An Introduction to Volume 30: Continuities and Innovations from the Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association Une introduction au volume 30 : continuités et innovations de la réunion annuelle de la Société historique du Canada

Volume 30 of the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association carries on the tradition of publishing articles based on the best papers presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association. It also introduces what the editors hope will become a new tradition of sharing the annual meeting’s keynote address, and restores an earlier practice of assembling papers under a common theme. By opening with a presidential address, this issue follows a convention that has been in place through the lineage of the JCHA since 1922 (when it was called Report of the Annual Meeting). Adele Perry’s “Starting with Water: Canada, Colonialism, and History at 2019” invites us to reconsider our perspectives by placing water at the centre of historical questions. Perry’s address flows through several thousand years of history to discuss colonialism and the weight of the past on people today. With a focus on the area around Winnipeg, but a view that sees much further, Perry begins with and returns to “intimate, consequential” water to bring us into a thoughtful and subtle critique of what it means to be a historian of Canada and a member of Canada’s largest professional organization for historians. The keynote address from the 2019 annual meeting also asks us to recognize the legacy of the past we study in the world we inhabit. In “Settler Colonialism and Beyond,” Allan Greer intercepts an influential concept and holds it up for historians’ scrutiny. Without denying the force or influence of settler colonial theory, Greer’s address challenges us to avoid presuming that it is always and everywhere applicable. In short, Greer historicises settler colonial theory as an analytical tool, and settler colonialism as a historical process. He insists on precision in how we use terms like “colonialism,” “empire,” and, for that matter, “Canada,” and reminds us to be sensitive to specific historical contexts when using theoretical approaches developed for a different time or place. He shows the limits of settler colonial theory for trying to understand early modern North America, discusses its strengths for explaining immigration and migration from the later eighteenth century to the formation of the Canadian state in the mid-nineteenth century, and suggests that it has been overshadowed globally by extractivism as the most significant form of colonialism affecting Indigenous peoples and their lands today. The other articles in this issue come from research on “Histories of the Senses,” which was the theme chosen for the JCHA-sponsored sessions in Vancouver. These sessions brought together an international group of scholars working on a variety of historical periods and places. The papers published here are three that focused on early modern Europe and European colonies in the Americas. In “Possession and the Senses in Early Modern England,” Erika Gasser considers how people thought about the senses as they tried to discern, explain, and eventually dispute possible cases of demonic possession. Gasser’s analysis of the role of sense perception in questions of evidence and faith builds upon well-developed fields of scholarship in early modern demonology and history of the senses, and adds a new facet to the social, political, and religious history of England during the long seventeenth century. Andrew Kettler’s “Queer Mineralogy and the Depths of Hell: Sulfuric Skills, Early Modern England, and the North American Frontier” bridges the history of senses with environmental history by examining how and why the association between the smell of sulfur and the perception of evil weakened between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. As industrialization increased the demand for sulfur, and as potential industrial profits pulled sulfur mining westward across North America, the sensory meanings …