John H. Thompson
| Title: | Professor and Director of Graduate Studies |
| Office Location: | 331 Carr Bldg |
| Office Phone: | +1 919 684 8102 |
| Email Address: | jthompso@duke.edu |
- Office Hours:
- Mondays from 1 to 2:30 PM
Wednesdays from 2 to 3:30 PM
Education
- PhD Queen's University, 1975
- MA University of Manitoba, 1969
- BA University of Winnipeg, 1968
Research Interests
I study nineteenth and twentieth-century North American History. I teach a seminar in Canadian history [HST 183S], a comparative lecture course on the North American Wests [HST 108D], and a lecture course the relationships among Canada, Mexico and the United States [HST 108F]. In Spring 2008, I'll teach a lecture course on 'Baseball in Global Perspective.' My almost-completed research project is a book entitled "Family, Farm and Community: The Rural Northern Plains, 1860-1970," a comprehensive comparative rural history of the region to the post World War II "great disjuncture," examining how institutions, "culture," and historical contingency shaped a geographically homogeneous region into the six very different U.S. states of North and South Dakota, Montana, and the Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. My next (and my last) project, just underway, is a book about Enos Slaughter [1916-2002], a Hall of Fame ballplayer from Person County, NC. The project is not a biography of Slaughter, but an attempt to use his life in baseball to explore larger questions about gender, race, class, and celebrity in America.
Teaching (Fall 2008): (typical courses)
- HISTORY 304.01, Focusing prep port prelim cert
- Carr 229, M 11:40 AM-01:50 PM
Recent Publications
Books- John Herd Thompson and Stephen J. Randall, Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies (fourth edition) The United States and the Americas (The University of Georgia Press / McGill-Queen's Press, Spring, 2008). [abs]
- with Patricia E. Roy, British Columbia: Land of Promises Oxford Illustrated History of Canada (Oxford University Press, February, 2005).
- John Herd Thompson, "“Canadian History in North American Context,”" in Patrick James and Mark Kasoff, eds., ed., Canadian Studies in the New Millennium (University of Toronto Press, 2007), 37-64.
- John Herd Thompson, "“Canada in the ‘Third British Empire,’ 1901-1939,”" in chapter 5 of Phillip Buckner, ed., Canada and the British Empirea volume in The Oxford History of the British Empire, (Oxford University Press, in press for fall 2007 publication, 2007), pp 82-101.
- John Herd Thompson, "Foreword" in Sterling Evans ed., The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the Forty-ninth Parallel (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), x-xiv.