Mark Humphries

I am currently researching the social history of the North American fur trade, specifically the experiences of French Canadian voyageurs and their families in the Great Lakes and Northwest regions. Studying these ordinary people from the 18th and early 19th centuries involves inter-linking a variety of record types, including genealogical databases, parish records, notarial records, legal records, newspapers, voyageur contracts, account books, fur trade journals, and correspondence. This project grew out of a dual interest in my family's genealogy and history as well as the digital historical methods I developed in earlier projects.

My major writing project at the moment is a biography of fur trader Alexander Henry the Elder (1739-1824). I hope to write a book that will illuminate the importance of kinship networks, land speculation, illicit trade, and the American revolution in the early North American fur trade while showing how British Canadians and imperialists later re-imagined that story in a way that supressed the complexity of the past and justified processes of dispossession. I came to this project serendipitously while reconstructing voyageur life histories and kinship networks through a chance discovery: I found that Alexander Henry’s famous and influential memoir, Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories, was, in fact, written by little known English children’s author Edward Augustus Kendall – a fascinating story of deceit and misrepresentation that I recently documented in the Michigan Historical Review.

While working on these new projects, I am also overseeing the final stages of the “Aftermath: Canadian Veterans and the State” project, housed at the Laurier Centre for the Study of Canada (formerly the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies). This SSHRC Insight Grant funded project (2013, 2018), which led to the digitization of more than 100,000 First World War Canadian veterans’ files in partnership with Veterans Affairs Canada, will create an essential resource for social historians, family historians, and genealogists. These digitized files document the lives of veterans, their families, and their kinship networks through their interactions with the state between 1915 and approximately 1950. Over the past few years, a team of graduate students and associated researchers have been analyzing these files to study a variety of questions related to social, military, and family history. In 2023, a special issue of the journal Canadian Military History will bring together eight papers based on these records written by leadings scholars and graduate students in the field and will be the culminating publication outcome for this important project.

I have also written books and articles on the 1918 influenza pandemic, public health in Canada, and shell shock in the Canadian Expeditionary Force as well as military operations in the First World War.

• AMS Pope Foundation Fellow, Annual Lecture, Dalhousie Medical History Society, Dalhousie University (2018)
• LH Thomas Memorial Lecturer, University of Alberta (2018)
• SSHRC Insight Grant, 2018-2023.
• Early Ontario Researcher’s Award, 2015-2019.
• SSHRC Insight Grant, 2013-2018.
• Choice Award, American Library Association with John Maker and Wilhelm Kiesselbach, 2014.
• Canadian Historical Review Prize, 2010.
• SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 2009-2013.

At the moment, positions in the "Aftermath" program of research into the history of Canadian veterans and their families are full. I am currently interested in supervising students at the MA and PhD levels in areas of Pre-Confederation Canadian history, including in the fur trade, digital history, and 18th century military history.

Books

• Mark Humphries. A Weary Road: Shell Shock in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1918. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018, 416 pp.
• Terry Copp, Mark Humphries, Nick Lachance, Caitlin McWilliams, and Matt Symes, Canadian Battlefields of the First World War: A Visitor’s Guide. Waterloo: LCMSDS Press of Wilfrid Laurier University, 2015, 171 pp.
• Mark Humphries. The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013, 323 pp.
• Mark Humphries, John Maker (editors), Wilhelm J. Kiesselbach (translator), with a foreword by Hew Strachan, Germany’s Western Front: Translations from the German Official History of the Great War, 1914 Part I. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013, 620 pp.
• Terry Copp and Mark Humphries, Combat Stress in the 20th Century: the Commonwealth Experience. Kingston: Canadian Defence Academy, 2011, 595 pp.
• Mark Humphries, John Maker (editors), Wilhelm J. Kiesselbach (translator), with a foreword by Hew Strachan, Germany’s Western Front: Translations from the German Official History of the Great War, 1915. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010, 413 pp.
• Mark Humphries (editor), The Selected Papers of Sir Arthur Currie: Diaries, Letters, and Report to the Ministry, 1917–1933. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press/LCMSDS Press, 2008, 407 pp.

Selected Articles and Chapters in Books

• ‘A “Pretended Copy Right”? E.A. Kendall and the Writing of Alexander Henry’s Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories,” Michigan Historical Review, 48, 1 (Spring 2022): 1-29.
• ‘Working the Short-Haul Fur trade: Voyageurs and the Family Economy at St-Benoit, 1796-1821,” Histoire Sociale/Social History, 54, 110 (May 2021): 17-41.
• Kandace Boegart with Mark Humphries, “‘Remember me to the folks’: Memory, the Great War and the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic in Canada,” in Guy Beiner, Pandemic Re-Awakenings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 152-168.
• “In Death’s Shadow: The 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic and War in Canada,” in Tim Cook and Jack Granatstein (eds.), Canada, 1919: A Nation Shaped by War. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2020.
• “The Best Laid Plans Sir Arthur Currie’s First Operations as Corps Commander,” in Serge Durflinger and Doug Delany, eds. Capturing Hill 70: Canada’s Forgotten Battle of the First World War. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017, 78-101.
• ‘This is the Time to Mobilize Forces to Resist the Invader’: War, Public Health, and the 1918 ‘Spanish’ Influenza Pandemic in Alberta,’ In Jeffrey Keshen and Adriana Davies, eds. The Frontier of Patriotism: Alberta and the First World War. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016, 485-508.
• “Introduction,” In G.W.L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919, revised edition. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen‟s University Press, 2015, xii-xli.
• Mark Humphries, ‘Between Commemoration and History: The Historiography of the Canadian Corps and Military Overseas,’ Canadian Historical Review 95, 4 (September 2014): 384-397.
• ‘This is the Time to Mobilize Forces to Resist the Invader’: War, Public Health, and the 1918 ‘Spanish’ Influenza Pandemic in Alberta,’ In Jeffrey Keshen and Adriana Davies (eds.), Alberta and the Great War (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2014) – Invited Contribution.
• ‘Willfully and With Intent: Self-Inflicted Wounds and the Negotiation of Power in the Trenches,’ Histoire Sociale/Social History XLVII, 94 (June 2014): 369-97.
• ‘Paths of Infection: The First World War and the Origins of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,’ War in History 21, 1 (January 2014): 55-81.
• ‘A Calamity from which no Relief can be expected’: Empire, Authority, and Civilian Responses to the French Occupation of Newfoundland, June–September 1762,’ Acadiensis XLIII, 1 (Winter/Spring 2014): 35-64.
• ‘Terry Copp’s Approach to History,’ in Canada and the Second World War: Essays in Honour of Terry Copp, Geoffrey Hayes, Michael Bechthold, and Matt Symes, eds. (Waterloo: WLU Press, 2012), 15–32.
•  ‘The Limits of Necessity: Public Health, Dissent, and the War Effort during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,’ in Esyllt Jones and Magda Fahrni, eds. Epidemic Encounters: Influenza, Society, and Culture in Canada, 1918–20 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012), 21–47.
•  ‘War’s Long Shadow: Masculinity, Medicine and the Gendered Politics of Trauma, 1914–1939,’ Canadian Historical Review 91, 3 (September 2010): 503-531.
• Mark Humphries with Kellen Kurchinski, ‘Rest, Relax, and Get Well: Re-Conceptualising Great War Shell Shock Treatment,’ War & Society 27, 2 (2008): 89–110.
•  ‘Old Wine in New Bottles: A Comparison of Canadian and British Preparations for the Battle of Arras,’ in Geoff Hayes, Andrew Iarocci and Michael Bechthold, (eds.) Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007, 65-86.
• ‘The Horror at Home: the Canadian Military and the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 16 (2005): 231–265.

Recent Courses Taught

HI126: War and Society in the Western World

HI292: History of Canada to Confederation

HI347P: Furs and Empire in North America

HI429/HI479: Research and Reading Seminars in the Canadian Fur Trade

HI656: War and Empire in the Great Lakes Region, 1700-1821

In-Development

HI2XX: Digital Approaches to Family History

HI2XX: North American Histories to 1821

‘A “Pretended Copy Right”? E.A. Kendall and the Writing of Alexander Henry’s Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories,” Michigan Historical Review, 48, 1 (Spring 2022): 1-29.

‘Working the Short-Haul Fur trade: Voyageurs and the Family Economy at St-Benoit, 1796-1821,” Histoire Sociale/Social History, 54, 110 (May 2021): 17-41.

‘A Calamity from which no Relief can be expected’: Empire, Authority, and Civilian Responses to the French Occupation of Newfoundland, June–September 1762,’ Acadiensis XLIII, 1 (Winter/Spring 2014): 35-64.