initiate the Final Solution.

For more information see the Cambridge University Press site.