History

The first government-issued welfare payment to an aboriginal British Columbian occurred in the early 1870s. Since then, these payments have increased exponentially and today aboriginal welfare dependency has become one of the most daunting challenges facing all Canadians. Working with the Stó:lō people of British Columbia’s Fraser River Valley as a case study, this paper traces the history of welfare from its inception as a form of relief issued by the Department of Indian Affairs, through its growth as an instrument of assimilation, and to its emergence in the mid-twentieth century as the primary means of livelihood for millions of aboriginal Canadians. Using oral as well as written sources, I argue that for much of this history aboriginal people did not connect welfare to the negative stigma it carries in mainstream society. Rather, welfare served as a valuable economic resource to be exploited in concert with traditional subsistence activities and wage labour. By the mid-twentieth century, however, this diverse and flexible economic strategy had been eroded and for many people welfare was all that remained.

Discusses the 1815 decision of the Hudson's Bay Company to hire French Canadian voyageurs out of Montreal to break the domination of the Athabasca region fur trade by the North West Company. Competition between these two companies had been violent, and voyageurs were not easily hired. The article describes the effects of the intense corporate competition on the voyageurs, particularly in terms of the legality of desertion, voyageur identity, and the greater ability of the voyageurs to control the terms of their service.

In 1701, William Musgrave described the case of a man who had a periodical evacuation of blood from his thumb every month at the full moon from infancy until the age of twenty-four. The man's health remained unaffected, but he became "uneasie" about the "troublesome flow" and seared his thumb with hot iron.

The abundance of artistic renderings of pain during the eighteenth century suggests it was a subject of great interest. In The Gout (1799), for example, James Gillray (1757-1815) represented gout as an evil, sharp, and fiery devil biting into the sufferer's foot. Charles le Brun (1619-90) captured the differences between the facial expressions of emotion, including acute and simple bodily pain. These images evoke powerfully the early eighteenth-century inseparability between physical and emotional suffering. Gillray's gout was the crippling fiend that could not be ignored, while Le Brun's faces starkly revealed the connection of emotional and physical pain.

In the modern world, technology has enabled us to understand the connections between the menstrual cycle and female fertility and to observe the reproductive process even from conception. Unable to see inside the living body, however, eighteenth-century people imagined reproduction and fertility holistically. Their understanding of fertility was inseparable from the way in which they imagined the inner-workings of the humoral body. Although menstruation was understood to be connected to reproduction, it was considered unreliable, a peripheral indicator of fertility. Above all, the best marker of a woman's fecundity was good overall health.

Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582-1648) is considered by many scholars to be the "father of English deism" as well as one of the earliest English precursors to the European Enlightenment. 2 Although historian Eugene D. Hill places Herbert's deistic works among the third generation of European Deists, Herbert is largely recognized as the chief progenitor of English deism. 3 This is likely because his works were the first to be published in England with a claim of authorship rather than circulated in a clandestine fashion. Largely overshadowed by his younger brother, the poet George Herbert, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Edward was an acclaimed author, philosopher, historian and statesman during his lifetime. 4 Interestingly Herbert has been characterized by later scholars and philosophers both as a "dandy" and a "fop" and, more ominously, as the "Black Lord Herbert." 5 To understand the religious views of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury it is advantageous to gain a basic knowledge of the life he lived and the influences that surrounded him. To this end I will first diverge slightly from our topic in order to provide a brief biography in an effort to shed light both on Herbert's person and the world that he lived in as it related to him.

This presentation examines the place of the mystagogue, men of dubious extraction who worked on the borderlands between science and magic attempting to force their way into communities of scientific patronage using arts that blurred the lines between science and magic, within the complex alchemical patronage networks of Elizabethan England. Many studies have focussed on various scientific patronage networks and those scientists that gave birth to the Scientific Revolution. However, there is a gap in the scholarly literature regarding networks of alchemical patronage in England and the alchemists that achieved wealth and fame from these networks.
  This paper addresses the following key questions: What was the fundamental composition of alchemical patronage networks in Elizabethan England? How did they function? And what role did the mystagogue play within what was ostensibly a “scientific” pursuit? Utilizing personal letters and alchemical tracts by both wealthy patrons and the alchemists they employed, this study suggests that the major state and privately funded patronage networks in the late 16th century were highly selective in the alchemists that they chose to support, but the basis for the decision rarely included the scientific merit of the selected project. Legitimate natural philosophers like Thomas Charnock found themselves overlooked while mystagogues were given vast amounts of money to practice their art. Though mystagogues like William Medley believed that transmutation of metals and the creation of the Quintessence were indeed possible, they were making promises upon which they could not deliver. However, these men were able to draw wealthy, well-educated patrons into a massive alchemical network that would end in the near ruin of many prominent Elizabethan nobles.
  Historians of patronage studies have noted that, unlike anywhere else in Europe, patronage in England favoured people whose art was deemed utilitarian. This meant that fantastic and often impossible projects could be favoured by wealthy patrons over the work of innovative natural philosophers. This study invites discussion about what exactly constitutes “science” in Elizabethan England and the place of magic, alchemy and the mystagogue in the transformation of the pseudo-science of Alchemy to the modern science of chemistry.

as well as Diplomatic History's anonymous readers for their constructive suggestions and guidance. This research could also not have been accomplished without generous financial assistance from the University of Ottawa and the Harry S. Truman Library Institute. Last but not least, I must express my gratitude to family and friends for their patience and unconditional support.