The journey to Calgary led to a new job that would challenge and stimulate me in ways I did not yet imagine. I crossed that professional threshold with curiosity, carrying the intellectual baggage of over three decades in U.S. higher education. My expertise consisted largely of U.S. history and culture. I was particularly influenced by the new social histories of the 1960s and 1970s that focused on relationships of race, class, and gender and movements for social change. My scholarship had focused on Rocky Mountain miners and their communities, and women in the U.S. West. I had followed miners and western women across international borders, and was introduced to Canadian mining, labor, and women’s histories by colleagues I met through conferences: Jeremy Mouat, a fellow labor and mining historian; historian Catherine Cavanaugh and filmmaker Lorna Rasmussen, who shared the histories of Canadian prairie women. Drs. Mouat and Cavanaugh invited me to write an introduction for their anthology of new Canadian western history, Making Western Canada, through which I met future Canadian colleagues and which may have led indirectly to my invitation to apply for the Imperial Oil-Lincoln McKay Chair.¹

My intellectual baggage also included social theory. I was influenced by historical materialism and feminist theories that helped frame my research questions and topics. My research sometimes led me to re-think or expand those frameworks. In 1975, for example, I had wrestled with evidence that the progressive miners of the Cripple Creek, Colorado, gold mining district were also sexist and racist, and wrote about the overlapping and inseparable identities of class and gender that complicated my analysis of a vibrant labor community.² When I arrived in Calgary, I had just completed two book projects that built from that early scholarship: All That Glitters: Class, Conflict and Community in Cripple Creek and Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, an anthology I co-edited with Susan Armitage.³ As I began to develop new research projects and new classes, I used my scholarship on the California Gold Rush, Colorado gold miners, and western women for my first lectures, to introduce myself to my new colleagues and community.

Much of my energy was focused on the transition to Calgary and to Canada. My job was the immediate priority—learning more about my students and about the University of Calgary academic programs. In some ways University of Calgary students resembled students at the University of New Mexico. Many undergraduates in both Calgary and Albuquerque worked fulltime while carrying full course loads. But when I taught U.S. history in the United States, I was teaching my students their own histories. That was particularly powerful when I taught histories of women, or of race, histories to which women students and students of color had had little previous access. In Calgary, I needed to make American history speak to Canadian students.

The University of Calgary graduate program was a bit different from the U.S. programs I knew. It seemed to me to be a cross between the research-based British model and U.S. programs that require more and broader coursework in preparation for teaching. At Calgary we expected students to know their research topics when they entered their graduate programs, though they could change focus as their studies progressed. In the United States, the choice of a dissertation topic often waited until after a student was well into graduate studies, and sometimes until after the comprehensive exams that came just before the final step of researching and writing a dissertation.

There were daily personal adjustments aplenty, some intriguing, some unsettling. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when my son made friends on his first week at Queen Elizabeth II Junior High School. The name of the school was another reminder that I was in another country. The schools he had attended connoted the enormous hemispheric reach I now sought to bridge—he had attended Montezuma Elementary School and Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Albuquerque, so the names of his schools traversed the histories and borderlands of Mexico, the United States, British North America, and Canada.

I noticed that there were five public children’s playgrounds within walking distance of my house and commented to my neighbor that no real estate developer in the United States would devote that many residential lots to play space. He looked puzzled and responded, “But children need to play.” “How civilized,” I thought.

I was, however, shocked the first time I took my son to a doctor’s appointment when the physician made me sign a document promising not to sue her before she agreed to examine my child. She explained that she knew Americans were litigious and it was a standard precaution in her practice.

There was a lot to notice and absorb: how long to withhold personal information with new acquaintances, the fact that “progressive conservative” was not an oxymoron in Canada, never to plant my garden or change my snow tires before May Long Weekend, all the nuances of daily social behavior.⁴ Each morning I passed three neighborhood schools on the way to work and for some months remained a bit surprised to see the Canadian flag flying over them, not the Stars and Stripes.

I was fascinated with subtle differences between the histories and politics of Canada and the United States. I was astonished with how quickly Canadian political parties and alliances could be formed and dissolved. A Canadian colleague had told me about the notwithstanding clause—Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms which gives Parliament and the Provincial legislatures the ability to override portions of the Charter, certain guaranteed rights “notwithstanding.”⁵ Coming from a country that had rejected its Articles of Confederation after a brief eight-year experiment, it all seemed pretty weird to me. But being forewarned, I could understand a student’s question in my first class in the fall of 1999. I had lectured about the 19^th amendment to the U.S. constitution, which established woman suffrage, when a young woman raised her hand. “What happened,” she asked, “if a state refused to obey the law?” “Some states have ignored federal laws,” I admitted, “for instance when they denied African Americans’ voting rights. But they were breaking the law. The United States doesn’t have a notwithstanding clause.”

I enjoyed the enormous multicultural diversity of Calgary, including emigrants from most parts of the British Empire, and enjoyed hearing echoes of my grandmother’s British accent. I loved the Canadian concept of a multicultural mosaic, a contrast to the U.S. melting pot. The week we arrived I got my introduction to the distinct migrations that had shaped Calgary’s social landscape. I took my car for a required safety inspection at an authorized Toyota dealership. They wanted to keep the car for the day and provided a driver to take me home. He was delighted that I spoke his native Spanish, and we chatted a bit about our separate paths to Canada. In New Mexico I might have assumed he was from Mexico, but he had come to Canada from El Salvador. Many in the small Calgary Latinx community had fled the repressive aftermaths of the failed Sandinista Uprising in Nicaragua and the El Salvador Civil War of 1979–1982. U.S. involvement in his homeland had led my driver to seek refuge in Canada rather than the United States.

Shortly afterwards, a colleague invited me to a lecture about Irish Canadians. As the presenter launched into a discussion of the Orange Order in Canada, I realized with a jolt that of course more Irish Protestants came to Canada. I knew more about the Irish Catholics who chose the United States, including the Irish miners I had studied, who brought the Ancient Order of Hibernians and Knights of Columbus to U.S. mining towns, not the Orange Order that played a large role in Canadian history. The Grand Orange Lodge of Canada, I learned, expanded to include people of non-Irish heritage, and among its members boasted four prime ministers, including Sir John A. MacDonald and John Diefenbaker, and most Toronto Mayors and Council Members from the 19^th through the mid-20^th centuries.

I soon learned, as well, that different migrations had forged the Jewish communities I had known and to which I now belonged. In Canada, there were proportionately fewer 19^th-century German Jewish immigrants, like the ones who had helped found my Reform Jewish congregation in Galveston, and more Eastern European Orthodox Jewish immigrants who fled pogroms in the late-19^th and early-20^th centuries. Canada admitted proportionately more Jews following the Holocaust, though it, like the United States, had denied entry to Jews fleeing Hitler’s Germany. The migrations that shaped the Jewish communities of the Canadian prairies shared some connections with U.S. Jewish agricultural settlements. I had learned about one of those settlements as I wrote an essay to contextualize the memoir of Rachel Calof, a Russian Jew who homesteaded with her husband in a North Dakota Jewish agricultural community from 1894–1917.⁶ The history of Jewish settlement in Southern Alberta helped me locate my experience in multicultural Calgary, where Muslims far outnumbered the small Jewish community, and where the members of the Orthodox and Conservative Jewish congregations far outnumbered the Reform congregation my son and I joined in 1999.⁷ Some of this history became personal in the summer of 2000 when I met a Calgary family descended from Rachel Calof’s brother-in-law. They remain close friends.

While I explored new ground and began new research, I relied on my completed scholarship to introduce my work to Canadians. My first public lecture at the University of Calgary was not a Chair’s Lecture, but a talk in November 1999 at the invitation of the English department, based on work I had done on Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the popular “Little House” children’s books. In that talk, “Cinderella Meets Her Manifest Destiny,” I discussed how Wilder had tailored and fictionalized her own life, following a narrative that combined the narrative structure of Cinderella with historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis that traced American settlement across successive westward-moving frontier lines to claim an ever-receding expanse of “free land.”⁸ By eliminating periods when her family moved back East and editing out periods of extreme hardship and her own childhood labor, Wilder fit her life into Turner’s narrative of frontier progress as pioneers and the nation moved west. Following the Cinderella structure of a long foreground that ends happily-ever-after when the heroine marries her prince, Wilder ended her seven-volume series with her marriage to Almanzo Wilder in 1885. By stopping then, she erased the enormously difficult times that lay ahead for the couple and the Wilders’ final move southeast from South Dakota to Missouri. I continued to write about Wilder during my years in Calgary, but this was my only public lecture based on that work.⁹

However, my research on Wilder became part of the University public relations staff’s project to introduce me to the community as the new Chairholder. They notified media that on Wilder’s birthday, February 7, 2000, I would be available in my office for press interviews about my research on the popular children’s author. For most of the day I gave phone interviews, but the Calgary Herald sent a photographer who took photos of me holding a Little House book. The next morning, I was asked to come for an early-morning interview about Wilder on the local CBC “Eye Opener” radio program. On the way home, I stopped to buy a Herald to see how the story had come out. Below the fold on the front page, I saw the story: “U of C Prof. Says Little House Books a Lie.” And then the banner headline—announcing a university tuition hike. By the time I got to my office, my email overflowed with messages from irate Albertans who did not want to pay more to hear their beloved children’s books debunked.¹⁰

That episode introduced me to a new role in the public media. I was surprised, gratified, and challenged to discover how much academic commentary was valued in Canadian political life and public culture. My opinions had not mattered much in the United States, where no public media cared about what I thought at election time. I was a bit startled and unsettled at first when the CBC asked me to comment on American politics. I tried to tread lightly and offer nonpartisan interpretations while I taught at the University, though my values and politics were probably not hard to discern.

My first three Chair’s Lectures developed some of the themes I introduced in that first public talk for the English Department. For the decade before my move to Calgary, historians of the U.S. West had debated Frederick Jackson Turner’s formative essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” and its enduring influence on history and popular imagination.¹¹ Academic circles in the 1990s were embroiled in fierce debates about the challenges of a group of New Western Historians, and my lectures reflected the intellectual residue of those debates.¹² I introduced my Canadian audience to Turner’s thesis and interrogated the ways that Americans and Canadians alike had used the frontier narrative to construct a mythic U.S. West. Turner’s frontiers continued to influence public imagination long after the 1990s debates over Turner’s frontier thesis had left the academic spotlight. Indeed, throughout my teaching career in Calgary, I confronted students’ images of a mythic American West that historians of the U.S. West had long contested and complicated.

For my first Chair’s Lecture, in the spring of 2000, I used a piece I had prepared for the 1999 Sesquicentennial of the California Gold Rush, tracing the social relationships of gender, class, and race that hopeful gold seekers formed, and contrasting their lived experiences with romantic Gold Rush lore. In 2001 I returned to Turner’s frontiers and explored how western women stretched their categories and boundaries, drawing on over two decades researching women’s history and helping establish the field of western women’s history. That lecture highlighted some of the recurring themes in my work, especially the importance of domestic arenas, families, and private life as sites where social relations are produced and changed, where history-making acts are kindled, and new social institutions imagined.¹³ In 2002 I presented work from my research on western hardrock miners. That work began in 1969, when, as an undergraduate history major at Antioch College, I worked as a student intern at the University of Colorado Western History Collections, organizing the archives of the Western Federation of Miners/International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. I used the archive to write my senior thesis and later to research my dissertation, moving from a focus on the union itself, to its significance for the miners it represented, their families, and communities. My 2002 Chair’s Lecture focused on the story of one extended family in the Cripple Creek, Colorado, gold-mining District, based on oral histories I conducted in the 1970s, and to which I returned in preparation for the centennial of the Cripple Creek strike of 1903–1904, a dramatic chapter in a series of conflicts known as the Colorado Labor Wars. One of those family members, May Wing, had introduced me to the cross-border movements of her father, an Irish immigrant hoist engineer, who she accompanied to the mining community of Rossland, B.C. in the 1890s before returning to Colorado.¹⁴

Together, these lectures introduced my work and some interests I continued to develop during my tenure as the Imperial Oil-Lincoln McKay Chair of American Studies. They used the tools of social history to explore unequal social relationships of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, as they were constructed and transformed in the American West. Focusing on the daily lives of “ordinary” people, I probed the connections of private lives with public history as they forged social relationships and institutions. I introduced a few scholars and people who deeply influenced my work, and to whom I returned occasionally in subsequent lectures.

In the meanwhile, I tried to learn more about Canada, its history, and the shifting meanings of a border that changed dramatically as I began to focus on what did and did not cross it.

Notes

1. 1 Elizabeth Jameson, “Introduction,” in Making Western Canada: Essays on European Colonization and Settlement, eds. Catherine Cavanaugh and Jeremy Mouat (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1996), pp. ix–xix.

2. 2 Elizabeth Jameson, “Imperfect Unions: Class and Gender in Cripple Creek, 1894–1904,” Frontiers 1:2 (Spring 1976): 89–117; prepared originally for Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker, ed. Milton Cantor and Bruce Laurie (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 166–202. In this article, I grappled with the intersections of class and gender as they operated in the Cripple Creek working-class community. My Galveston childhood and subsequent experience had taught me that the intersections of race, class, and gender exponentially disadvantaged working-class women of color, and how these overlapping identities differentiated peoples’ experiences and opportunities. I found it painful to confront the fact that miners I admired were also sexist and racist, but I should not have been surprised that gender affected working-class women and men and disadvantaged working-class women. Although I always explored the overlapping intersections of race, class, and gender, I never attempted to develop a theory of intersectionality, as Kimberlé Crenshaw did so elegantly. There were other terms for these intersections before Crenshaw developed the term “intersectionality.” I used “co-construction” for awhile. See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 139–67; “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43:6 (July 1991): 1241–99; On Intersectionality: Essential Writings of Kimberlé Crenshaw (New York: The New Press, 2017).

3. 3 Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, eds., Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997).

4. 4 For U.S. readers: in Canada there are “long weekends,” rather than “holiday weekends.” The May Long is also known as Victoria Day weekend, in recognition of Queen Victoria’s birthday, May 24, 1819. The Monday before May 25 is Victoria Day and comes at the end of the May Long weekend.

5. 5 Section 33 allows legislatures to override Sections 2 and 7–15 of the Charter for five years when enacting new legislation. These sections deal with fundamental freedoms, legal rights, and equality rights, but not democratic rights. The Notwithstanding Clause was intended to address concerns that the Charter would disrupt the balance of powers between the provinces and the federal government. It was assumed that it would be used only in extraordinary cases.

6. 6 Elizabeth Jameson, “Rachel Bella Calof’s Life as Collective History,” in Rachel Calof’s Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains, ed. J. Sanford Rikoon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 135–53.

7. 7 On Jewish immigration to Canada, see Gerald Tulchinsky, Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community (Toronto: Lester Publishing, 1992); Branching Out: The Transformation of the Canadian Jewish Community (Toronto: Stoddart, 1998), and Irving Abella, A Coat of Many Colours: Two Centuries of Jewish Life in Canada (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1990). On World War II era exclusion, see Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948 (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1982). On Jewish settlement in Alberta, and in Calgary, see The Jewish Historical Society of Southern Alberta, Land of Promise: The Jewish Experience in Southern Alberta (Calgary: Jewish Historical Society of Southern Alberta, 1996) and A Joyful Harvest: Celebrating the Jewish Contribution to Southern Alberta Life, 1889–2005 (Calgary: Jewish Historical Society of Southern Alberta, 2007).

8. 8 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” first presented at the American Historical Association meeting in Chicago, July 12, 1893, coinciding with the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893, originally printed in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894).

9. 9 My work on Wilder includes “Commentary: Truth, Facts, and Alternative Histories: Views from the Little Houses,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 69:2 (Summer 2019), 68–70; “The Myth of Happy Childhood (and Other Myths about Frontiers, Families, and Growing Up),” in Pioneer Girl Perspectives, ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal (Pierre, SD: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2017), 231–63; “Introduction,” in Laura Ingalls Wilder and the American Frontier: Five Perspectives, ed. Dwight M. Miller (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 2002), 1–12; “Unconscious Inheritance and Conscious Striving: Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Frontier Narrative,” in Miller, Laura Ingalls Wilder and the American Frontier, 69–93; “In Search of the Great Ma,” Journal of the West 37:2 (April 1998): 42–52; also in Richard W. Etulain, ed., Myths and the American West (Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1998), 42–52. My 1999 lecture unknowingly influenced a young author in the audience, Hiromi Goto. I was surprised and pleased to read in the acknowledgements of her novel, Kappa Child (Calgary: Red Deer Press, 2001) her thanks to me for “the enlightening panel discussion . . .at the University of Calgary on November 17, 1999” that helped her “revisit the Little House books with new eyes.” You never know what seeds you’re sowing or where they’ll sprout.

10. 10 To be clear, I, too, loved the Little House books as a child, and was not “debunking” them as literature, just interrogating their claims as history.

11. 11 Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

12. 12 The New Western History encompasses a large body of scholarship and owes a great deal to the new histories of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, women, labor, and new environmental histories of the 1970s and 1980s. Among the leading texts of the New Western History were Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991), and Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). For an example of the heated responses to the New Western history, see Gerald D. Nash, “Point of View: One Hundred Years of Western History,” Journal of the West 33:2 (July 1993): 3–4. My one small contribution to this discourse was in Susan Armitage, Elizabeth Jameson, and Joan Jensen, “The New Western History: Another Perspective,” Journal of the West 32:3 (July 1993): 5–6.

13. 13 I served on the organizing committees of the first conference in the field, the Women’s West conference in 1983 and the third Women’s West conference in 1987, and I co-edited two volumes, Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, eds., The Women’s West (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987) and Jameson and Armitage, Writing the Range.

14. 14 Elizabeth Jameson, “The Creatures of Discontent: The Western Federation of Miners and the Radical Labor Movement, 1893–1911” (BA thesis, Antioch College, Department of History, 1970); Elizabeth Ann Jameson, High Grade and Fissures: A Working-Class History of the Cripple Creek, Colorado, Gold Mining District, 1890–1905 (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1987); Jameson, All That Glitters; Jameson, “Imperfect Unions”; Elizabeth Jameson, “History, Memory, and Commemoration: The Cripple Creek Strike Remembered,” in The Colorado Labor Wars: Cripple Creek 1903–1904, ed. Tim Blevins, Chris Nichol, and Calvin P. Otto (Colorado Springs, CO: Pikes Peak Library District, 2006), 3–34; and Elizabeth Jameson, “Talking the Walk: The 1903–1904 Strike Centennial in the Cripple Creek District,” in Blevins, Nichol, and Otto, The Colorado Labor Wars, 101–16. I also co-produced a slide-tape presentation with the support of the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities based on my interviews with residents of the Cripple Creek District, Elizabeth Jameson and David Lenfest, “We Were Never Supposed to be Rich,” slide/tape and video, 1979.