22/11/2024
New episode out today! https://open.spotify.com/episode/6mMdbfvLUs5lwGkQG9Vqqx
When you think about student protest movements, you probably don’t think about the Victorian era. But maybe you should—because in 1895, University of Toronto students challenged the university’s administration by going on strike! In this episode, we discuss what led to this protest, what happened during the strike, and campus life/culture in the nineteenth century more broadly.
Here are some recommendations for further reading:
• Martin Friedland, The University of Toronto: A History, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).
• Robert Craig Brown, Arts and Science at Toronto: A History, 1827–1990 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).
• Keith Walden, “Respectable Hooligans: Male Toronto College Students Celebrate Hallowe’en, 1884–1910,” Canadian Historical Review 68, no. 1 (March 1987): 1–34.
• Caitlin Harvey, “University Land Grabs: Indigenous Dispossession and the Universities of Toronto and Manitoba,” Canadian Historical Review 104, no. 4 (December 2023): 467–93.
For anyone interested in what the University of Toronto was like in this period, also check out the university's calendar (essentially, its handbook) for the year of the strike—it's pretty interesting to flip through and compare to today! https://archive.org/details/uoftcalendar1894/
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Image 1: Students in front of University College, c. 1880.
Image 2: Some of the few women students at the University of Toronto in the late nineteenth century. Some of these students were involved in the strike.
Image 3: 1882–83 staff of The Varsity, the university’s student newspaper.
Image 4: William Lyon Mackenzie King, c. 1895. The future prime minister was a leader of the strike.
Image 5: James A. Tucker, the editor-in-chief of The Varsity during the strike who was punished by the administration for what the paper published, c. 1895.
Image 6: Notice of a mass meeting during the strike.
