Call for Contributors to Active History: Indigenous Voices

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A red, green, and black design with words in white text reading Call for Contributors Active History: Indigenous Voices

Active History and Know History are partnering to publish Active History: Indigenous Voices.

Know History is generously sponsoring a series and providing honoraria for an editor and up to four contributors. The editor will receive $500 and each contributor will receive $125.

We invite proposals from First Nations, Inuit, and Métis editors and authors from all educational and occupational backgrounds. Proposals should include a series title, a one-paragraph statement explaining the theme and format of the series (essays, artwork with commentary, etc.), and short biographies of the editor and each contributor.

For more information visit our Guidelines for authors and contact us at activehistoryinfo@gmail.com.

A Signature Pedagogy for History Instruction?

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Paul McGuire

This is the sixth entry in a monthly series on Thinking Historically. See the Introduction here.

Photo by author.

At least twice a year, we take a trip to the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia. One of the most beautiful parts of the valley is Grand Pré and Hortonville. From here, you can see Blomidon and the vast expanse of the Midas Basin. Hortonville is also one of the ports used during the British expulsion of Acadians in 1755. Just down the road, you can see a Parks Canada plaque commemorating a vicious massacre of New England troops by French and Mi’kmaq fighters in the dead of night during a winter blizzard; some New Englanders died before they could stir from their beds.

Plaque describing the Attack at Grand Pré. © Parks Canada Agency / Agence Parcs Canada.

When I read the plaque at Grand Pré for the first time, it caught my attention. Somewhere in the recording of the battle, there was the suggestion, just a suggestion, that this nighttime raid may have been one of the reasons the Acadians in the area were expelled from their homes eight years later.

This is what history does: It captivates the reader and hints at the consequences to come. This is the way we need to teach history in public schools: Give the students a spark to ignite their desire to dig deeper and explore further. But how do we do this? Is there a method, a pedagogy, that teachers can use to engage students in historical inquiry?

Continue reading →

LAC’s Vision: What Future for the Past

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By Allan Greer

Libraries might be considered repositories of information, but archives are something else.  They collect and preserve documents – unpublished, one-of-a-kind texts such as letters, court records and business accounts – as well as images, maps and sound recordings.  It is all very raw material, and it tends to be biased, partial and incomplete; somewhat like archaeological artifacts, these sources provide scholars with clues about past events, which is not exactly the same as information.

Historians need to know what they are looking at, where it comes from and how it is situated in relation to other material.  The “archival turn” that swept the profession in recent decades amounted to a call for greater attentiveness to archival collections as constructed artifacts that need to be examined in their integrity and not simply treated as a mine from which to extract tidbits of information.[1]

Every collection has its peculiar structure and logic; each was assembled with a particular purpose; and researchers can easily be led astray if they read the contents naively, without regard to its context, its purposes and its biases.  But just as we have been sensitized to such methodological considerations, Library and Archives Canada have been making it harder and harder to examine collections in their integrity and to discern their nature and structure. Continue reading →

Feminism and its Malcontents in Canadian Universities

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Black-and-white photograph of several women in a library, looking for books on the shelves and working at tables.

Museums Victoria via Unspash

Sara Wilmshurst

First off, I’d like to bless the Internet Archive for preserving human folly. The paper under review today has been scrubbed from its original home but lives on in infamy through the Wayback Machine.

I am speaking of “On the Challenges of Dating and Marriage in the New Generations,” published under the name of Benyamin Gohjogh. It made the news recently because Gohjogh lost his sessional teaching positions at Waterloo and University of Guelph after students raised concerns about the paper, which argued professors should be welcome to date their students, claimed “girls” behave in “psychologically sadistic” manners toward “boys” who are attracted to them, bewailed the difficulty of “hunting” for a partner at work or school, and complained that the pursuit of advanced education is “destructive for forming families”. References include “many boys who have experienced it” and incel YouTube videos. Continue reading →

Playfulness and History: Sackville’s GFG Stanley Statue

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By Andrew Nurse

Sackville, New Brunswick’s, George F.G. Stanley Canada 150 commemorative sculpting would be an odd candidate to be part of Canada’s statue wars. And it isn’t. To the best of my knowledge, no one has asked that the statue be removed. It has not been sprayed with graffiti or knocked it over.

Photo by author

Precisely the opposite. Rather than becoming the subject of criticism, local culture seems to express care and concern for the statue by dressing it up, adding a hat on cold days, masks during COVID-19, and scarves, among other articles of clothing. This shows an odd but interesting playfulness concerning historical commemoration. Continue reading →

LAC: The Scandal of the Archives

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By Allan Greer

Recently I had occasion to visit Library and Archives Canada.  Marching up Wellington Street, I noticed my heart beating a little faster as the historical juices began flowing through my researcher’s veins.  Even at the time, I recognized this pulse of excitement as a throw-back, a residual thrill from a time long ago when I was an eager graduate student discovering the wonders of dusty manuscripts; more recent visits to the federal archives had been anything but thrilling.

Indeed, as I checked in at the desk and surveyed the vast marble lobby, I realized that I had been coming here, on and off, for a little over fifty years!  That was a sobering thought at a personal level, registering as it does just how far the days of my youth have receded, but at the same time, I hope this extended experience puts me in a good position to observe the ways in which this institution has evolved over the decades.  I don’t pretend to know the full history of the federal archives, but I can testify to the changing experience of an academic historian probing the collections for source materials.

I was a graduate student in the 1970s, which in retrospect seems to have been the high-water mark for state institutions, buoyed by postwar prosperity and before the neoliberal wave of privatizations and shrinking budgets. Continue reading →

Who Killed the History of Canadian Multiculturalism?

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Street crowd reflecting in the polyhedral mirrors of Tokyu Plaza Omotesando, Harajuku station, Tokyo, Japan, Wikimedia Commons.

Daniel R. Meister

In a recent op-ed, Stephen Marche claims “the foundation of Canadian multiculturalism rests on a basic piece of common sense: Leave your shoes at the door.” Picking up on this thread, Jack Granatstein countered that multiculturalism as a policy actually consists of encouraging immigrants to leave those shoes on—and march right into a polling booth. Multiculturalism is about buying votes, he suggests, and there is little effort being made to “turn immigrant communities into Canadians.” But a brief examination of the policy’s history and impact suggests quite the opposite on both counts.

Multiculturalism as a concept emerged during the debates about national identity that marked the 1960s. Continue reading →

Uncovering the Rutherford Maid: Gender, Class, and Representation in Living History

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Julia Stanski

I discovered Lillian Rose Adkins on September 27, 2023. Although I hadn’t known her name, I’d been searching for this woman for at least five years. Others had been looking for much longer. She’s been dead for more than half a century, but Lillian might be the key to a representational puzzle that has obscured her—and women like her—for far too long.

I’m a Master’s student in Canadian women’s history at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, as well as a living history interpreter at Fort Edmonton Park (FEP). This site represents Edmonton in four different eras. In the 1905 section, a prize building is Rutherford 1, the house where Alexander Rutherford (the first Premier of Alberta) lived from 1895 to 1911 with his wife, Mattie, and their children, Cecil and Hazel. At FEP, costumed historical interpreters animate each building, and at Rutherford 1, interpreters frequently play the roles and discuss the lives of the four Rutherfords.

But since 2002, a fifth character has joined them: the Rutherford maid.

Continue reading →

“Where are all the (non-white, non-elite) women?” Examining issues of diversity and intersectionality in the creation of women’s history lesson plans for Ontario educators

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Cecilia Butler, working as a reamer in the Small Arms Ltd. section of the John Inglis Company munitions plant in Canada in 1943. Photo credit: National Film Board of Canada. Photothèque / Library and Archives Canada / e000761869.

Tifanie Valade

This is the fifth entry in a monthly series on Thinking Historically. See the Introduction here.

While history classes are often viewed as a neutral, apolitical venue for the transmission of “facts” about the past, history education is in fact a value-laden enterprise that seeks to construct and communicate overarching national narratives and national identities. Such narratives often privilege political accounts and the activities of “great” men at the expense of the experiences of everyday citizens, including women. The women who do appear are often white, of European descent, and from elite classes, and their actions are mainly profiled as they pertain to androcentric domains such as politics, war, and economics. As a result, women who are racialized, Indigenous, disabled, working class, 2SLGBTQ+, or are at the intersections of these identities, are often absent from history curricula and educational materials. As C.D. Cosentino notes “there is no hesitancy to exclude women from the telling of Canada’s past and the permission to do so is ingrained in the institutional structures that set the standards for defining which is the “right” history that should be taught”.[1]

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The Anthropocene, Atmospheric Chemists, Geologists and Historians

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By Jim Clifford 

Paul Crutzen, who proposed the Anthropocene epoch in 2002, wasn’t a geologist. He was an atmospheric chemist. This fact might explain the decision to reject his proposed new epoch. He wasn’t thinking like a geologist when he suggested the Anthropocene. I’m not a geologist either and have no opinion on whether they got this decision right or wrong within their field. But I do know we live in a world under intense pressure from humans. Humans are changing the climate, contributing to the mass extinction of thousands of species, moving sand at a scale equal to all the rivers on the planet, spreading plastic pollution to most corners of the earth, and overloading waterways and aquatic ecosystems with nutrients. The evidence amassed by the proponents of the Anthropocene epoch confirms we live on a very different planet than our ancestors did a few generations ago.

The problem is fitting a deeply interdisciplinary concept into a geological paradigm. This was evident as the process played out, and they searched for “golden spikes” in the geological record. This is very important for geologists if they want to build a case for a new epoch. It made little sense to historians or historical geographers, who see humanity’s increased influence in shaping the global environment as a centuries-long process, not a singular event. The search for a golden spike caused the Anthropocene working group to focus on the beginning of the nuclear age after 1945 because it left a clear record in the strata (if you have the right equipment and know where to look).

As a historian of industrialization, I would look elsewhere and identify thousands of sites that record the global-scale transformation of the past few hundred years. I would try to show how their number, scale and spread increased over time. I might start with the coal fields in Great Britain and note the evidence of the absence of vast quantities of coal extracted over the past four hundred years. From there, we could map all the other subsurface locations that supplied coal, oil and gas to fuel unending economic growth. However, I would not limit it to these sites as the changing energy regimes only tell part of the global story. So, we’d want to link the coal mines with the iron foundry at Coalbrookdale, where coke was first used in place of charcoal, and the sugar plantations in the Caribbean, where African slaves used iron tools made in Britain’s fledgling industry to produce a new source of food for the English working classes. Increased global connections are central to the transformative process. Continue reading →