Browse Exhibits (15 total)
The Enduring Value of ‘Ephemera’: Postcards from Scotland
Do you ever consider the potential value of today’s’ ‘throw-away’ items to future historians? Imagine how your emails, texts, Tweets and direct messages could be used to explore your life and the world in which you lived.
In fall 2019 students in UNIV*1200, ‘The History of Stuff’, spent a semester exploring Guelph’s extraordinary archival collections of ephemera, and came up with projects that reveal the exceptional evidentiary value of the postcard. Though we are long from its ‘Golden Age’ in the early twentieth century, the postcard has endured, especially as a medium of communication during travels. In this exhibit, we use Scotland as a case study to examine the richness of the postcard as an historical source.
We invite you to join us as we explore these ‘Greetings from Scotland’!
CC BY-NC-ND:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Archival & Special Collections, University of Guelph Library, Guelph, ON
The Extraordinary History of Stuff Recipe Pamphlet Exhibit
Welcome to our exhibit, which showcases the work of UNIV*1200 F '17. Through the course of the fall semester, the class explored readings and participated in excursions to archives, museums and galleries, where we learned about the nature of ephemera, its status as historical evidence, and its use in historical scholarship.
We focussed our examination of ephemera on printed culinary material, and this exhbit is the culmination of our study of this form, and of eighteen specific sources held in the Archival and Special Collections unit at the McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph.
Melissa McAfee and Ryan Kirkby at the Library made this class possible: thank you for your commitment to our learning.
Enjoy the fuits of our labours ... we hope you will never see 'throw-away' stuff the same way again!
Tried, Tested, and True: A Retrospective on Canadian Cookery, 1867-1917
This exhibit explores cooking in Canada from Confederation until the First World War. The aim of the exhibit is to use cookbooks and domestic manuals as a window into Canadian society during the period in question. It is hoped that audiences gain an appreciation for the diversity of Canadian foodways and the usefulness of cookbooks as primary sources.
The cases and online exhibit focus on 8 themes:
- Technical Housewifery
- Agriculture & Rural Life
- Local History: Guelph & the Surrounding Area
- Community Cookbooks: Religion, Fundraising & Communities
- Advertising Cookbooks: Corporate Advertising
- Wartime Cookery
- Economical Cooking
- Health & Nutrition
This online exhibit accompanies the physical exhibition on display in McLaughlin Library from April 7th, 2017 to December 31st, 2017. Materials on display in the exhibit are drawn from Archival & Special Collections’ distinguished Culinary Arts Collection in the University of Guelph Library. Highlights include a copy of a very rare cookbook published in the year of Canadian Confederation in Ottawa called The Canadian Receipt Book. Only 2 copies in the world are known to exist. Another highlight is The Housewife's Library: a rare book published in Guelph in 1883.
The exhibit was curated by the following University of Guelph students and staff:
Melissa McAfee (Special Collections Librarian)
Kristyn Pacione (3rd year Anthropology student)
Stephanie Reynolds-Badder (4th year History student)