“Stuff” as a Source: A Source Story and NiCHE Collaboration

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What’s the “stuff” that helps you do environmental history? Environmental history is a particularly “boots-on-the-ground” discipline that has material concerns at its core; the physical worlds around us shape the questions we ask and the choices we make as historians. 

In partnership with Histoire Source | Source Story, a storytelling initiative that makes primary sources accessible to educators and students across Canada, NiCHE is seeking short-form blog posts about the “stuff” you use to engage with environmental history. Highlight a primary source that is particularly illustrative of your research, a historical prop your students love, or even a place that challenges how you think about environmental history. 

Potential “stuff” might include museum artifacts, archival sources (such as maps), physical landscapes, family heirlooms, photographs, or even infrastructure such as a bridge or a road. We’re taking the most expansive definition of “stuff” that we can in order to make the breadth and depth of Canadian environmental history accessible to educators.

We’re looking for a series of short blog posts in either English or French of approximately 500-700 words, geared towards history educators for use in their classrooms, to run in the months of June and July. What’s your cool “stuff” that challenges something about Canadian environmental history? 

Pitch your ideas by 20 May 2022 by emailing editor Blair Stein at bstein [@] clarkson.edu with the subject line “Stuff Stories.”

An honorarium is available for contributors without adequate or consistent access to institutional financial compensation, assistance or support.

Image credit: Items inside artist Kenojuak Ashevak’s tent, Cape Dorset, Nunavut, 1960. Library and Archives Canada, R12438-2954-3-E vol 4.
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Blair Stein

I am Assistant Professor of History at Clarkson University in northern New York State. I teach history of science and technology and environmental history, and I write about the links between geography, technology, and modernity in twentieth-century Canada, with a special interest in aviation.

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