How Do We Talk about LLMs?

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By Jim Clifford

It is never fun to watch friends argue. Generative AI has created multiple fractures across our universities and the community of historians. The stakes are high and we are all dealing with the repercussions. I spent a few weeks in August rebuilding my second-year course for the third time. Two years ago, I swapped the traditional research essay for a StoryMap project, thinking that even if the students used GenAI, they’d still learn something making the map. But now, a student with Claude in Chrome could get the LLM to build the whole map without any real engagement. This year I’m trying a hybrid of contract grading and ownership. It was a lot of work and I still worry about what we’ve lost without a traditional essay.

The frustration and anger with the tech companies make it hard to hold a conversation. I’m worried about the future of higher education at the scale it has operated for the past half century. If machines are starting to displace recent graduates in the employment market, then the basic promise of working hard to earn a fulfilling and remunerative career is under threat. I understand the decision to simply refuse: not to engage with this technology and not to pay Anthropic or OpenAI a monthly subscription. I also understand why people are skeptical about any claims about the ability of LLMs. In 2024, OpenAI claimed PhD-level intelligence for models that couldn’t count the number of Rs in “strawberry.” Professors saw the regular failure of LLMs hallucinating historical arguments and citations. But a lot has changed in the past fifteen months, with the emergence of agentic systems, and then in mid-2026, with the launch of the Fable and Astra models. The problem is that both of these systems take investment to learn how to use and high-tier subscriptions. So, the vast majority of historians have not seen how they work.

My proposal here is to engage with those of us who are using the tools to understand where we stand in 2026 so we can collectively start to talk about what needs to change as we move into 2027 and 2028. I am not asking anyone to change their ethical stance, and I acknowledge there are large problems with the current build-out of data centres without enough regulations to mitigate environmental concerns. These issues are real, but I have decided, for myself, that critical engagement is how I can best understand the technology and think through its implications. The profession needs some of us working inside these tools; it does not need all of us to.

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Mexico’s Midcentury Nightlife

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Kevin M. Anzzolin

Since publishing my first book in 2024, I’ve turned my attention to gathering material for a second. Provisionally titled A View from the North: Lost Anglo-American Literature on Mexico from the Twentieth Century, I am exploring pulp novels, young adult adventure stories, tales of espionage, tourist guides, and yes, even postcards — in hopes of showing the extent to which the “Good Neighbor” cultural diplomacy of the twentieth century was, in fact, a genuinely intercultural endeavor between the United States and Latin America. Who were the small players — dime store novelists, postcard photographers, and nightclub owners — who got swept up in the large-scale international initiatives between North and South?

The Doris Z. Stone Latin American Library on the campus of Tulane University is an ideal place to examine this particular historical moment. The collection is replete with Mexico travel and tourism ephemera — magazines, hotel brochures, and highway maps — all of which, I believe, serve to better understand how our southern neighboring countries were constructed as attractive vacation destinations during the mid-twentieth century. Mexico especially loomed large in the imagination of US tourists; it was the period when, as historian Mauricio Tenorio shows, Mexico was understood as a “Brown Atlantis” — where revolutionary thought fermented and the Pan-American Highway promised access to exotic adventures. Everyone wanted to meet Frida Kahlo, everyone wanted to visit Teotihuacán, all while dreaming up global politics anew.

Two brochures found in the Mexican ephemera collection tell how Mexico feted itself for an international community.

Panoramic of the city center of Taxco de Alarcón, Guerrero, Mexico. Viewed from the Christ Monument looking southeast, via Wikimedia Commons.

First, is a trifold brochure from arguably Mexico’s most famous nightclub during the second half of the twentieth century — Cantarranas, located in the silver-mining town of Taxco, some two and a half hours outside of Mexico City. As the brochure details, the “Hacienda Cantarranas was built in 1538 by order of Hernán Cortés. The actual construction was done by his son Martin de Cortés.” The estate was used for silver processing. The locale, built with large stones on a hillside, became a nightclub in 1957 under the direction of entrepreneur Antonio “Tony” Reyes Ramírez. He would later become Taxco’s minister of tourism. Cantarranas was known worldwide for its revelry through the 60s and 70s before being acquired by the government of the Mexican state Guerrero in 1983, when it was converted into a culinary school and arts center. In 1992, it was turned over to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México as a school for foreign nationals. The hacienda was named “Cantarranas” — that is, literally “singing frogs” due to the loud chorus of frogs living in the area nearby. The brochure obviously plays upon this idea — even if not representative of the real spectacles of the club, the image is fetching.  

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An Anarchist Queen and Her Radiant Protégé: Marie Tiboldo and Emma Goldman in Toronto

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Cynthia Wright and Franca Iacovetta

In November 1926, Emma Goldman, then 57 and beginning a first period of exile in Toronto, enthused over a “radiant” young Italian woman seated at a welcoming dinner for Goldman organized by the city’s Jewish anarchist comrades.[1] Just over six months later, Goldman dubbed Marie Tiboldo “a terrible prude” who did “not feel anything deep enough, whether…for a man or ideas, to do anything worth while.” Tiboldo appears only fleetingly in Goldman’s estimated 200,000 letters, but her assessment of the young woman’s shortcomings aligns with Goldman’s pronounced tendency to go hot and cold with friends, comrades, and lovers. It’s not surprising, then, that Goldman also emphasized her continuing interest in “Marie,” writing that “I do not mean to give her up” and “I will certainly see much of her.”[2]

Marie Tiboldo (far right) at Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1929 (Julia Barnett Collection)

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Sapphic Sanctuaries: Navigating and Creating Lesbian Spaces in Fredericton, New Brunswick, 1969-1995

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Rosemarie Forsberg

In 1979, lesbians in Fredericton, New Brunswick, found community not in a dedicated gay bar or a visible neighbourhood, but on the dance floor of the Cosmopolitan Club. On Thursday nights, women quietly gathered with friends, effectively “queering” a predominantly heterosexual venue. In a city without lesbian bars, bookstores, or formal organizations, even a dance floor could become a place of belonging. From 1979 to 1995, lesbians in Fredericton actively built and sustained physical and imagined queer spaces that fostered community, activism, and belonging. Whether through dances, newsletters, phone lines, private homes, or women-only organizing, these spaces reveal how meaningful lesbian community could flourish beyond Canada’s metropolitan centres. In recovering these histories, Fredericton’s lesbian spaces emerge not as exceptions to Canadian queer history, but as evidence that community has always existed.

Queer history in Canada is often centred on the country’s largest urban centres: Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Histories of queer activism have long focused on these cities, where visible institutions such as bars, bookstores, political organizations, and later gay villages left a stronger archival footprint. Much of the scholarship has similarly centred the experiences of urban gay men, tracing legal milestones such as decriminalization, police repression, and the rise of liberation movements. However, this focus overlooks the rich and varied experiences of lesbians in places like Fredericton, where queer history did not always take the form of visible institutions. Lesbian histories outside major cities challenge the assumption that queer communities depended on permanent spaces such as gay villages or commercial venues. Instead, many rural and small-city lesbians built networks through temporary gatherings, personal relationships, and community-based organizing.

As the provincial capital and home to two universities, Fredericton occupies a unique position within New Brunswick’s largely rural landscape. For many lesbians living in smaller towns, it became the nearest place to find others like themselves. Women travelled hours by car to attend dances, softball tournaments, and other events in the city, while local publications and phone networks helped sustain connections across long distances.

One of the clearest ways that lesbians created space in Fredericton was through community organizations. The founding of Fredericton Lesbians and Gays (FLAG) in 1979 gave lesbians access to meetings, dances, discussion groups, and a volunteer phone line. Even without a permanent headquarters, FLAG transformed temporary spaces such as university classrooms, church gymnasiums, and rented halls into meaningful queer spaces. However, the 1980s brought a notable decline in lesbian participation in mixed queer organizations like FLAG, shaped by broader tensions including lesbian separatist politics and ongoing experiences of misogyny and marginalization within male-dominated queer spaces. Across Canada, many lesbians responded to these tensions by creating women-only spaces that prioritized lesbian voices outside of male-dominated gay spaces. In Fredericton, this shift contributed to the founding of WOMYN in 1991, a lesbian-focused group that hosted and organized a variety of social activities, including dances, potlucks, barbecues, and softball games. By organizing regular social events in dedicated spaces, WOMYN created consistent opportunities for lesbians to build relationships and foster a sense of belonging.

Nightlife was another important way that lesbians in Fredericton carved out space, even without a dedicated lesbian bar. In the 1970s, lesbians gathered at the Cosmopolitan Club, a straight-owned venue on King Street that became a key nightlife spot for both gay men and lesbians, especially on Thursday nights. Because it was still risky for lesbians to dance openly with other women, gay men and lesbians often danced together in mixed pairs to appear as a heterosexual couple. By the 1980s and 1990s, this nightlife expanded through FLAG’s mixed dances and later WOMYN’s women-only dances, which offered safer and more intentional spaces for the lesbian community, visibility, and belonging.

An advertisement for Fredericton Lesbians and Gays (FLAG) from the first edition of Flag Mag, 1980. (Flag Mag No. 1, September 1980: 2)

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Teaching Against AI: Notes from the Field

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Edward Dunsworth

While a small but vocal minority of historians have embraced the use of generative artificial intelligence in their research and teaching,[1] many of us find ourselves trying to hold the pedagogical line against what we perceive as serious threats to students’ ability to learn, reason, and express themselves intelligently.[2]

In this post, I share my attempts to “teach against AI” in an undergraduate course taught at McGill University in fall 2025. HIST 299, The Historian’s Craft, is an introductory theory-and-method class recently made a requirement for history majors. My objectives were for students to consider some of the major questions in the philosophy of history, learn about important changes over time in historiography, learn about some of the main ways that people “do” history, and then to try their hand at doing it themselves, via research and writing.

The author’s paper-strewn desk

As I’ve made clear in past pieces, I don’t believe that generative AI has anything useful to offer students towards the attainment of any of these goals. To the contrary, I think it poses a significant danger to students’ ability to think independently and develop as thinkers, writers, and human beings. Emerging research supports my concerns.

I thus adopted a number of strategies in this course to encourage students to do things the “old school” way, with the aim of fostering the learning and skill development at the core of our mission as educators in humanities and social sciences. In what follows I outline what I did, what I didn’t do, and what students thought about it all.

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Active History – We’re Back!

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“Algonquin Park,” October 4, 1995, photo by Dick Loek, published by the Toronto Star (Toronto Star Archives, Toronto Public Library).

ActiveHistory.ca is back from our summer hiatus! This week we’ll be releasing new posts, and we’re excited to share some new changes with all our contributors, guest writers, guest editors, and readers that we’ll be rolling out later this year. Keep an eye out!

Sincerely,
The Active History Editorial Collective

Repost: Rural Museums Matter: The Ross-Thomson House & Store

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By Erin Isaac and Cady Berardi

The thoughts and sentiments shared in this essay are our own and do not represent the Nova Scotia Museum or Shelburne Historical Society.

As part of the significant cuts set out in the 2026-2027 Nova Scotia provincial budget, the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage announced last week that they needed “to focus [their] efforts where they will make the most difference.” Those efforts will no longer extend to the 12 rural museums they suddenly, and without warning, decided to permanently shutter. Shelburne’s Ross-Thomson House & Store was among the casualties. 

In their statement, the department indicated that they considered several factors when deciding which museums to close, but noted especially that these sites had low visitor attendance. This measure does not acknowledge the value of these heritage spaces to their communities or the important histories they preserve.

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Repost: The power of oral history in piecing together archival fragments documenting 2SLGBTQ+ community histories

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Meredith J. Batt

P918-1067 Mullins Photography Ltd. fonds, PANB, Fredericton, N.B., October 1998. 

I have made an error.

These are not words that come easily to a historian, when evidence is the backbone of our work. However, as Tim Lacy notes in his Society for U.S. Intellectual History blog post On the Failures of Historians, “There is no question that historians in their role as content experts experience failure.  All humans are imperfect, and all historians are human, hence imperfect historians are not always on target.” It is how we correct the misinformation that matters; one way is by using tools, additional records and memories to add context to archival records where incorrect assumptions have been made.  This article thus follows my journey in correcting my own error in historical research using oral history to piece together archival fragments. 

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Repost: “Entre Amis in an Era of Polarization”

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By Stephanie Bangarth and Sara Beth Keough

In March 2026, a Canadian historian and an American Geographer met in Cambridge, ON to begin a collaborative project, literally “between friends,” inspired by Canada’s 1976 bicentennial gift to the United States, the coffee table book Between Friends/Entre Amis.[i] The year 2026 marks the 50th anniversary of this gift. And we are those two scholars.  Looking at this book together, as friends and scholars from opposite sides of the border, inspired questions about the current relationship between Canada and the United States. What did this book mean to the two countries at the time of its publication? What does this book mean 50 years later? How has the polarization of the Canada-U.S. relationship changed the meaning of this gift?  This essay is our reflection on the historical context of the book and some possible answers to these questions.

First edition publication of the book Between Friends/Entre Amis. Photo by authors.

Between Friends/Entre Amis was Canada’s official gift to the United States on the occasion of its bicentennial in 1976. Twenty-six Canadian photographers were commissioned by Lorraine Monk of the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board of Canada, and some 220 photographs were ultimately included in the volume. Designed to celebrate “the longest undefended international border in the world,” photographers were tasked with capturing images within 30 miles of the Canada-U.S. border, beginning in the Arctic, down the Alaska panhandle and across the Rockies, prairies, Great Lakes, Quebec, and the Maritimes. McClelland & Stewart’s press run was the most ambitious Canadian publishing project to that time. Indeed, some 200,000 copies were printed, and the book received outstanding praise and criticism in the press on both sides of the border. A special Presentation Edition was extended for American dignitaries. Pierre Trudeau and Lorraine Monk personally gave President Ford his copy in a Washington ceremony. The entire project cost about $1 million (in 1976).

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Repost: Trump needs a history lesson. Maybe we all do

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By Robert Englebert

The tariff war has begun.

Since coming into office only weeks ago, Donald Trump’s on-and-off again threat of taking a sledgehammer to free trade has kept Canadians on edge.  

Canadians are angry and frustrated, especially at Trump’s continued assertion that our country is not viable and that we should become the 51st state.

I am not all that convinced that Trump’s end goal is to annex Canada, but if for some reason that is the objective, he need only look to Canada’s long history to understand how unlikely he is to succeed.

Reproduced in A Caricature History of Canada, Volume I, 23 Sept 1869 (wikimedia commons)

Our countries seem alike, but are not the same. We have had many opportunities to join our neighbours to the south and have repeatedly decided to chart a different path, each step shaping distinctive Canadian political structures and traditions.

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