A.J. Rowley

Parliament Can Offer History More Than Just Legislation

February 22, 2012

“It’s a difficult thing to live in a country that has erased your past.” – Teju Cole, Open City Amnesty International is concerned about a new French law that would “…[make] it a criminal offense to publicly question events labeled ‘genocide’…”. The bill cleared the upper house of the French Parliament on 23 January 2012 [...]

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From Black Tuesday to Black Friday to Everyday

December 7, 2011

Discussing money is generally afforded the same privacy as the balance of one’s bank account. Inviting an open conversation about the subject in public, from basic finance to complex economics, is thought to be rude and even poorer politics. It is perhaps the most polarizing field of contemporary journalism because it has absolutely no means [...]

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Must We Associate Innovation With National Identity?

July 6, 2011

Are associations between nationalism and technological innovation useful?

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Technology and the Post-War Presidency

May 19, 2011

What is the relationship between presidential popularity and technology?

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The Revolution Will Be Rubbernecked

February 16, 2011

While the recent protest movements in the Middle East reveal much about the present state of civic community among the people of those nations — Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt (and a growing list of others) — our reaction to them reveals more about ourselves than we should perhaps find flattering.

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Where Did You Get That From?

January 20, 2011

A discussion of intellectual property rights through the production and reproduction of images.

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You Are Here: Not A Year-In-Review Post

December 16, 2010

While many writers will be surrendering their soapboxes to reflection and summation — perhaps as the basis for trying to predict where it seems we’re headed — I’d like to offer a different sort of historically-minded meditation: a brief you are here assessment informed by two somewhat interconnected statements that recently caught my attention.

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Is Wikipedia Worth the Trouble?

October 13, 2010

Formally launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia — the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” — has become the first (and often only) stop in Internet fact-finding. With well over ten million articles to date, Wikipedia has evaded overt corporate influence through a non-profit structure and currently ranks among the top [...]

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Sharing History Through Used Books and the Internet

September 16, 2010

In honour of both the September crunch and ActiveHistory.ca‘s own expanding book review section — be sure to check out Mitch Primeau’s review of The Second Greatest Disappointment (1999) — I’ll be devoting this month’s post to some of my favourite used book websites. History tends to involve a few more books than other disciplines [...]

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Can We Redeem File-Sharing After the Download Decade?

August 3, 2010

The term “download decade” is an effective description of the first ten years of this infant century and the first rising chapter of the so-called Information Age. It accurately distills the blind conspiracy between the exponential availability of high-speed Internet, the gradual decrease in the cost of personal computers, the rise of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks [...]

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