Made Modern
Made Modern
Science and Technology in Canadian History
Science and technology have shaped not only economic empires and industrial landscapes, but also the identities, anxieties, and understandings of people living in modern times.
Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History explores the complex interconnections between science, technology, and modernity in Canada. It draws together leading scholars from a wide range of fields to enrich our understanding of history inside and outside Canada’s borders. Organized around three key themes – bodies, technologies, and environments – the book’s chapters examine how science and technology have allowed Canadians to imagine and reinvent themselves as modern. Focusing on topics as varied as colonial anthropology, scientific expeditions, electrotherapy, the occult sciences, industrial development, telephony, patents, neuroscience, aviation, space science, and infrastructure, the contributors explore Canadians’ modern engagements with science and technology and situate them within larger national and transnational contexts.
The first major collection of its kind in thirty years, Made Modern explores the place of science and technology in shaping Canadians’ experience of themselves and their place in the modern world.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the history of science and technology, Canadian history, and environmental history.
These are excellent case studies of historical realities that may in some sense be very Canadian, insofar as they touched upon sensitive geopolitical and power relations… They enrich our knowledge about the social function of field science, expertise, science-policy relations, and about Canadian history in ways that would have made Jarrell proud.
The coherence of such awide-ranging collection is achieved because ‘modernity’ within Canada – as expressed alongside the formation and definition of the idea of ‘Canadian,’ the legacies of imperialism within rational, Liberal, individualist Western nationhood, and of imperial/territorial conflict – remains central throughout.
The editors of this splendid collection argue, in a sly nod to Bruno Latour, that ‘We’ve always been modern,’ or at least liked to describe ourselves as such… Bocking’s dense and accomplished piece on 'landscapes of science' is alone worth the price of admission.
Edward Jones-Imhotep is a cultural historian of science and technology and an associate professor of history at York University. He is the recipient of the Sidney Edelstein Prize in the history of technology for his book The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War. He has held visiting fellowships at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and was the Northrop Frye Visiting Fellow at the University of Toronto.
Tina Adcock is a cultural and environmental historian of modern Canada and an assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University. She has published work in Swedish, Norwegian, Canadian, and American scholarly journals and volumes. She is an associate of the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University.
Contributors: Stephen Bocking, Dorotea Gucciardo, Jan Hadlaw, James Hull, Dolly Jørgensen, Eda Kranakis, Daniel Macfarlane, Beth A. Robertson, Efram Sera-Shriar, Blair Stein, Andrew Stuhl, David Theodore
Introduction: Science, Technology, and the Modern in Canada / Edward Jones-Imhotep and Tina Adcock
Part 1: Bodies
1 Civilizing the Natives: Richard King and His Ethnographic Writings on Indigenous Northerners / Efram Sera-Shriar
2 Scientist Tourist Sportsman Spy: Boundary-Work and the Putnam Eastern Arctic Expeditions / Tina Adcock
3 Nature’s Tonic: Electric Medicine in Urban Canada, 1880–1920 / Dorotea Gucciardo
4 Cosmic Moderns: Re-Enchanting the Body in Canada’s Atomic Age, 1931–51 / Beth A. Robertson
Part 2: Technologies
5 The Second Industrial Revolution in Canadian History / James Hull
6 Mysteries of the New Phone Explained: Introducing Dial Telephones and Automatic Service to Bell Canada Subscribers in the 1920s / Jan Hadlaw
7 Small Science: Trained Acquaintance and the One-Man Research Team / David Theodore
8 Paris–Montreal–Babylon: The Modernist Genealogies of Gerald Bull / Edward Jones-Imhotep
9 Percy Schmeiser, Roundup Ready® Canola, and Canadian Agricultural Modernity / Eda Kranakis
Part 3: Environments
10 Landscapes of Science in Canada: Modernity and Disruption / Stephen Bocking
11 “For Canada and for Science”: Transnational Modernity and the Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition 1913–1918 / Andrew Stuhl
12 North Stars and Sun Destinations: Time, Space, and Nation at Trans Canada Air Lines/Air Canada, 1947–70 / Blair Stein
13 Negotiating High Modernism: The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project / Daniel Macfarlane
Epilogue: Canadian Modernity as an Icon of the Anthropocene / Dolly Jørgensen
Index
Northscapes
History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments
Edited by Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin
Science of the Seance
Transnational Networks and Gendered Bodies in the Study of Psychic Phenomena, 1918-40
The Nuclear North
Histories of Canada in the Atomic Age
Edited by Susan Colbourn and Timothy Andrews Sayle
After Ice
Cold Humanities for a Warming Planet
Foreword by Emma Kowal and Joanna Radin; Edited by Rafico Ruiz, Paula Schönach, and Rob Shields
