HIST 4303A: Biography, Memoir and the Writing of Prairie History

HIST 4303A: Biography, Memoir and the Writing of Prairie History
Fall 2025

Description: This course will focus on a small handful of first-person accounts—as-told-to biographies, memoirs, and other recollections—by Indigenous peoples and settlers in the Prairie West. These works were lauded at the time of their publication for what they revealed about the life and times of these individuals. They were later revisited, reevaluated, and incorporated into larger historical accounts as primary sources and used to tell larger stories about the western past in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The course examines the texts and contexts for these stories, both in the moment of their creation and in the decades since. You will be asked to review these accounts, to look “behind the scenes” at other archival records that shed light on their creation, and to track the reception of these works at the time of their first publication. You will also track how, in subsequent decades, historians have turned to these accounts for vital insights into key moments in the history of the Prairie West. In the process, our focus will shift from the authors involved in creating these first-person accounts, to the cultural, social, and political contexts they inhabited, and to the way that historians have turned to these works as “sources” to write larger, regional histories.

This close examination of how these stories were created and how they have since been incorporated into broader histories. As we trace how stories moved from the first-person singular to the plural, and from personal memoir to public history, we will consider the role played by historians in selecting and interpreting aspects of those life histories.

Format: This course will consist of seminar discussions. For the most part, these will focus on the joint consideration of assigned texts, primary sources, and other materials. It will also include mini-workshops on such topics as research, primary source analysis, writing, and editing.

Evaluation: I have yet to settle on the exact assignments for the course. Our activities will depend on active seminar participation and will also include:

In-class writing assignments
Research or Review Essay

Questions? Please contact me at michel.hogue@carleton.ca