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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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Canada's first prime minister a tweeter?

Since starting up in 2006, Twitter has quickly become one of the most popular forms of social media.  Twitter is a website used to broadcast text messages – known as “tweets” – in 140 characters or less.  It has over 200 million accounts, and its users write more than 65 million tweets a day.  Twitter provides an opportunity for organizations, companies, individuals, and websites (like ActiveHistory.ca) to get their message out to wider publics.

But living Canadians aren’t the only ones taking advantage of Twitter.  Dead Canadians of historical prominence are too.

During last fall’s Toronto mayoral race, the local media and the Twitterverse were a flutter over the tweets of William Lyon Mackenzie, known on Twitter as @rebelmayor.  Mackenzie is most widely remembered for leading the failed 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion, but he also served as Toronto’s first mayor in 1834.  According to his Twitter account, Mackenzie was “back & pissed & running for Toronto mayor in 2010.”

Throughout the 2010 election, @rebelmayor continually tweeted thoughts on the other (official) mayoral candidates with the mocking tone of a nineteenth-century colonial.  After hearing the victory of Rob Ford, he wrote, “Holy hell. It never occurred to me to install suicide barriers on penthouse [Mackenzie's apparent 2010 residence was a condo in swanky Yorkville]. Locked team in bunks. Sedated them. Hid muskets. Good Holy God,” followed by “Musket shot. Ho ye. Goodnight.”  His last tweet, written soon after the election, announced that his “iPhone battery [was] almost dead. Browns Line. Sherway Gardens. Mississauga border. Prius “tank” full. Westward ho. Goodbye Toronto. Again. XOXOXO.”

Mackenzie was publisher of the Colonial Advocate during the 1820s and 1830s. He used the newspaper – that dominant nineteenth-century media form – to rail against the Family Compact and advance his beliefs in democracy and liberalism.  So it’s not surprising that he would use Twitter to promote his political agenda.  Except that he died in 1861.

Days after the election, @rebelmayor revealed his true identity.  Turns out @rebelmayor wasn’t the real Mackenzie.  Rather, it was Shawn Micallef, avid tweeter (@shawnmicallef), author of Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto (2010), and senior editor of Spacing magazine.  When asked by the Globe and Mail what motivated him to take up the e-persona of Toronto’s first mayor, Micallef said that he “felt like William Lyon Mackenzie seemed to embody the angry electorate. It was like his time to come back was now. He could channel the anger of Torontonians, just as he did in 1837.”

All of Canada’s dead prime ministers also have Twitter accounts, from Sir John A. Macdonald (@PMJAMacdonald) to Pierre Trudeau (@PierreTrudeau or @P_Trudeau).  Predictably, banter between them heated up during the recent federal election, under the hashtag #deadPMattackads.

These former leaders comment on current political issues from their own perspective.  Following the recent announcement by Stephen Harper that embattled Conservative MP Bev Oda would continue to serve as Minister of International Cooperation, R.B. Bennett (@OlBonfire), Conservative prime minister from 1930 to 1935, tweeted: “Bev Oda is still in cabinet? Oh well, I kept Manion around, so who am I to judge” (Robert James Manion was Bennett’s Minister of Railways and Canals).  Mackenzie King (@wlmk) has taken a different approach, tweeting selections from his once private but now public diary.  He is followed by current Liberal MPs Justin Trudeau (@justinpjtrudeau) and Carolyn Bennett (@Carolyn_Bennett), themselves active tweeters.

Other prominent dead Canadian politicians use twitter: Sir George Cartier (@sirgeocartier); D’Arcy McGee (@Darcy_McGee); British Columbia’s second premier, Amor de Cosmos (@AmordeCosmos1).

Dead female politicians aren’t represented to a degree similar to men; then again, a lower ratio of women have served political office compared to men throughout Canadian history.  Nonetheless, Agnes Macphail, Canada’s first female MP, tweets famous quotes and facts from her life, under the name @AggyMac.

Some dead Canadians whose historical prominence came outside of politics also use Twitter.  Samuel de Champlain, seventeenth-century navigator and founder of New France, tweets under the username @Sam_D_Champlain – in French, of course.  It’s probably not surprising that Marshall McLuhan (@marshallmcluhan), media theorist and prophet of the electronic Global Village, uses Twitter to promote his own work.  Stephen Leacock (@Leacocklapses), a McGill political economist remembered more for his humour writing, is a very active tweeter who quotes from his own work and other thinkers.  But others, like Frederick Banting, Terry Fox, Billy Bishop, Sanford Fleming, and Lucy Maud Montgomery, haven’t picked up the Twitter habit.

What motivates these historical figures to use Twitter?  J.S. Woodsworth (@JSWoodsworthCCF), social activist and first leader of the CCF during the early 1930s, began to tweet when he noticed that the debate between dead political figures lacked a third-party perspective.  When I asked why he tweets, he responded that “[p]eople tend not to remember me but I made quite a contribution to Canada.”  He followed that he’s “more relevant now considering the results of #elexn41 [the recent federal election].”  Sir John A. gave a similar response: “Keeping history alive and relevant is my reason for tweeting. As a ‘man of the people’ this medium suits me….thanks for caring.”

Alright.  It’s a safe bet to assume that these dead individuals aren’t themselves doing the tweeting.  Instead, Twitter offers a unique and often entertaining way to garner interest in the country’s history, especially to younger, tweet-savvy Canadians.  In some ways, these Twitter accounts are the virtual counterpart of historical pageants and reenactments, as people today find those of the past – both “elites” and “ordinary people” – so captivating that they temporarily perform the assumed persona of these deceased individuals.  Yet J.S. Woodsworth’s reflections illustrate that this practice also has relevance to today’s political debates.  If Sir John A. has Twitter, why don’t you?

The recent coverage reminded me of an article on Michael Ignatieff in the November 2009 issue of Toronto Life. “The Man Who Would Be PM” noted the Conservative Party strategy of negatively depicting the Liberal leader with the epithet “cosmopolitan”, a frame that the Conservatives have continued in election ads that imply Ignatieff’s years outside the country signal a lack of pride in Canada.  The article’s author questioned why Ignatieff was “trying to play the ordinary Joe card”, and argued Iggy would be a more successful politician if he underlined his exceptionalism rather than his similarities to Canadians.  The article then asked: when did Canadian politicians begin to depict themselves as ordinary Canadians, not elite members of society? The question made me think of three moments in Canada’s political past.

John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, was critical of American-style republican democracy and favoured a political system based on British constitutional principles.  Macdonald’s push during Confederation debates for a Senate – an appointed upper house to serve as a check on the elected House of Commons – also illustrates his skepticism of democracy.  But power required ballots from the limited number of Canadians who possessed the vote, which meant that the Old Chieftan’s popularity had to depend on the support of those from lower economic standings.

“The Old Flag, The Old Policy, The Old Leader”, 1891, Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN no. 2834401

“The Old Flag, The Old Policy, The Old Leader” is an 1891 election campaign poster, often reproduced in history textbooks. The Old Flag refers to Macdonald’s support for Britain and Empire, the Old Policy means the Conservatives’ National Policy of railroad building, western expansion, and high tariffs to support manufacturing, and the Old Leader is, well, Macdonald (the election would be his last).  What jumps out most from the poster, however, is the way in which Macdonald is literally being supported by a farmer and an industrial worker (probably a baker), respectively representing rural and urban interests. Although clothing clearly separates Macdonald’s bourgeois class from that of the two men, both farmer and worker share a physical connection to the Conservative leader.  Macdonald is depicted as an elite, but he is sustained by the common man.

When the term “cosmopolitan” is used to reference past Canadian prime ministers, Pierre Trudeau is probably the leader that comes first to mind.  Harvard educated, fluently bilingual, citizen of the world, Trudeau created a self-image that was rooted in his cosmopolitanism, which he successfully used to promote himself as the leader for a young, modern Canada of the late 1960s.  Yet Trudeau, a master of media, could also show himself to be down to earth.  On the campaign trail in 1968, Trudeau surprised reporters when he performed a backflip into a swimming pool (in fact, Larry Zolf claims he was the first prime minister photographed in a swimming pool).

Of course, moments in which politicians engage in the “ordinary” activities of Canadians can come back to hurt them.  Robert Stanfield, leader of the federal Progressive Conservatives during the late 1960s and 1970s, has been touted as “the greatest prime minister Canada never had.”  In terms of the campaign trail, he is often remembered for a costly spoof during the 1974 election, when he dropped a football pass during a game of catch as his campaign plane refueled in North Bay, Ontario.  The Globe and Mail put the fumble on its front page.  Some pundits claimed it lost Stanfield the election.

The nature of Canadian political campaigning has obviously changed over time, influenced by new media, new voting groups, a growing sense of popular sovereignty, and a number of other factors.  Yet our political leaders have long accented their commonality with ordinary Canadians.  This dynamic mirrors Canadian political culture, grounded partly in elitism and partly in democracy.