Thomas Peace is a historian of colonialism in early Canada and co-director of the Huron Community History Centre.

As a Researcher, he studies how diverse Indigenous, English, and French communities interacted with each other, and made Home, in Northeastern North America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. His book, The Slow Rush of Colonization: Spaces of Power in the Maritime Peninsula, 1680-1790, won the 2024 Wilson Book Prize and the Canadian Historical Association’s 2024 Clio Atlantic Prize. Click the links on the right to hear Tom talk about his book or to purchase a copy for yourself.

As a Learner, he reflects upon the relationship individuals and communities have to the spaces and places that define the world in which they live. As part of this work, he has a weekly column with CBC London’s Afternoon Drive focused on the Hidden Histories of Southwestern Ontario (click the link on the right to learn more).

As a Teacher, he draws upon Open Educational Resources and Open Pedagogies, to emphasize the importance of understanding how both historical and archival contexts shape our past, present, and future. Three OER history-courses are linked on the right: Digital Disruptions: Settler Colonialism in Mi’kma’ki, Acadie, and Nova Scotia (produced in collaboration with Renee Girard and Danny Samson), A Few Words that Changed the World: Key Sources in Global History, and The Open History Seminar (a Canadian History resource produced with Sean Kheraj).

As a Facilitator, his goal is to empower and equip people with the tools they need to preserve, interpret, and share their own histories. Since 2008, much of this work has been done as an editor at ActiveHistory.ca. You can read Tom’s most recent contributions to this project at the bottom of this page.

At the core, Peace believes that studying the past helps situate ourselves in our present and better plan for the future. Good history is produced for, by, and with communities, something he has learned from friends in L’Arche Homefires, Daybreak, and London.

To do this work, Peace teaches history as an Associate Professor at Huron University College. He is one of the founding editors of ActiveHistory.ca, a web-based project aiming to make academic history more accessible to broader audiences. As co-director of the Huron Community History Centre, he also manages the Hidden Histories of Southwestern Ontario project.