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Made Modern

Made Modern

Science and Technology in Canadian History

Edited by Edward Jones-Imhotep and Tina Adcock

Published by: University of British Columbia Press

Imprint: UBC Press

388 Pages, 152.00 × 229.00 mm, 13 b&w photos, 13 illus., 4 maps, 2 tables

Paperback
9780774837248
Published: August 2019

£28.99

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Hardcover
9780774837231
Published: December 2018

£72.00

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

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 draws together leading scholars from a wide range of fields to enrich our understanding of history inside and outside Canada's borders. The book's chapters examine how science and technology have allowed Canadians to imagine and reinvent themselves as modern. Focusing on topics including exploration, scientific rationality, the occult, medical instruments, patents, communication, and infrastructure, the contributors situate Canadian scientific and technological developments 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.

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

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

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.
- Sverker Sörlin, professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm (Scientia Canadensis - Roundtable Review)
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.
- Karen Sayer, Professor and Director of History, Leeds University (NiCHE)
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.
- Elsbeth Heaman, associate professor, McGill University (Scientia Canadensis - Roundtable Review)