Academic Calendar 2015/2016 - Land & Subsistence

HIST 4485  Land & Subsistence

Prerequisites:

Restricted to students in an Honours program with 84 credits completed.

Hours:

Three hours of seminar per week.

Credits:

6

Description:

Local food and local farms are newly popular. Yet few Canadians own enough land to contribute to more than a small part of their own survival. This is relatively recent - as late as 1941 a majority of Canadians lived in rural places. How and why have Canadians, Native and non-Natives, and Europeans before them, lost access to the resources of the land? How has direct access to sources of food and other subsistence resources been replaced by market-based systems of food production and distribution? What has been gained, and what has been lost? How has the radical separation of Canadians from land after World War II contributed to the economic dynamism, and also the insecurities, of life in Canada today?