Tom Peace

Strengthening Community through Digitized Local History

December 13, 2010

The Black Creek Living History project is a great example of how community history can be told over the internet.

Remembering Francis: Sharing life and sharing the past

November 1, 2010

Over the past five years I have spent many Friday afternoons with Francis and the Club at L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill. Daybreak is a community that focuses on sharing life with people with different gifts and abilities; at its heart are men and women with intellectual disabilities. On Friday afternoons at the Club, a program for retirees, we often gather around the television screen to look at old community photographs. The members of the Club tell me stories about their past experiences, and I annotate the images in a digital database with the names of the people in the picture and the stories associated with them.

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Hands-on History: Are the archaeologists leading the way to a new mode of public engagement?

September 20, 2010

Are the archaeologists leading the way to a new mode of public engagement? A discussion and comparison of public archaeology and history.

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Historical Preservation in Comparative Perspective

July 26, 2010

Toronto’s lack of history, heritage and culture is a myth, but does it thrive in the city’s municipal structure?

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Remembering Oka

July 5, 2010

The twentieth anniversary of the Oka Crisis provides an opportunity to reflect on how Canada, Canadians and Aboriginal people engage with each other and each other’s past.

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Conversation, Contradiction and Conflict in ‘The Historical Present’

May 17, 2010

The practice of history, however, is not a zero sum game in which historians can isolate themselves from outside influences. The research, writing and teaching of academic, policy-oriented, and popular history are deeply political, social and ideological pursuits. Whether historical research is intended to ‘add value’ or ‘make an impact’ is only one component of many that shape historical perspective.

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Street History

April 5, 2010

Often the public face of history is seen in museums or government issued historical plaques; but important historical narratives also exist outside of these structures, and they often tell stories that otherwise remain obscure or hidden by more official ways of historical story telling. I call this way of sharing the past street history.

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Active History and learning from the early-Canadian past

March 1, 2010

As the university of Sussex restricts its history curriculum to post-1700 English history and post-1900 European history. How important is early-Canadian history to current issues facing Canadian society? And how does research on early-Canadian history compare with the study of later periods?

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History for Haiti

January 25, 2010

Today Foreign Ministers from the ‘Friends of Haiti Group’ are meeting with Jean-Max Bellerive in Montreal to discuss both the current situation in Haiti and longer term plans for the country’s stabilization and reconstruction. As they discuss Haiti’s future, it is important for them to also consider Haiti’s past.

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Broadening participation in the Academic Conference

December 14, 2009

Conflict often arises between how professional and non-professional historians interpret the past. Broader participation in academic conferences can help to resolve this. Three upcoming conferences in 2010 are discussed.

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