About

About
Editors
Book Review Editors
Public Outreach Representatives
Contributors
French Information

ActiveHistory.ca is a website to help connect historians with the public, policy makers and the media. This is an effort to facilitate and disseminate the ideas developed at the conference “Active History: History for the Future” at Glendon College in September 2008.

We define active history variously as history that listens and is responsive; history that will make a tangible difference in people’s lives; history that makes an intervention and is transformative to both practitioners and communities. We seek a practice of history that emphasizes collegiality, builds community among active historians and other members of communities, and recognizes the public responsibilities of the historian.

We are always looking for people to contribute blog posts to the website and join our database. Please contact us at info (at) activehistory.ca if you are willing to support the project or consider submitting a paper.

Please also visit our French-language sister site, HistoireEngagee.ca.

Editors

A group is currently working on editing and building activehistory.ca:

• Ian Milligan is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Western University. His postdoctoral project, tentatively titled “Postwar English-Canadian Youth Cultures: A Digital History, 1945-1990,” will apply digital humanities methodologies to the study of postwar Canadian history. His own website is at ianmilligan.ca. He can be reached at ianmilligan1@gmail.com.
• Christine McLaughlin is in her fifth year of the PhD program in history at York University.  She is interested in the contested meanings and experiences of community, family and work.  Her dissertation explores these themes as they played out in twentieth-century Oshawa, Ontario.
• Jay Young is a sixth-year PhD student in history at York University. He is interested in the relationships between technology, environments, and cities. Jay is nearing completion of his dissertation, entitled “Searching for a Better Way: Subway Life and Metropolitan Growth in Toronto, 1942-1978”.  His own website is http://historianjayyoung.wordpress.com
• Jim Clifford is a post-doctoral fellow with the Digging Into Data Trading Consequences project. His current research explores the environmental and economic histories of the global commodities that supplied industries in the Thames Estuary during the 19th century. He completed his PhD in the history department at York University in 2011. For more information, visit jimclifford.ca.
• Thomas Peace is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Native American Studies Program at Dartmouth College.  He is interested in the social and cultural dynamics of community, education and literacy, and connections between geography, environment and community.  Tom’s post-doctoral work focuses on Aboriginal people and education at the end of the eighteenth century.  He can be reached at tspeace [at] gmail.com.
• Karen Dearlove completed a PhD in history from McMaster University in 2009. While a graduate student Karen became involved in local and public history in her hometown of Cambridge, Ontario.  She is the chair of the City of Cambridge Archives Advisory Board and has organized two History on the Grand local history symposiums. Karen is currently the Executive Director of the Canadian Industrial Heritage Centre in Brantford, as well as the Living History Multimedia Association.
• Krista McCracken is currently the Archives Technician at Algoma University’s Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre. In the past Krista has worked as a digitization facilitator, a historical researcher, and an assistant curator. She holds an MA in public history from the University of Western Ontario.

Book Review Editors

• David Webster, David Webster is assistant professor of International Studies at the University of Regina. His first book “Fire and the Full Moon: Canada and Indonesia in a Decolonizing World” (UBC Press, 2009) examined the history of Canadian relations with Indonesia in state and non-state realms since 1945. Current research looks at Canadian development advisors in Southeast Asia and at international human rights.
• George Buri,  is a sessional lecturer at the University of Manitoba.  His areas of teaching specialization include post-confederation Canada and the 20th Century United States.  His PhD research explored the relationship between public education and post-WWII political hegemony in Canada using Manitoba as a case study.
  

Public Outreach Representatives

Approaching the Past

• Brittany Luby is originally from Kenora, Ontario – 210 kilometers northeast of Winnipeg, MB. She is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at York University and a Research Associate of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies. Passionate about education, Luby also devotes her time to www.indigenousstudentlife and Approaching the Past, two organizations dedicated to enhancing the student learning experience. Her critical and creative work can be found in periodicals such as Canadian Journal of Native Studies, Native Studies Review, Native Literatures: Generations, and Red Ink Magazine. Luby’s poetry has also appeared in Walk Myself Home. New historical work is to be released in Jill Oakes’ upcoming anthology Memory and Tradition with Aboriginal Issues Press.

Contributors

• Katharine Bausch is a fifth-year PhD student in the history department at York University. She is interested in race and gender as contested and appropriated discourses in post-war America. Her dissertation, “He Thinks He’s Down: White Appropriations of Black Masculinities in the Civil Rights Era” explores these discourses in the culture of the United States from 1945-1979.
• Kaleigh Bradley holds an M.A. in Public History from Carleton University and is currently working as a research consultant for the History Group, researching Canada’s Aboriginal Residential School system as part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Her research interests include photography and visual cultures of colonialism, place and memory, and acts of placemaking in Labrador.
• Mike Commito is a second-year PhD student at McMaster University. His dissertation, tentatively titled ”Orphaned Cubs and Responsible Hunters: Conflicting Values and the Management of Black Bears in Ontario, 1900-2000″ focuses on the development of black bear hunting policy and management strategies in Ontario. He is interested in how various groups in the province such as biologists, policy-makers and the lay public viewed bears and how this perspective has changed over time.
• Teresa Iacobelli is a recent graduate of PhD program in History at the University of Western Ontario.
• Jeffers Lennox is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia.  His research interests focus on how geographic knowledge influenced political and cultural relations among British, French, and Native groups in early North America and the Atlantic World.  His blog is www.jefferslennox.com
• Laura Madokoro is a 5th year PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. Her research is inspired by the evolving relationship between states, migrants and citizens. Her as-yet untitled thesis explores the emergence of the postwar international refugee regime through the movement of Chinese refugees around the globe from 1949-1989.
• Daniel Macfarlane is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Carleton University. He is finishing a book, based on his doctoral dissertation, titled To the Heart of the Continent: The Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project. He is widely interested in Canadian-American environmental relations, and is also conducting research on the transborder manipulation of Niagara Falls and co-editing a collection on the history of Canadian-American water relations.
• Merle Massie is a writer and historian, and a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Saskatchewan. Find her blog at: http://merlemassie.wordpress.com/.
• Ian Mosby is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Guelph and studies the history of food and nutrition in Canada during the twentieth century.
• Sean Kheraj is an assistant professor of Canadian and environmental history at York University. He blogs at http://seankheraj.com .
• Ryan O’Connor is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Trent University. A historian of Canada’s environmental movement, he maintains a research blog at www.thegreatgreennorth.com.
• A.J. Rowley is a freelance writer, communications coordinator, and researcher.  He is currently completing a part-time MA in History at Trent University.
• Karlee Sapoznik’s training is in slavery in all of its forms, human rights, transnational history, genocide and memory, women’s and gender history, the Holocaust and servile forms of forced marriage. She has several article publications on these topics. She volunteers with the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture, is a member of the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario’s Forced Marriages Project, a member of the Harriet Tubman Institute’s Executive, a member of B’nai Brith Canada’s League for Human Rights, a member of the Canadian UNESCO Human Rights Ad Hoc Committee, and a member of two international research networks on slavery. She is also the co-founder of the Alliance Against Modern Slavery.
• Jamie Trepanier is a third-year PhD candidate in History at York University and is currently Co-Director of the CHA Active History Working Group. His research interests include youth, nationalism and the social and cultural history of religion in North America. His dissertation examines the Boy Scout movement in Canada from the 1930s to the 1960s as a means to better understand French and English-Canadian nationalism, the shifting role of organized religion in Canadian society and changing attitudes towards  nature, youth and citizenship.

ActiveHistory.ca est un nouveau site Internet cherchant à rapprocher les historiens du public, des décideurs politiques et des médias. Nous ambitionnons de favoriser la diffusion des idées développées lors du colloque «L’histoire engagée: une histoire porteuse d’avenir», qui a eu lieu au Collège Glendon en septembre 2008. Ce projet de site Internet est actuellement mené par un groupe d’étudiants doctorants du département d’histoire de l’Université York. Au cours des prochains mois, nous espérons recruter de nouveaux membres aux comités de direction et de rédaction. Vous n’avez qu’à nous contacter si vous souhaitez jouer un rôle plus actif dans ce projet: info@activehistory.ca.

L’histoire engagée telle que nous la définissons est essentiellement une histoire appliquée à transformer les perceptions des praticiens de l’histoire et des communautés. Elle favorise la pratique collégiale de l’histoire, l’enrichissement de la vie communautaire et la reconnaissance des responsabilités publiques de l’historien.

Notre site s’inspire plus directement du site Internet britannique History & Policy.

Nous encourageons les historiens à s’inscrire à notre base de données et à soumettre des essais.

Notre site Internet sera appelé à se bonifier avec le temps. Un site partenaire francophone a vu le jour récemment: HistoireEngagee.ca.