Brendan Hughes

Northern Ireland experienced three decades of violent conflict until the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Many of perpetrators never faced justice and some of these individuals have been brought into the political system as a part of the peace deal. This past creates multiple tensions in the present and leaves significant questions about how the judicial system should approach the numerous unsolved murders. Historians and those interested in truth and reconciliation have their own desires to better understand this past.  Why did so many otherwise normal individuals become involved in mass murder? Can a greater knowledge of the individual motivation of IRA members help us better understand these kinds of conflicts in the future? All this leads to significant tensions between the desires of victims’ families for justice  and the demands of a political settlement and power sharing agreement that might fall apart if too many reformed political leaders are brought up on charges. An academic project to record oral histories with living IRA members, which were then to be locked away at the archives in Boston College until the interviewee passed away, has brought these tensions between the demands of justice and a search for historical understanding into the news. The Belfast Project for Boston College preformed the interviews with republicans for five years beginning in 2001. Last year, after details from the late Brenden Hughes interviews were published, the Police Service of Northern Ireland began court proceedings in the United States requesting access to the remaining interviews.

An appeals court in the United States will now have to decide between the demands for justice and the value of this kind of historical project, which might become impossible in the future if academics cannot find a way to deposit transcripts beyond the reach of a subpoena. The issues are further complicated, as some suggest these interview transcripts might confirm Gerry Adams’ role in some of the violent attacks and potentially could lead to criminal charges for the current President of Sinn Féin (something Adams denies). Beyond the legal implications, this could damage Adam’s political career, as he claims he was never a part of the IRA. This creates a very difficult situation for the American appeals courts, as their decision might lead to a potential political crisis in Norther Ireland. Academics and journalists will now have the opportunity to intervene in the court case and make arguments that the importance of creating this kind of historical archive outweighs the demands of justice for the unsolved crimes from the troubles. Are they right? Does our quest to better understand the past supersede the rights of all of the victims?

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Notes prepared for Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s attendance at a Commonwealth conference in March 1961 summed up Canada’s position on Africa, noting that Canada had “no territories in Africa and no territorial ambitions.  It has no financial or commercial interests in the Congo sufficient to influence its judgment.  Canada – as anyone may verify by examining our record on this issue in the United Nations – has been and remains, relatively speaking, impartial” (p.148).  So, how did Canada end up with blue berets in the Congo?

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British politicians and planners are using the 2012 Olympic games to “revitalize” the Lower Lea Valley, a post-industrial landscape, situated between four inner-suburban boroughs in the East of London, including West Ham, which was the focus of my dissertation research.

A century ago R. A. Bray described West Ham “as that of a spot somewhere near London to which people went with reluctance if they had business there, and from which they returned with joy as soon as the business was over.”[1] Sadly, I don’t imagine most people would describe it any differently today.

Half a century of rapid industrial and population growth in the second half of the nineteenth century transformed the once green wetlands of the Lower Lea River and Thames Estuary into a dirty manufacturing suburb with a range of social problems that matched the extensive environmental decline. Despite this troubled history and the scarred landscape it left, I would suggest travelers to London should venture eastward and see a different side of London from the regal and imperial parks and buildings in Westminster. The Docklands Light Rail lines make it easy to travel through East London and they are above ground, so you can see where you are going. Most of the West Ham sites listed below are within walking distance of a DLR station.

View Olympic Neighbourhoods in a larger map
Here are a few highlights:

• The Olympic Park: While the stadium is visible from a lot of places in the Lower Lea Valley, the park was blocked by high blue walls the last time I was in London. At that time, the best views were from the elevated Dockland Light Rail trains traveling from Stratford to Bow. You can get off at the Pudding Mill Station for a longer view. The building is starting to accelerate and each time I visited more of the buildings are taking shape. I imagine at least some sections of the park are now open to the public. You can see the two Back Rivers that flow through the Olympic park.
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• Abbey Mills Pumping Station (Cathedral of Sewage): This amazing building located alongside a polluted stream and old factories looks really out of place. It is even more bazaar when you realize its function: to pump sewage through the massive main drain underneath the green-way path you’ve just walked on to find this Victorian relic. The architecture provides a reminder of the civic pride the came with the construction of the integrated sewage system in the 1860s.
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• Three Mills Island: This is the oldest remaining tidal water mill in England. There have been tidal mills on the Lower Lea since before the Norman Invasion in the 11th century and the House Mill building dates back to the early 18th century. You can also admire the massive gasometers just south of Three Mills and consider the changing scale of industry between the 18th and 19th centuries.
• The Royal Docks and the Excel Centre: The former docks provide an excellent opportunity to see the process of revitalization underway in this region, as the warehouse have been replaced with a university, an airport and a large conference facility. The Excel Conference centre will host some of the Olympic events and this is one of the better places in West Ham to find a cluster of nice restaurants.
• The Thames Barrier: Taking the train out to the amazing flood barrier bring your past the handful of remaining industrial sites in West Ham, including the Tate and Lyle sugar refinery.
• The Lea Towpath: If you are lucky enough to be in London during nice weather the many tow paths along the old canals are great locations for walks. You can walk north along the River Lea miles, all the way to Waltham Abbey if you are feeling really ambitious.
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[1] R. A. Bray, “Review: West Ham A Study,” The Economic Journal 18, no. 69 (March 1908): 60-64.

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Visit the full EHTV website at: http://niche-canada.org/ehtv

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For more than one hundred years, Quebecers have mined this unique and dangerous mineral from the northern region of the Appalachian mountain range. This episode examines the early origins of asbestos mining in Quebec and some of the early uses of the miraculous fire-proof material.

Viewers should also visit the website for Asbestos, QC: The Graphic Novel to further explore Dr. Van Horssen’s work on this topic.

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Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States.

This is not the history I learned last week as I walked with my family from the Boston Commons to the North Church along the “Freedom Trail” or while visiting the Minutemen Visitor Center on the road between Lexington and Concord. Instead I learned about the heroes of the American Revolution and the narrative of events that led up to and followed “the shot heard around the world.” As someone with limited training in American history, most of which focused on the history of slavery, my tendency is to dismiss this nationalistic historical narrative and perhaps side with Zinn’s perspective. It is clear enough that the fight for independence only achieved liberty for some people in the United States, while many other groups continued to struggle for the freedom for many years to come.

However, as someone interested in promoting history to a wider audience, it was hard not to be deeply impressed with the sheer presence of history in the Boston region. Much of the city and the region is a public history site. There were a fascinating mix of people and organizations presenting the history of the revolution including official (National Parks), commercial (dozens of guides wearing three cornered hats) and grassroots (a man sharing free homemade binders with extra historical information about one of the main cemeteries along the Freedom Trail). More impressive than the infrastructure was the thousands of tourists wandering through the streets of Boston learning about an important historical event on a grey Saturday in October. I expect a lot of people left knowing far more about American history than when they arrived. Between the historical plaques, museums, significant buildings like the Old North Church, and graves of famous figures, you can learn a lot about the outbreak of the war and the standoff between Gage and Washington on the surrounding hills during the months that followed. The explanations of the causes were a bit more simplistic than I would like, but the textbook narrative on the struggle against taxation without representation is well presented in the Old State House museum.

The singular focus on the battles between the British and rebelling colonists missed an opportunity to discuss the long history of Boston. I would have loved to learn more about the social, cultural and political histories during centuries before and after 1776. For example, I must have heard about Paul Revere’s ride at four or five different historical sites. It would have be possible to diversify things a little bit (abolition does get a little bit of attention in Faneuil Hall) . That said, the opportunity to learn history in the places where events happened provides a lot of opportunities not available when reading a book or website. The reconstructed sections of road between Concord and Lexington allow visitors to see and understand the first battle of the war.

Reading between the lines provides some opportunities to get beyond the standard narrative and biographical histories. The landscape provides some clues to the major transformations of the urban environment over the past two centuries. While environmental history is not front and centre, you do learn about the massive land reclaiming that took place as Boston expanded (making it difficult to imagine the Boston neck seen in the map above) and how the region between Boston and Concord has a lot more trees today than it did in 1775. Similarly, the different social standing of various memorable figures in the history provides some indication of how class worked in the late eighteenth century. Paul Revere was a craftsmen, while John Hancock was one of the wealthiest merchants in the city. Comparing their biographies gives visitors some insight into the social history of the revolution. All and all, I left Boston with a new interest in early American history and a desire to read more perspectives on these events. I hope the same is true for some of the thousands of other people who wander the “Freedom Trail” each day.

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The lists are generally broken up by topics and nationality. I follow, for example, H-Albion, H-Environment, H-Urban, H-Canada, H-Labor and H-Water. This results in thousands of emails a year – which I keep segregated from my main email inbox – and try to skim a few times a week. Now and again a topic gains traction in one of these dispersed internet communities and leads to dozens of replies. The strikes in Wisconsin (H-Labor) and a potential boycott of the environmental history conference in Arizona last year (H-Environment) resulted in dozens of emails.

While some interesting historical questions result in large numbers of responses (What was the most important strike in US History?), the posts related to current events are among the most active on some of the H-Net lists. In response to the U.K. riots last month, H-Urban posts included some of the best analysis of the events on offer (along with some self-promotion). Some contributors lived in London and provided some firsthand reflections on the events, while others provided links to interesting newspaper articles or blog posts. Some of the emails were long, while others provided, short, but sometimes poignant reflections. You can look through the email chain here.

Reading through this particular chain of emails, I found myself wishing there was a simple way to share more of these emails with a wider audience. The reaction of the political elite and judiciary in Britain left much to be desired. We needed an analysis that went beyond blaming the riots on bad parenting or a moral crisis, and better solutions than rapid harsh sentencing and evicting families from public housing. The various perspectives provided by the historians on H-Urban discussed the decades long development of urban social problems and the related weakening of the welfare state. They provided an important extra layer of analysis to the articles I read in British newspapers and the interviews I heard on the BBC.

I forward a few of the better emails on to a friend and reposted Dr. Daley’s essay here (as it was already published on a Creative Commons website). While the copyright page on H-Net suggests that authors give “permission to H-Net and its subscribers for electronic distribution and downloading for nonprofit educational purposes with proper attribution to the author, the originating list, and the date of original posting,” I don’t think a lot of these authors expected to see their email reposed on a blog like ActiveHistory.ca. Moreover, most were written as informal emails and would need to be reformatted for publication on a website. Clearly historians have something to contribute to the analysis of events like these riots, but currently too many of discussions take place semi-privately over email lists.

A number of  major media outlets presented perspectives on the riots from a few historians (Guardian, BBC), some of the emails point to a few interesting blog posts, and History&Policy published two opinion articles (Fire and fear and Get Local). Nonetheless, I think there is a lot of room to increase the presence of historians in the public reactions to major current events. The email chains on H-Net lists demonstrates the interest among historians in commenting and reflecting on the historical context of today’s crisis, so we need to provide more pathways beyond listservs to share these ideas.

From time to time we, the editors of ActiveHistory.ca, contact authors of interesting H-Net emails and ask them to contribute a post on this website and maybe we should do this more often.  Group blogs like ActiveHistory.ca are an easy start, but as one of editorial board members, Adam Chapnick, recently commented on Lisa Madokoro post, we also need to think bigger and publish OpEds more frequently and by a wider range of historians. Maybe this would lead to more historians interviews on TV and the radio. How do we do this if newspaper editors tend to reject most of the contributions historians like Madokoro send? We need more Popular Publishing workshops and opportunities to share information on how to get the media interested in contributions from historians. Maybe this could be a regular workshop at major historical conferences? We also need to be ready to find the time when an event related to our research presents the opportunity to publish an opinion piece. Hopefully in the years ahead the H-Net lists will continue to discuss current events, but with significantly more emails pointing to blog posts, OpEds and media interviews where historians shared their reflections with a wider audience than their fellow academic historians.

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A few months ago I took part in the “Expert participation survey” and in doing so learned about the Wikimedia Research Committee‘s concern about the lack of involvement from scientists, academics and professional experts. The survey asked me to rank the importance of a number of reasons I did not edit Wikipedia more often. The major themes in these questions included lack of time, lack of professional credit/career advancement, and inability to include “original research”. I think the first two are interconnected. Should graduate students or early career historians spent time writing Wikipedia articles when they should be finishing their dissertations or working on their books/articles for peer-review?

I don’t expect job search committees put too much weight on editing Wikipedia when they consider a candidates academic CV. As a friend suggested in my question about editing Wikipedia on Twitter, she already spends enough time doing things that will not help get her a paying job. While none of us want to think purely about advancing our careers (if we all took a CV building mentality to its extreme we’d be terrible teachers and it would be hard to find people to blog for ActiveHistory.ca), we do all hope to get paying jobs some day and finishing the dissertations, books and article require a lot of time.

The third concern, about not writing article based on original research, is equally limiting. The easiest articles that I could edit are the ones on West Ham and the River Lea. I know a lot about this history, as I’ve completed a dissertation on the topic. Wikipedia, however, does not allow any information not found in reputable published sources. It is possible to reference your own publications, but they warn not to do so excessively, as it would raise red flags about self-promotion. So the lack of time, career advancing credit, and warnings against writing about our own research, together creates some high barriers against regular participation from academic historians (not to mention the historians who distrust the whole Wikipedia crowd-sources approach to creating an encyclopedia).

With all these road blocks, why should we bother with Wikipedia? The answer is simple. Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the web (currently ranked # 7, behind giants like Facebook and Google, but still ahead of Twitter and Bing). Google and other search engines direct millions of readers to Wikipedia articles daily. One of the goals of ActiveHistory.ca is to connect historians with policy makers, the media and the public. They all use Wikipedia. It is the first source of information for a growing proportion of the world’s population, so it is increasingly important that the information is both correct and expansive.

Other disciplines have recognized the importance of Wikipedia and are working on promoting a more active engagement. The Association for Psychological Science, for example, issued this statement to its members encouraging them to edit Wikipedia:

APS is calling on its Members to support the Association’s mission to deploy the power of Wikipedia to represent scientific psychology as fully and as accurately as possible and thereby to promote the free teaching of psychology worldwide. (APS Webiste)

They also have a good short podcast on their site about the topic.

After having been convinced of the importance of engaging with Wikipedia a few months ago, I’ve finally set aside some time to get started. Last week I decided to look at pages related to environmental history, which is a topic that I’ve read a lot of secondary sources for, giving me the expertise to add content, without relying on my own original research. First, I updated the list of key sources in British Environmental History and then I noticed the lack of attention to Canadian Environmental History. This led me to learn how to start a draft page for a new topic and I’m currently working with a group of Canadian environmental historians to write a new article on their topic. If you would like to help, please visit this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cljim22/Canadian_environmental_history

You don’t, however, need to jump straight into writing new article for Wikipedia. Simply adding citations is one of the biggest and easiest contribution academic historians can make to improving Wikipedia articles. The process is simple. Click “Edit this Page” on any Wikipedia article and then put your cursor at the location you’d like to add a citation. Then click Citation on the top of the edit screen and choose the type of source from the templates (web, book, journal, news). This brings up a form for you to fill in the author, title, publisher, etc. Finally, add something in the “Edit Summary” box explaining you’ve added a citation and click “Save Page”. If all of us take five minutes to add a citation or two every few weeks, the quality of the history articles will increase and make them an even more useful source for students beginning research projects.

Teaching is the final reason it is important for academic historians to engage with Wikipedia. We need to stop telling our students to avoid it. After they leave university many of them will work in jobs where web searches will be the standard approach to research and information gathering. Instead of telling our students to never use Wikipedia, we need to show them how the articles are created and provide them with the critical skills to judge good articles from bad ones (the number of citations and type of citations and the number of editors are two easy tests to judge the quality of an article). Good articles are ideal for the first stage of research, as they provide lists of further resources on the topic (much like a text book) at the bottom of the page. I still warn student to not use Wikipedia article in their citations, much like my professors warned me to not use the Encyclopedia of Britannica articles in research papers during my first year of university (during the pre-Wikipedia late 1990s). A few history professors have gone beyond teaching students how to use Wikipedia for research and ask their students to write Wikipedia articles as assignments. You can read Frederick Gibbs’ blog post on the topic here. I think it is increasingly important that we teach our students digital literacy and I think a Wikipedia assignment could teach students a wide range of new skills. The site is ranked almost as highly as Facebook after all, so we should teach our students and ourselves how to use it well.

Please leave comments about your experience with Wikipedia.

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An article in the Guardian, “Houseboaters being ‘socially cleansed’ from Olympics area,” suggests this process might be underway. House boaters are concerned that British Waterways are going to increase the mooring costs along canals in the Lower Lea:

British Waterways, which manages 2,200 miles of canals and rivers, has put forward changes to the mooring rules on the river Lea, in east London, that could increase the cost of living on the waterway from about £600 to £7,000 a year. Residents see the move as a deliberate attempt to drive them away. A draft note from British Waterways on 6 December 2010, seen by the Guardian, says: “The urgency … relates to the objective of reducing unauthorized mooring on the Lea navigation and adjacent waterways in time for the Olympics.”

My research showed links between environmental and social conditions dating back to the mid-1850s. Charles Dickens visited the place in 1857 and wrote an article about the polluted streams and the unhealthy people:

… we come to a row of houses built with their backs to a stagnant ditch. We turn aside to see the ditch, and find that it is a cesspool, so charged with corruption, that not a trace of vegetable matter grows on its surface – bubbling and seething with the constant rise of the foul products of decomposition, that the pool pours up into the air. The filth of each house passes through a short pipe straight into this ditch, and stays there. Upon its surface, to our great wonder, a few consumptive-looking ducks are swimming, very dirty; very much like the human dwellers in foul alleys…

The Lower Lea became increasingly polluted during the half century that followed, as its wetlands filled with gasworks, chemical and heavy engineering factories, and the low ground meant there was a regular problem with smoke pollution. As a result, the housing build among the factories, and on the flood plains in Canning Town, mostly drew socially marginalized people.

As industry experience a protracted decline in the 20th century, the environment remained contaminated and the social problems continued.  Until the redevelopment, the Lower Lea Valley remained a undesirable, dirty and distressed location for many Londoners. The 2012 Olympics promised to solve these problems:

The Olympic Park will lie at the heart of the Lower Lea Valley, just four miles from Tower Bridge. Currently one of the capital’s most underdeveloped areas, the Lea Valley is an area of outstanding potential which will be transformed by the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. The Games legacy will transform this area into one of the largest urban parks created in Europe for more than 150 years, stretching 20 miles from the Hertfordshire countryside to the tidal estuary of the River Thames. A network of footpaths, cycleways and canal towpaths will link the communities on either side of the valley. Riverside housing, shops, restaurants and cafes will provide new amenities for the local community. New playing fields will sit alongside the world-class sport facilities that will be adapted for community use. The natural river system of the valley will be restored, canals would be dredged and waterways widened. Birdwatchers and ecologists will be able to enjoy three hectares of new wetland habitat. And the park will be planted with native species, including oak, ash, birch, hazel, holly, blackthorn and hawthorn, providing a home for wildlife in the middle of the city. The rehabilitation of the Lower Lea Valley lies at the heart of the Olympic legacy to east London, restoring an eco-system and revitalising an entire community. (“A valley reborn” 2012 Olympics Webpage circa 2006)

The problem I have with this vision is that I don’t know what will happen to the socially marginalized people who currently live in West Ham. Who will benefit from this transformation of the Lower Lea Valley – the current residents of the Lower Lea Valley or a “higher” class of people who can afforded to buy the new condos/flats and houses built in the cleaner landscape near the new parks? As the toxic legacy of the region’s industrial history  is ploughed under, and the environmental conditions improve, Iain Sinclair and others worry that rising rents and demolitions will displace many of the people of West Ham and Hackney. The Guardian story suggests this process might be well underway. Sadly, I believe the poor people will be pushed aside, as they were from central London by warehouses and railroads in the nineteenth century, and by banking towers and loft apartments in Wapping and the Isle of Dogs in the 1990s.  One of the main legacy of these games will likely be to again move the lower segments of society out of central London to the less desirable edges of the metropolis.

Through pure serendipity I decided to write a post about historical films on the internet two days after the British Film Institute (BFI) uploaded a fifty-five second clip to their YouTube Channel of the launching of the HMS Albion from the Thames Ironworks Shipyard in West Ham. The HMS Ablion was one of the last battleships built on the Thames. This film records a major tragedy, as the launch created wave that capsized a jetty killing almost forty onlookers (it is not easy to figure out exactly where this takes place watching the film). While I knew about this tragedy, I was more captivated by this very short footage of the landscape I’ve been studying for more than five years. The abundance of smoke and smokestacks, the scale of the warship built near the mouth of the Lea and the huge piles of coal in the right of the frame all add to my existing knowledge of this space. This moving image, even of limited quality and length, is different from all the other sources I’ve consulted; it seems to bring history to life.

As a nineteenth century historian I’ve never worked with film as a historical source, but my brief exploration of the BFI’s YouTube channel suggests it is a medium that will be very useful for historians of the twentieth century and perhaps even more useful for teaching history in classrooms, museums and on the web. Below are a small selection of films from the first half of the twentieth century that caught my attention as I scrolled through the films uploaded to YouTube. The BFI’s website has an even deeper collection on their websites, but much of it is unfortunately restricted to users in British libraries, colleges and universities.

The second film below, is a longer colour film of the Thames in the mid-1930s.  The colour footage makes clear the abundance of coal smoke produced by London’s heavy ship traffic.  The film provides a significant contrast with today’s London. The Thames was a working river through to the middle of the twentieth century before a number of factors including containerization led all of the London Dock (aside from Tilbury) to close in the decades after World War II. Now this same river is crowded with tourist and commuter boats.

Beyond these two films of personal interest, I found a large number of clips that are very useful for teaching social history. The next two films record street scenes from Petticoat Lane in 1903 and 1926. They show the crowded East London market and provide an opportunity to see how working-class people dressed and shopped in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Even more impressive is the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection of film from the first years of the twentieth century, which recorded both every day life and a number of special events in England. The BFI have created an amazing Google Earth layer that allows you to choose the different films based on their location in the Midlands and North of England and watch them in Google Earth. Click Here to download the layer that will open in Google Earth. Here is one example from the collection: a factory gate film from Huddersfield in 1900:

The YouTube channel also has a few great films for students of Rural History, including this one that records the use of mechanized harvesting equipment in the 1930s:

This second film records the annual migration of urban labourers from London’s East End to the Hop field of Kent.

Finally, the BFI has a significant number of clips that would be of interest to historians of sport and popular culture including this clip of a Wales vs. England rugby game from 1922:

The BFI’s YouTube channel is only one of many sources of early film on the internet. Here in Canada the National Film Board has put a large collection of its films online. Not many date back to the early twentieth century, but the collection becomes more significant for the 1940s and after. Like the BFI’s YouTube collection, the NFB allows you to embed their films in your website or blog:

The Internet Archive has a huge collection of films and movies.
The Library of Congress also has a collection on movies on its website, but they are not as well organized as the BFI or the NFB collections.
Please add a comment if you know of other great collections of historically significant films on the internet.

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