I am an historian of citizenship and democracy who specializes in the political, legal, and cultural histories of colonial North America and Canada through the long nineteenth century. I have written on a variety of subjects including British North American democratic and anti-democratic thought, regional electoral enfranchisement, women’s suffrage, political violence, the new political history, and turn-of-the-nineteenth-century North American masculinities (with Elizabeth Mancke). I am the co-editor of Reforming Senates: Upper Legislative Houses in North Atlantic small powers from 1800 to the present and my work appears in the Canadian Historical Review, Histoire Sociale/Social History, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, and in edited collections published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, the University of Toronto Press, Routledge, and Dundurn.

Books

Colin Grittner. Between Independence and Contribution: Civic Inclusion and the Electoral Franchise in Nineteenth-Century British North America (in preparation).

N.H. Bijleveld, Colin Grittner, David E. Smith, and S.W. Verstegen. Reforming Senates: Upper Legislative Houses in North Atlantic Small Powers 1800–present. New York and London: Routledge, 2019.

Journal articles and book chapters

Colin Grittner. “A Tendency Towards Mobocracy? The Democratic Realities of Nineteenth-Century British North America.” In Julien Mauduit and Jennifer Tunnicliffe, eds. Constant Struggle: Histories of Canadian Democratization. Pages 203-231. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021.

Colin Grittner. “Greater Expectations: Politics, the New Political History, and the Structuring of (Canadian) Society.” Canadian Historical Review 100, no. 4 (December 2019): 602-619.

Elizabeth Mancke and Colin Grittner. “From Communal to Independent Manhood in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, ca. 1760-1820.” Histoire Sociale/Social History 52, no. 106 (November 2019): 257-280.

Colin Grittner. “Constitutional Conservatism, Anti-Democratic Ideology, and the Elective Principle in British North America’s Upper Legislative Houses, 1848-1867.” In N.H. Bijleveld, Colin Grittner, David E. Smith, and S.W. Verstegen, eds. Reforming Senates: Upper Legislative Houses in North Atlantic Small Powers 1800–present. Pages 93-106. New York and London: Routledge, 2019.

Colin Grittner. “Of Bludgeons and Ballots: Political Violence, Municipal Enfranchisement, and Local Governance in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Montreal.” In Elizabeth Mancke, Jerry Bannister, Denis McKim, and Scott W. See, eds. Violence, Order, and Unrest: A New History of British North America, 1749-1876. Pages 312-335. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019.

Colin Grittner. “Macdonald and Women’s Enfranchisement.” In Patrice Dutil and Roger Hall, eds. John A. Macdonald at 200: New Reflections and Legacies. Pages 27-57. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2014.

Colin Grittner. “Working at the Crossroads: Statute Labour, Manliness, and the Electoral Franchise on Victorian Prince Edward Island.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 23, no. 1 (2012): 101-130.

Other publications

Colin Grittner. “Another Reason to Vote on Election Day.” ActiveHistory.ca. http://activehistory.ca/2019/10/another-reason-to-vote-on-election-day (17 October 2019).

Colin Grittner. “‘If a man preferred to work’: Prince Edward Island’s Statute Labour Franchise in the Era of Responsible Government.” Womensuffrage.org. http://womensuffrage.org/?p=22069 (16 September 2013).

Colin Grittner. “Women and the Provincial Vote in Nineteenth-Century British North America.” Womensuffrage.org. http://womensuffrage.org/?p=21989 (16 August 2013).