Promotional image for Season Five of Mad Men

By Jay Young

Like many people, I anticipated the return of Mad Men (AMC, Sundays, 10 pm EST), one of television’s most acclaimed series of the past decade.  Now in its fifth season, the show looks at the life of Don Draper and other workers in the New York advertising industry during the 1960s. At the same time that I became reunited with Don and his gang at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, I also began to re-watch The Wonder Years.  Running from 1988 to 1993, the series told the coming-of-age story of Kevin Arnold, a teenage boy living in an unnamed American suburb during the late 1960s and early 1970s.  What struck me as I watched Mad Men and The Wonder Years is the different ways in which both shows explore history, nostalgia, and life during the turbulent decade of the 1960s.

Mad Men and The Wonder Years share many of the same overarching historical themes of political, social, and cultural change during 1960s America.  Specifically, both shows illustrate how the everyday lives of people at the time intersected with the events and trends that have become engrained in popular memory of the decade.  The civil rights movement, feminism, the Vietnam War, and the emerging counterculture – to name a few of the major forces of the era – serve as subtext for both series.

Despite their similarities, both series employ different historical chronologies, geographies, and narrative techniques in order to dramatize the transformations of the decade.  Season One of Mad Men is set in 1960, and the current season is set in 1966.  This periodization allows the show to emphasize a gradual transition from the conservative 1950s to the liberal 1960s.  From the open drinking in the morning office to the overt sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, adultery, and homophobia of its characters, the series’ chronology also enables it to illustrate the negative side of an era perceived by some conservatives today as a simpler time before the emergence and influence of liberal and radical social movements during the 1960s.

My guess is that Mad Men will end in 1968, the year that many historians see as the high point of 1960s radicalism.  The year 1968 is the starting point for The Wonder Years, which concludes in 1973.  Although the values of Kevin’s parents – especially his father – often seem like a caricature of 1950s conservatism, the series takes off as the changes of the 1960s are already well underway.  Whereas Man Men emphasizes the continuities between the early 1960s with the 1950s, The Wonder Years does the same with the early 1970s and the late 1960s.

Different geographies and social classes also mark both shows.  Many of the characters in Mad Men, such as Don Draper, are jet-setting elites who work (and in some cases live) in Manhattan.  Of course, the characters do not directly witness all major historical events of the time, but they seem closer to the epicentre of change.  For example, Don’s ad firm seeks to represent Richard Nixon in his failed presidential run against John F. Kennedy in 1960.  Later on in the series, Don realizes the business opportunities from the changing tide of social perceptions against smoking, so his new ad firm publicizes in newspapers their opposition to tobacco advertisements, despite his own chain-smoking habit.  Similarly, Season Five begins with a civil rights demonstration outside a rival ad agency that ultimately leads to Draper’s firm hiring its first black employee.

In contrast, The Wonder Years is set in middle(-class) America.  The big events of the era directly affect the Arnold family.  To recount one instance, in the show’s first season we learn that the older brother of Kevin’s childhood friend, Winnie, has died in Vietnam.  Yet the geographical position and the ordinary status of characters in the show often make them seem like respondents to major historical trends, rather than agents themselves.  As such, major events come into the Arnold home most prominently through visuals and sounds of the nightly news that emanates from the family’s kitchen television, often simultaneous to their discussions of the mundane details of their own daily experiences.

Paul, Kevin, and Winnie from The Wonder Years

A striking feature of The Wonder Years is its distinct storytelling method.  Viewers will remember that the show features the narration of an adult Kevin, who looks back on his youth with not only a sardonic wit about the idiosyncrasies of his family and the contradictions of the era, but also a sense of nostalgia for his youth.  Along with the use of Arnold family home films interspersed with dramatic scenes, Kevin’s adult voice gives the show a sense of realism.  Adding to this realism is the fact that I suspect the show’s main viewer demographic consisted of baby-boomers, who watched in part because of their own nostalgia for the idealism of the 1960s.

Much has been made of the sleek aesthetic style of Mad Men: its suits, dresses, cars, furnishings, and music of an era long gone.  Such characteristics, along with Don’s own hidden past identity, makes the show feel more like fantasy than realism, more like the dream-world of television advertising than grainy home films.  And unlike the baby-boomers who might relate to Kevin Arnold, Mad Men draws its audience from not only members of that generation, who never worked in an office building during the early 1960s (although their parents may have), but also members of Generations X and Y, who never even lived through the era.

Ultimately, both shows struggle with the meaning of the Sixties, the effects of historical forces on everyday life, and the legacies of such forces on more recent times.  Communications scholar Daniel Marcus has written that during the early 1980s political actors in the United States – such as Ronald Reagan – began to use the dichotomy between perceptions of the 1950s and the 1960s in popular culture as “a primary way … to shape (and reshape) public memories according to their own needs.”  Conservatives, for example, have rejected social movements that arose out of the 1960s as an unfortunate turn from what they conceive as the golden years of the 1950s.  Mad Men and The Wonder Years show how popular culture can complicate our impressions of these decades.

By Jay Young

I recently spent an extended weekend in New York City.  Along with the well-known sights, sounds and tastes of the Big Apple, I was excited to visit the Tenement Museum, a restored five-storey building at 97 Orchard Street that educates visitors about life in the Lower East Side during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The non-profit museum, which also features an exhibit space, connects people to the history of the building through the vibrant stories of immigrants who made the tenement home.

German immigrant Lucas Glockner built 97 Orchard Street in 1863.  At the time, this area of the Lower East Side was still known as Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany.  Multi-story brick buildings – they became known as tenements – replaced small wooden structures that lined the neighbourhood’s narrow streets, and soon after, the area’s ethnic composition changed from a population of mostly German and Irish inhabitants to include newcomers of Italian and East-European Jewish heritage.  Unlike most tenement owners, Glockner lived with his family in the building during its early years.  Over the next seven decades, almost 7,000 people resided in the five-storey building until its owners evicted its last tenants in 1935.  During the 1950s, the city condemned the building because it failed to conform to new regulations requiring metal staircases.

97 Orchard Street

Then, historian and social activist Ruth Abram discovered 97 Orchard.  Abram and her co-founder Anita Jacobsen aspired to use an old tenement as a venue to understand the immigrant experience in the United States.  In 1988, they found 97 Orchard, a “time capsule” that had remained (officially) unused for decades.  Researchers uncovered the history of the building and the lives of those who resided there, while preservation experts restored the rooms inside.  Four years later, the first restored apartment was complete, a number that now stands at six apartments.

According to its mission statement, the museum “forges emotional connections between visitors and immigrants past and present; and enhances appreciation for the profound role immigration has played and continues to play in shaping America’s evolving national identity.”  To fulfill these aims, a number of activities take place.  Over 40,000 students have come to the museum to experience the history of immigration and city life.  ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) students also arrive at the museum to learn English through a program that maintains a connection between lives of past immigrants and those of today.  The museum features a stimulating website, where educators can download lesson plans to teach their students (elementary to high school level) about material history, archival documents, and oral history.  Lectures, discussions, and other community events that explore the history of New York also take place at the museum.

The best way for the first-time visitor to get to know the museum is to participate in one of the guide-led tours.  These tours explore the restored apartments through the lives of the building’s families.  Each tour focuses on a small number of real families of various ethnic backgrounds who lived at 97 Orchard in order to learn about wider historical themes of specific decades.  If you can’t make it to Manhattan any time soon – you can get a sense via online tours found on the website.  I opted for the “Hard Times” tour, which looked at two families struggling to get by during the economic depressions of 1870s and 1930s.

Participation and conversation are key parts of the tours.  At the outset, as we stood outside the stoop at 97 Orchard, our informative and energetic tour guide explained to us that she was going to ask us questions throughout the tour.  This interactive dimension created a lively atmosphere between tour participants.  She also asked us to turn off our cell phones – for the sake of historical accuracy, of course!

The first apartment we visited was the home of the Gumpertzs, a German-Jewish family that migrated from Prussia in 1858.  We were all immediately struck by the size of the apartment, which consisted of a small bedroom, an even smaller kitchen (featuring a coal stove), and a larger living room – the only room to feature natural light.  Our tour guide revealed the most dramatic part of the Gumpertz story: Julius, husband to Natalie and father to four children, abandoned his family a year after the Panic of 1873.  Natalie had to make ends meet by sewing.  This led to a discussion about what strategies we might pursue if we needed help.  Who would we turn to?  With the state providing a minimal social safety net during the 1870s, people of the Lower East Side turned to family, friends, and local mutual aid societies for assistance.

Next, we walked across the hall to our second apartment, inhabited by the Baldizzi family.  The Baldizzis left Sicily in 1923.  Greater restriction on immigration following passage of the Johnson-Reed Act a year later meant that the family probably arrived in the United States by “creative means,” as the tour guide put it.  Entering the Baldizzi’s former home, our tour guide asked us to think about continuity and change.  What was different about this apartment, restored to emulate the space during the 1930s, compared to the previous apartment?  New technology stood out, as running water was installed in 1895, followed soon after by indoor plumbing.  The building was wired for electricity in the early 1920s.  An electric iron in the corner of the room signaled such change.  Tour participants also noted more windows, as the building was retrofitted to increase air flow and natural light.  After we heard about daily life for the Baldizzis and their struggles during the Great Depression, our tour guide asked us to share memories about how our own families had dealt with the economic trials of the 1930s.

The tour ended with a discussion of life in the neighbourhood since the 1950s.  The Lower East Side has seen an influx of immigrants from other areas of the world, especially Latin America and Asia.  Our tour guide also mentioned the ways in which gentrification is having an impact on the area.  Middle-class New Yorkers with disposable income are moving in.  Old tenement apartments sell for astronomical prices and new luxury condominiums pop up.

I suspect the museum is at the crossroads of this process.  On the one hand, it seeks to preserve the legacy of past immigrants who struggled to make it in New York.  It also provides useful services to more recent newcomers.  On the other hand, the museum is a sign of the changing local economy.  Orchard Street is now lined with chic clothing stores and hip restaurants.  By attracting tourists and other visitors willing pay $22 (adult price) to see the tenements, the museum serves as a significant economic motor for the area.  A nearby restaurant, for example, advertises a ten percent discount with purchase of a museum ticket.  Local shop owners seem to realize that heritage can be good business.

My time at the museum was short, but I left in agreement with one aspect of its mission: “In recognizing the importance of this seemingly ordinary building, the Tenement Museum has re-imagined the role that museums can play in our lives.”

Jamie Oliver eating Bahn Mi in east end London, from Jamie's Great Britain. Screen shot from YouTube.

Jamie Oliver has made a name for himself as a celebrity chef who has sought to improve the way we eat.  Whether it be his instructional cooking or his fight to reform school cafeterias, Oliver has spent over a decade teaching us how to make food, and urging us to think more about it.

Some of his series have explored different national food cultures.  In Jamie’s Great Italian Escape, he tried to answer why Italy has a lower GDP than the United Kingdom, yet its people enjoy a healthier diet.  Oliver traveled across the USA in Jamie’s American Road Trip, while he showed us that despite outside stereotypes of a monotonous fast-food culture the country has a diverse number of cuisines based on its many different regions, histories, and people.

His newest show is called Jamie’s Great Britain, and its argument is a historical one: the foods that many Brits see as traditionally “British” weren’t always so.  The series is one example of connections between historical perspectives and food culture in popular media.

In the first episode, Oliver outlines the mission of the series.  “I want to scratch under the surface. I want to see what the modern day communities are like, whether they’re classic British (whatever that is) or the new waves of immigration,” he says.  The chef explains that he’s “not going to stop at the classic British dishes. I’m going to show you how centuries of foreign influences on our island have changed the whole landscape of what we eat and how we eat it. We’re like magpies. We love to sort of get little ideas or steal things.  Then what the British are brilliant at is making it our own.  At that is what I really love about British food.”

He offers an example in the apple pie: “We think its British? No way.  The whole concept of a pie came from the Egyptians.  The great British eating apple. Not British.  Came from western Asia.  And cinnamon. Not a single bit of that has ever come from Great Britain.  But you know what? It tastes so good, and it’s ours now.”

Jamie Oliver walking through east end London, from Jamie's Great Britain. Screen shot from YouTube.

The series’ first segment starts off in the east end of London, where he notes different immigrant groups arrived before continuing their journey outwards. As he walks through Whitecross Street Market, he describes an unspecified earlier era, “back in the day,” when the area was known as Squalor Street, filled with street vendors and the mixing of immigrant cultures.

“Food was always a representation of immigration.  You take something quintessentially British like Fish and Chips – it’s not English!  You know, it’s Jewish.  And that was two hundred years ago when the Jewish were coming through east London. Hundreds of years before that it was the French Protestants.  In more recent times, it was the Bangladeshis, the Italians.”

Another immigrant group to make the east end home is the Vietnamese, who came as refugees to Britain in large numbers during the Vietnam War.  Oliver chats with two workers at a food stall selling Bahn Mi.  The sandwich is a mix of Vietnamese ingredients like red chilis, cilantro, and pork shoulder in a French bread slathered in mayonnaise.  Oliver points out that it is also an artifact of history, a product of the French colonization of Southeast Asia during the nineteenth century.

Oliver is taking apart the popular myth that there is one authentic, static, British food culture.  His point about Fish and Chips shows such an intention.  This is a political exercise.  It repudiates a corresponding idea that thinks there are Brits who have a more traditional claim to Britishness, ie white Anglo Saxons, compared to more recent inhabitants of the island, many of whom are people of colour.   By underlining the ways in which Britain’s food culture is historically contingent and a constant process of evolution, he shows that its populace, also ever changing, mirrors this phenomena.

As Jamie’s Great Britain illustrates, food history is a fruitful historical subject.  Food, after all, has been essential to the survival and everyday experience of all people living in the past.  It has also served as a key aspect in the development of human culture: the signs, symbols, and practices that we use to understand the world around us.

These factors help to make food history a topic with much popular appeal.  Everyone eats.  And recently there has been a growing interest in food, whether it be the popularity of Food Network or farmers markets.  A number of popular history books, some of which have become New York Times best sellers, have catered to this interest by examining the history of specific foods or ingredients like cod, sugar, chocolate, bananas, coffee, oysters, and corn.  Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History (2002), for example, traces the culinary origins of the mineral and its importance to various cultures.

Even popular books about food without an explicitly historical dimension make arguments based on particular perceptions of the past.  Food historian and ActiveHistory.ca contributor Ian Mosby has shown this with Michael Pollan’s 2009 bestseller, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.  Pollan writes: “Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”  This rule is based on a nostalgic understanding of the past, of an earlier time before factories made food (despite the fact that Jello was invented in 1897, Mosby points out).

In Canada, food history is a growing field.  Lily Cho’s Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada (2010) looks at the role of Chinese immigrants within the Canadian restaurant industry and the ways in which such spaces have connected Chinese Canadians and people of other ethnic backgrounds.  The next few months will see the release of Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History, a collection of chapters edited by Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek, and Marlene Epp that is sure to continue this trend by exploring how food links to wider historical themes like religion, immigration, politics, gender, and science.  However, food has long had a subtle yet significant place in Canadian history books.  One only has to think of the importance of cod and wheat to the Staples Thesis of Canadian development, or the role of food shortages in the rebellions of 1837.

Oliver’s argument about the heterogeneity of British food culture would probably come as less of a surprise to people living in Canada, a country whose recent national identity has been built more explicitly around immigration and multiculturalism.  Our national food culture is also certainly one of evolution, ever changing with new developments in technology (for example, deep freezers), economy, and cultural influences.

With food, we can see how the quotidian things of our everyday lives are not timeless.  They have a history that appeals to wide audiences.  And as Jamie’s Great Britain shows, these histories can make more palatable a larger argument about the need for cultural acceptance.

Historical Geographer Richard Harris recently presented a talk entitled “The Making of Dufferin-St. Clair: 1900-1929” at a local library located in this Toronto neighbourhood.  Following his talk, a room full of community members shared their personal memories of the area’s social and physical development.  Harris’s talk comes from research for his book, Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900 to 1950 (1996), which examined the rise and fall of working-class home ownership in Toronto’s suburbs.  The Dufferin-St. Clair neighbourhood, also known today as Corso Italia, is a key location in the book.

Harris’s talk is available here for audio download.

The presentation is the fourth talk of the 2011 History Matters lecture series.  Now in its second year, the series gives the public an opportunity to connect with working historians and discover some of the many and surprising ways in which the past shapes the present.  This year’s talks focus on two themes: labour and environmental history.

The next History Matters lecture takes place this Thursday, when Craig Heron will discuss the history of labour parades in Toronto.  Click here for more details.

Trees are a common symbol for genealogy.  Like lines of ancestry, trees contain many branches that are united through a common trunk but grow in their own direction.  And like family history, we often only see the complexity of their roots when we start digging.

In a previous post, I outlined strategies on conducting the research of one’s home, and offered some thoughts on why home history is one of the most common ways in which ordinary people are interested by, think about, and interact with the past.  These “resident histories” seem to have some commonalities with family history,  as both topics connect the past with very intimate aspects of the everyday lives of people in the present.  Like a home, a family is an emotional site that embodies the physical continuities with the past.  Family history also illustrates change over time at a microcosmic level and within wider historical contexts.

Over the past year, my father has begun to research the history of my family.  This weekend, I had an opportunity to sit down to ask some questions about his own experiences. 

What sparked your interest in our family’s history?
When I retired, a former colleague spoke to me about how she thought we were related, going back about four generations.  I went to her house and was politely bored as she shared with me her journey to trace her heritage to become an official United Empire Loyalist, or UEL.  When I went home, I found myself Googling my surname and was surprised to find how much information was easily available. That experience, plus the recent death of my father at that time, started me on the road to researching my family’s background as well your mom’s family background.

What was your research strategy?  Has it been easier or more difficult than you thought?
My research strategy was to start with what I knew and go back from there.  The internet, local public libraries, people also interested in genealogy, and genealogy groups like the UEL and the Ontario Genealogical Society were my best resources. I have learned that just some days and weeks researching can provide an amazing amount of information which is very rewarding.  Although the weeks of always finding “dead ends” are discouraging, when you find that source or lead that opens up that dead end the rewards make you ecstatic.  Researching a family background in your non-native language poses other challenges, as your mom’s background takes me to Italian state sites – in Italian.

Did anything surprise you about our family’s history or the process of researching this history?
At a recent family reunion with relatives of Daniel Young who lived in the Niagara area in 1790, there was a presentation given by Young descendants stating that a recent analysis of their DNA made them conclude that they were related, but in a different way than church and state documents had stated. A family “secret” that was kept for over a hundred years was now being shared with other living relatives.  I guess time offers the ultimate forgiveness.

You have to remember the different social context of your research period.  I discovered that a great-grandmother remarried less than two months after her husband died. Initially, that didn’t give me good thoughts.  When you discover that she had five children under the age of eight, the fact that she lived in a time when there was no welfare state, and that she didn’t have a child with her second husband for more than two years, you look at the situation differently.  She needed someone to support her and her children and the boarder who was willing to do so was a viable solution.

Has researching our family’s history piqued an interest in the wider historical contexts in which our more personal past took place?
I have read history books about the different locations and time periods to better understand the wider picture about the times of the generations before me.  It is one thing to read a book like The Burning of the Valleys (1997) by Gavin K. Watt to learn about the American Revolution, and a totally different experience to find out that the name of a relative who fought with the British forces in the Butler’s Rangers was a key player in the book. Reading books on the Italian immigration to the United States in the 1890s and their passage from Bianchi, Calabria to Oakes Avenue, “Blyn”, New York takes on a whole new meaning when you realize that your mom’s great-grandmother was on one of those ships.  Discovering the online Ellis Island records showed that great-grandpa was heading to live at a street address in Brooklyn, New York, which has given me a strong desire to go to that street address today to connect with this past relative.

Have any documents or sources that you’ve discovered really stood out to you as a”goldmine” in your research?
The internet using Google has been really useful.  One website that has been particularly helpful was a free Italian state site that allowed me to discover the birth place of your mom’s great-grandfather and the names of his parents.  A fellow genealogist mentioned that he was digitizing funeral expense reports from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and this quickly allowed me to find a funeral expense account that gave additional proof that a great-grandfather was related to a previous unknown great uncle.  The United Empire Loyalist website gave me information to find proof so that I could obtain my UEL certificate.

What value has the memories of those who were or are still alive in your research? In other words, what value has oral history had for you?
When I was discovering the treatments of Italians and their descendants in Canada during World War II, I was shocked to learn that Italians were sent to internment camps as well.  My father-in-law told me that he remembered his father having to register at the local armoury so they could keep track of him. This still upset my father-in-law 70 years later, especially knowing that his father was born in the United States and had lived in the community since 1906.  Again through oral history, grandpa could describe a family house from 1906 to me even though it was torn down in the 1970s.

Has anything you have learnt in the process of understanding our family history changed the way you look at society today?
It’s helped me to understanding how immigrant populations had to live to survive in different situations.  The Jungs from the Palatine in Germany to New York in 1710, the Youngs on the Grand River Six Nations area in the 1800s, and the Pascuzzis landing at Ellis Island in the 1890s.  These examples have helped me get a better understanding of the challenges of recent immigrants to Canada and how others react to them.

Ancestry.ca, a popular website for researching genealogy, has the following quote on its site: “Wonder why you’re drawn to the arts? Or where your love of seafood comes from?  Or how you came to be such a proud Canadian? The answers are waiting for you in your family history.”  Do you think that our own personalities might be linked to our ancestors?
I guess it is sort of like believing in your horoscope.  If you believe, you read your day’s events as predicted by the horoscope.  If you are a skeptic, you think they are reading too much into it.  When family pictures are shown of relatives that lived two hundred years ago, and someone says you “look just like” a relative alive today, how do you answer that?  When you discover a fifth cousin for the first time and you feel a strange type of connection, how do you explain that?

Do you have a final goal?  Do you think family history research is more about the process of research, its final product, or both?
Receiving my UEL certificate was a goal when I started about four years ago. I believe it was something I could give to my future generations that could be easily found.  I read a a book called Calabrian Tales (2002) by Peter Chiarella, where family tales, history, and literature are combined to tell the story of a brother-in-law of your mom’s maternal great-grandmother.  Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes (2007) is another popular example where a family story has been written to share history with others.  I too hope to tell the names, dates, locations of our relatives in a story format to help make the experiences of our past relatives come alive to future generations.

Historian Lisa Rumiel recently presented a talk entitled “Three Mile Island to Bhopal: the Life and Work of Environmental Activist Rosalie Bertell” in front of an engaged audience at Toronto’s Parkdale library.  Bertell, who has a PhD in biometrics, has long spoken out about the environmental consequences of nuclear power.

Rumiel’s talk is available here for audio download.

The presentation is the second talk of the 2011 History Matters lecture series.  Now in its second year, the series gives the public an opportunity to connect with working historians and discover some of the many and surprising ways in which the past shapes the present.  This year’s talks focus on two themes: labour and environmental history.

The next History Matters lecture takes place tonight.  Jennifer Bonnell will discuss a timely topic: “Imagined Futures for the Lower Don: A History of Big Ideas for a Small River.” Click here for more details.

Stephen Cruise’s “Uniform Measure/Stack” located at the corner of Spadina Avenue and Richmond Street in Toronto. Photo by Carsten Nielsen from Flickr under Creative Commons license

Last week, historian Ruth Frager presented a talk entitled “Spadina Sweatshops: Jews and Gender in Toronto’s Labour Movement 1900 to 1939.”  The lecture examined the dynamics of the Jewish labour movement in Toronto and focused on a strike at the clothing factory of the T. Eaton Company in 1912.

Frager’s talk is available here for audio download.

The presentation kicked off the 2011 History Matters lecture series.  Now in its second year, the series gives the public an opportunity to connect with working historians and discover some of the many and surprising ways in which the past shapes the present.  This year’s talks focus on two themes: labour and environmental history.

The next History Matters lecture takes place Thursday, September 29^th, when Lisa Rumiel talks about the life and work of environmental activist Rosalie Bertell.   Click here for more details.

Nathan Philips Square, August 27 2011. Photo by author.

The passing of Jack Layton has unleashed a tremendous amount of mourning across the country.  Saturday’s state funeral, usually reserved for current or former prime ministers, Cabinet ministers, and governors general, attracted thousands of attendees inside and outside of downtown Toronto’s Roy Thompson Hall.   Many more people gathered at events held this past week across Canada to remember the man.  Possibly the most dramatic act was the striking facelift of Toronto City Hall, where people etched their thoughts about Jack in coloured chalk on the concrete of Nathan Philips Square.

Mourning is about memory.  And memory is not just about the past, but also aspirations for the future.  Canadians responded to Layton’s death in diverse ways, from skepticism of its media coverage to participation in his funeral.  The contribution Layton made to public life didn’t end as the crowds dispersed on Saturday.  In fact, the memory of his life promises to influence Canadian politics and society in upcoming years.

A day after Layton’s death, the National Post published a controversial piece by Christie Blatchford.  The columnist questioned the public’s reaction and claimed that Layton used his own death for political reasons.  In particular, Blatchford wondered why Layton, wife and fellow MP Olivia Chow, and other prominent NDPers had crafted his last letter to Canadians in the days before his death.

No doubt Blatchford is correct that Layton and his close advisors had attempted to construct a historical memory in order to further the political goals for which he fought during his life.  Journalist and activist Gerald Kaplan predicted that the letter “will find its way into history books for decades to come – a sense of what Canada could be at its very best.”   In life and in death, Layton was a consummate politician, and it isn’t surprising that he spent his last days thinking about his legacy and the future of Canada.

Layton’s death is unique in Canadian history, but shares similarities to other icons.  He was the first Leader of the Official Opposition to die in office since Laurier.  More important, his struggle with cancer touched millions: perseverance through physical pain played a part in his tremendous growth in popularity and the NDP’s jump in the polls.  His cane, after all, emerged as the lasting symbol of the spring 2011 election.  Commentators have compared him to Terry Fox, another Canadian who died of cancer just after achieving national fame for something many thought was unthinkable.

"You will never be forgotten Jack." Photo by author.

The mass outpouring of mourning is linked to his recent political success.  He even claimed he was the next prime minister in waiting, which had some truth to it.  In this sense, his death is reminiscent of John Kennedy and especially his brother Robert Kennedy, politicians who died too young and before the apex of their political ascendancy.

Layton’s death has created a power vacuum in Ottawa, as the NDP and the Liberals are now led by interim leaders.  And although Stephen Harper has promised to listen to other parties, his majority government will rule during the next four years with a weakened opposition.

As the left regroups, however, it will be interesting to see how politicians and other Canadians use the memory of Jack Layton.  After John Kennedy’s death, President Lyndon Johnson invoked his predecessor to urge passage of the landmark US Civil Rights Act.  The political circumstances are very different today than 1960s America, and the odds are against Layton’s death serving as the spark to ignite a new progressive era in Canadian politics.  Yet the public outpouring over the past week showed that the politics of hope and compassion still arouse Canadians, even in this conservative era.

The place where Layton’s death may have the greatest impact is in Toronto municipal politics.  Before he emerged on the national stage, Layton was a prominent councillor during the 1980s and 1990s.  Marcus Gee of the Globe and Mail asserted that Layton’s death could make it more difficult for Mayor Rob Ford and his right-leaning allies to gut municipal services, especially ones that Layton helped to create, such as the Toronto Atmospheric Fund.

A campaign has started on Facebook to change the bland name of Yonge-Dundas Square to Jack Layton Square.  Even without such action, Layton’s mark on the city will remain in more subtle ways.  Thousands of Canadians hold personal memories of him.  “You gave me soup,” one individual wrote in chalk at Nathan Philips Square.

Bike locks in Toronto co-designed by Jack Layton. Photo by author.

Perhaps the best symbol of Layton is the thousands of Post and Ring (or “popsicle”-style) bike locks that dot Toronto.  An ardent advocate of cyclist issues during his years at City Hall, he pushed for and even helped design the locks.  Artists have begun to colour abandoned, locked bikes as public art.  A bike painted NDP orange and attached to one of Jack’s locks seems like one fitting way to commemorate a politician who fought to improve the everyday lives of ordinary Canadians.

Toronto Public Library is pleased to announce the 2011 History Matters series.

This year these lectures focus on two themes—labour and environmental history in the Toronto area and beyond. Part of TPL’s Thought Exchange programming, these lively talks will give the public an opportunity to connect with working historians and discover some of the many and surprising ways in which the past shapes the present.

The series has been curated by Dr. Lisa Rumiel, SSHRC Post Doctoral Fellow at McMaster University. Dr. Rumiel is also the Book Review Editor for Canadian Bulletin of Medical History. We are especially grateful for the generous grant provided by The History Education Network (THEN/Hier), which has made the series possible.

Spadina Sweatshops: Jews and Gender in Toronto’s Labour Movement, 1900-1939
Ruth Frager (Dept. of History, McMaster)
Wed. Sept. 14, 7 pm
Lillian H. Smith Branch
239 College Street 416-393-7746

Three Mile Island to Bhopal: the Life and Work of Environmental Activist Rosalie Bertell
Lisa Rumiel (McMaster University)
Thurs. Sept. 29, 7 pm
Parkdale Branch
1303 Queen Street West 416-393-7686

Imagined Futures for the Lower Don: A History of Big Ideas for a Small River
Jennifer Bonnell (University of Guelph)
Wed. Oct. 12, 7 pm
Riverdale Branch
370 Broadview Ave. 416-393-7720

The Making of Dufferin-St. Clair: 1900-1929
Richard Harris (McMaster University)
Thurs. Oct. 20, 7 pm
Dufferin St. Clair Branch
1625 Dufferin Street 416-393-7712

Labour on the March: 150 Years of Labour Parades in Toronto
Craig Heron (York University)
Thurs. Oct 27, 7 pm
Beeton Auditorium, Toronto Reference Library
789 Yonge Street 416-395-5577

Learning About e. coli From Walkerton
Joy Parr (University of Western Ontario)
Wed Nov. 2 , 2 pm
Northern District Branch
40 Orchard View Blvd. 416-393-7610

Building Postwar Toronto: When Planning and Politics Collide
Stephen Bocking (Trent University)
Mon. Nov. 7, 7 pm
Annette Branch
145 Annette Street 416-393-7692

Producing History in an Auto Town: Oshawa After World War II
Christine McLaughlin (York University)
Wed., Nov. 16, 6:30 pm
Pape/Danforth Branch
701 Pape Ave. 416-393-7727

Note: talks from the 2010 Toronto Public Library History Matters lecture series are available for download in our podcast section.  ActiveHistory.ca hopes to post all the upcoming Fall 2011 talks as podcasts too.

I recently purchased an Apple iPhone, so that means I now enjoy texting, web browsing on the go and, of course, a higher monthly cell phone bill.  But I’m also able to use a number of great apps that relate to history.

An app (short for “application”) is essentially a computer program for a smartphone.  Apps are often created by third-party developers who combine different sources of digital information to create a new program.  Apps are usually free or cost a few dollars.

The most popular history-related apps are quiz games or “on this day” calendars.  Hey, who doesn’t like to be tested on the date of Lincoln’s assassination?  Yet there are greater prospects for historical apps, since they have the ability to integrate texts, images, and other data from (and about) the past with the mobility of smartphone technology.

One new app that does just that is Zeitag TO (free from iTunes).  It allows users to “see Toronto in another dimension” through over 500 historic photographs that are tagged to a map.  When moving across the city, you can use the program to see what areas looked like in the past, going back to the nineteenth century. It also has a twitter account, which informs users of recent images added to the app map.

Screen shots of Zeitag TO from iTunes

Zeitag TO was developed by Gary Blakeley, and plans are underway for other cities.  But Blakeley also hopes the app can also be expanded to include more than just images.  In particular, Zeitag TO could benefit from more historical context.  It’s fascinating to see which buildings framed a city intersection a century ago, but users want to know more about these buildings, the people who passed by them, and the conditions that led to their existence.  Blakeley hopes that historians will help.

Probably the best way to start is with those who use the app.  People who have downloaded Zeitag TO have asked if they can upload their own images to create a larger photo archive.  Even better would be if users could supplement photos by uploading other forms of data, including their own personal memories of locations across the city.

Apps like Zeitag TO offer great possibilities to incorporate heritage with physical spaces.  One way to get context and more content on Zeitag TO would be to sync the app with the hundreds of commemorative plaques that already dot the city’s landscape.  Thanks to Alan L. Brown’s website, the texts of these plaques are digitized.  And Heritage Toronto has already geotagged its plaques (along with its archaeological digs, museums, and heritage walks).

“We don’t want the city covered in bronze – there are various platforms to bring information to the public.  This way, you can tell as many stories as you want,” Blakeley recently said.  Physical plaques serve a purpose, especially for those without smartphones.  But apps on iPhones and other devices offer the ability to expand the number of (virtual) plaques, and what a plaque can do.

Developers are also beginning to integrate what’s known as “augmented reality development platforms” (or AR) into history-minded apps.  These platforms, like Wikitude and Layar, allow people to use the cameras in their smartphone to see what’s in front of them with added layers of text and images.

Historical Landscapes of the Chaudiere: Augmented Reality Apps for Environmental Histories, currently in development, will use AR to translate an existing walking tour of Ottawa created by graduate students in the Public History program at Carleton University to one you can do with your smartphone.   The project, funded by the Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE), will “demonstrate how the very direct relationships between geographical ‘mappings’ of heritage and place-based mobile computing privileges narratives of environmental history and will provide a model for using this technology in other landscapes.”  Exciting stuff.

Screen shots of Today's Document from iTunes

Archives and libraries are starting to take advantage of apps to make their collections more accessible – and more mobile.   Today’s Document, (free from iTunes) for example, is an app that features a historical document for each day of the year from the US National Archives.  Apps that use digitized materials allow primary documents housed in archival storage to come alive with the spatial tools of mobile technology.  The City of Toronto Archives provided many of the photos for Zeitag TO, but adding other kinds of sources from its collection would be another way to add content to the app.

Historians are also beginning to use apps for communication.  Another NiCHE-funded project in the making is the EH App Project, led by Sean Kheraj and Jim Clifford.  They are developing an app that aims to collect and disseminate news, blogs, podcasts, and other information that relate to Canada’s environmental history.

“As scholarly communication changes, historical researchers in environmental history and other fields have been exploring a variety of forms of online digital media to disseminate research findings and communicate and engage with one another,” notes Kheraj. “The growth of mobile internet use suggests promising new ground for scholars looking to reach audiences in new ways.”   They are interested to know what features historians want in such an app.  If you have ideas, you can contact Sean on his website or through Twitter.

Smartphones apps can be more than just games (don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against Angry Birds).  As more and more historical texts, images, and other media become digitized, the future of the past on smartphones seems promising.

Do you know of other smartphone apps that the Active History community should know about?  If so, please leave a comment!