John H. Thompson, Professor Emeritus

John H. Thompson

Please note: John has left the "History" group at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.

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.

Office Location:  331 Carr Bldg, Durham, NC 27708
Email Address: send me a message

Typical Courses Taught:

Specialties:

Global Transnational History
Research Interests: 20th Century, Rural History, U.S. Plains / Canadian Prairies

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.

Current Ph.D. Students  

Recent Publications   (search)

  1. Thompson, JH, Asa McKercher. Camelot and Canada: Canadian-American Relations in the Kennedy Era., American Historical Review, vol. 122 no. 4 (October, 2017), pp. 1202-1202, Oxford University Press (OUP) [doi]
  2. Thompson, JH, Canada and the 'Third British Empire', 1901-1939, in Canada and the British Empire (October, 2011), pp. 87-106, Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780199563746 [doi]  [abs]
  3. Thompson, JH, Saskatchewan: A New History (review), The Canadian Historical Review, vol. 90 no. 4 (2009), pp. 764-766, Project Muse [doi]
  4. John Herd Thompson and Stephen J. Randall, Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies (fourth edition), The United States and the Americas (Spring, 2008), The University of Georgia Press / McGill-Queen's Press  [abs] [author's comments]
  5. John Herd Thompson, “Canadian History in North American Context,”, in Canadian Studies in the New Millennium, edited by Patrick James and Mark Kasoff, eds., (2007), pp. 37-64, University of Toronto Press