25 July 2011 - Thunder Bay

Before Nelson Mandela and the ANC, before Huey Newton, Bobby Seal and the Black Panther Party, and before Malcom X and the Nation of Islam, there was Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. This volume of the Marcus Garvey Papers details the rise the UNIA, which became the largest and most feared Black Nationalist organization of the early twentieth century. Marcus Garvey styled himself as the "Provisional President of Africa" and the organization he founded became a powerful voice for equal rights in the United States and around the world in the early 1920s. Garvey's first experience outside of Jamaica was in Costa Rica as a time keeper on a banana plantation. From there he moved to Panama and on to the United States, but his ideas electrified class and race conscious West Indians across the Caribbean.

"Volume XI is the first to focus on the Caribbean, where the UNIA was represented by more than 170 divisions and chapters. Revealing the connections between the major African-American mass movement of the interwar era and the struggle of the Caribbean people for independence, this volume includes the letters, speeches, and writings of Caribbean Garveyites and their opponents, as well as documents and speeches by Garvey, newspaper articles, colonial correspondence and memoranda, and government investigative records. Volume XI covers the period from 1911, when a controversy was ignited in Limon, Costa Rica, in response to a letter that Garvey sent to the Limon Times, until 1920, when workers on the Panama Canal undertook a strike sponsored in part by the UNIA. The primary documents are extensively annotated, and the volume includes twenty-two critical commentaries on the territories covered in the book, from the Bahamas to Guatemala, and Haiti to Brazil. A trove of scholarly resources, Volume XI: The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910-1920 illuminates another chapter in the history of one the world's most important social movements."

The volume is published by Duke University Press,
http://www.dukeupress.edu/ Catalog/ViewProduct.php? productid=19692&viewby=title

2 December 2011 - Thunder Bay

Individuals and organizations across Thunder Bay were honoured this week for their contributions to arts and culture in the city at Thunder Bay's Arts and Heritage Awards.

Among this year's winners was Dr. Michel Beaulieu, Associate Professor in Lakehead's Department of History and Director of the Centre for Northern Studies, who received the Heritage award.

Congratulations to Dr. Beaulieu for this important community recognition. To learn more, read the full article in the Chronicle Journal, Arts, culture contributions honoured.

21 September 2011 - Thunder Bay

Under the Red Star will be shown at 7 pm on Thursday, September 29 at the Bay Street Film Festival in Thunder Bay. The film, directed by Kelly Saxberg and produced by Lakehead history professor Ron Harpelle and research provided by Michel S. Beaulieu, chronicles the story of the Finnish immigrants who built Canada's largest labour hall and used it as a locus of their activities. The courage of these newcomers in the face of government and police crackdowns helped shape Canadian labour history. Read more in the online Agora.

11 January 2011 - Thunder Bay

Dr. Michel Beaulieu and Dr. Ron Harpelle of the Department of History travelled to Montevideo, Uruguay to attend a seminar organized from Lakehead University.

Learn more about this important trip made in December 2010, as published by the Communications Office.

The professors were accompanied by graduate student David Blanchard, and more about this research trip appears in the January 10th edition of The Argus