Each year UVic faculty, staff, students, alumni, and retirees produce an incredible amount of intellectual content reflecting their breadth and diversity of research, teaching, personal, and professional interests. A list of these works is available here.
UVic Professor Emeritus Peter Baskerville has recently edited a new publication for McGill-Queen’s UP titled Lives in Transition: Longitudinal Analysis from Historical Sources. Lives in Transition demonstrates how the analysis of collective experience through both individual-level and large-scale data at different moments in history opens up important avenues for social science and historical research.
About the Book
Collective histories and broad social change are informed by the ways in which personal lives unfold. Lives in Transition examines individual experiences within such collective histories during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This collection brings together sources from Europe, North America, and Australia in order to advance the field of quantitative longitudinal historical research. The essays examine the lives and movements of various populations over time that were important for Europe and its overseas settlements – including the experience of convicts transported to Australia and Scots who moved freely to New Zealand. The micro-level roots of economic change and social mobility of settler society are analyzed through populations studies of Chicago, Montreal, as well as rural communities in Canada and the United States. Several studies also explore ethnic inequality as experienced by Polish immigrants, French-Canadians, and Aboriginal peoples in Canada.
About the Editors
One of Canada’s leading business social scientists, Dr. Peter Baskerville is described by the Royal Society of Canada as “one of the world’s leading historians engaged in inter-disciplinary research on the making of modern society.” Baskerville is still an active researcher and desires to make history accessible, relevant, and applicable by using the past to inform the future. Although based in Victoria, Baskerville holds the Chair of Modern Western Canadian History at the University of Alberta.
Kris Inwood is a professor in Economics and History at the University of Guelph whose interests lie in the borderlands between history and the social sciences. His teaching explores economic and business history, quantitative social history, and economic development. His research investigates inequality, changes in physical well-being, and the standard of living.
Praise for the Book
“The collection succeeds in pointing to the exciting potential of longitudinal analysis. In such skilled hands, the approach serves to dissolve older simplicities, to complicate transitions once seen as linear, and to reinforce the multiplicity of conditions affecting mobility.” Eric W. Sager, The Canadian Historical Review 97:1
“The collection establishes the notion of a translator’s body of work and studies it from various angles.” The Malahat Review
“The use of longitudinal historical data created by linking individual-level information in two or more large-scale databases is a relatively new technique to study patterns of social and geographic mobility. The chapters in Lives in Transition draw on census material from Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand and, as a result, scholars from an array of countries will be able to see firsthand how this technique can generate new and interesting lines of historical and sociological inquiry.” Vic Satzewich, Department of Sociology, McMaster University
