Description
Book SynopsisScience 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.
Trade ReviewThese 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 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: 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
