Belshaw, John Douglas 1957–

PERSONAL: Born November 13, 1957, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; son of Robert Douglas (a welder and mechanic) and Marjorie (a nurse; maiden name, Jones) Belshaw; married Danielle Reid, 1988 (divorced, 1998); married Diane Barbara Purvey (a university professor), August 14, 2000; children (first marriage) Benjamin, Simon, Andrew; stepchildren (second marriage) Natalie Ord, Ian Ord, Gabriel Ord. Education: University of British Columbia, B.A., 1979; Simon Fraser University, M.A., 1982; London School of Economics and Political Science, Ph.D., 1987. Religion: "Atheist." Hobbies and other interests: Soccer, running, skiing.

ADDRESSES: Office—University College of the Cariboo/Thompson Rivers University, McGill Rd., Kamloops, British Columbia V2C 5N3, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University College of the Cariboo/Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, associate professor, 1989–. Kamloops Heat Football Club, director, 1998–2000; Kamloops Oldtimers Recreational Soccer League, president, 2003–04.

MEMBER: Kamloops Museum and Archives Association (president, 1991–94).

WRITINGS:

Colonization and Community: The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbian Working Class, 1848–1900, McGill-Queen's University Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 2002.

Contributor to books, including The Pacific Province: A History of British Columbia, edited by Hugh Johnston, Douglas & McIntyre (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1996; Beyond the City Limits: Rural History in British Columbia, edited by Ruth Sandwell, University of British Columbia Press (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1998; and Canada: Confederation to Present (CD-ROM), edited by Bob Hesketh and Chris Hackett, Chinook Multimedia (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), 2001. Contributor to periodicals, including Western Historical Quarterly, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Labour/Le Travail, British Columbia Studies, British Journal of Canadian Studies, and London Journal of Canadian Studies.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Cradle to Grave: A Population History of British Columbia; As Certain as Taxes: A History of Death in Canada; Vancouver Noir, with Diane Purvey, a photographic history book; a study of the phenomenon of roadside shrines in Canada; research on demography and historical thanatology.

SIDELIGHTS: John Douglas Belshaw told CA: "The analytical and reflective narrative is the essential product of the historian's trade. Writing forces the historian to grapple completely with the evidence and the witnesses. I imagine the task as a kind of orrery (a mechanical model of the solar system): when the writing works, when the prose and the evidence are in harmony, then the planets move smoothly around the sun … and the sun doesn't suddenly go supernova.

"I am most influenced by those historians (invariably on the Left) who engaged personally with their fields and their writing. Eric Hobsbawm, George Rude, and Perry Anderson, among British historians, exemplify for me the scholars who conclude from their work that action is called for, and who conclude from their actions that greater scholarship is possible. Also, the historians who matter in the last half-century have been those who have struggled to find the voices of the voiceless, and these tend to be historians on the Left.

"I find myself drawn to subjects that constitute threads of my own experience, very often without being aware of it. For example, my work on British coal miners in British Columbia is an echo of my collier ancestors' own experiences in the western mountain ranges. My interest in death and mourning is, in a sense, the product of my own encounters with shifting rituals and conventions, beginning with my mother's death when I was young and culminating in my father's memorial service, in which I found myself playing the unanticipated and unwanted role of stage manager. In whatever field I find myself working, questions of social change and social justice are always proximate. I am always looking for 'first principles' in historical choices and never surprised to find that these are often ignored by scholars. For example, what motivated nineteenth-century immigrants to Canada? Answer that, and one has a legitimate benchmark by which to evaluate their historical experience.

"History has the power to be transformative—of knowledge, values, and assumptions. Writing is itself a transformative process. In this sense, the reader and the writer of history are engaged in a parallel process of growth and redirection. They are, like two planets in an orrery, exploring their respective elliptical orbits, independent but tied to one another nonetheless."