Conference Poster

The conference Looking Back, Moving Forward: War Resisters in North America took place at Steelworkers Hall in Toronto, Ontario, on Friday September 23 and Saturday September 24, 2011. The gathering addressed the plight of American war resisters who fled to Canada from 2004 to the present by providing a historical context for the roots of war resistance in North America. The conference also demanded action on the part of the Government of Canada to respect immigration and refugee law in Canada by rescinding Operational Bulletin 202 and to grant sanctuary to all American war resisters who fled to Canada during the “war on terror”. “This is of more than historical interest,” said Tom Riley, a Vietnam War resister and activist in the War Resisters Support Campaign. “It’s about learning from the past so we can support resistance today and in the future.”

The purpose of the conference was to offer public education about an aspect of North American history – cross-border migration during times of conflict and war – that is increasingly under attack in Canadian political circles in the early decades of the twenty-first century. The conference deconstructed the role of citizenship, civil disobedience, and conscientious objection during times of war. Moreover, we tried to illuminate the relationship between the Canadian and the United States governments during times of war and what this means for the twenty-first century.

We did this from the vantage point of those who have resisted wars: the veterans, the draft resisters, the family members of resisters, and support campaigners.  There have been other gatherings in 2006 and 2010 and we wanted to keep the cross-border dialogue going. Politicians and pundits try to score points with the public by making fancy statements of indignation towards these, in Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney’s own words, “bogus refugees”.

War Resisters June 2008. Photo: WRSC

We provided a space for war resisters to tell their own stories and for Iraq war resisters a chance to tell the public what information the Immigration and Refugee Board refused to hear up until very recently with consecutive appeals court victories for Dean Walcott and Chris Vassey.

Since January 2004 and the arrival of Jeremy Hinzman – who came to Canada as a conscientious objector to the war in Iraq – the War Resisters Support Campaign has supported hundreds of American war resisters and has mobilized public opinion to support these war resisters (64 percent in 2008, Angus Reid) who refused to participate in the illegal and immoral war in Iraq. “So long as they have wars, there are going to be war resisters,” said Frank Showler, a conscientious objector to the Second World War. “That is the continued importance of this advocacy work.”

Panel Discussions

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The conference featured a variety of speakers – such as Iraq War veterans, war resisters from World War Two to the ‘war on ‘terror’, lawyers, human rights activists, and academics– on five panel discussions. There were also information booths, letter writing campaigns, and a continued determination to see the granting of some kind of sanctuary to American war resisters.

Friday 23 September 2011

Resisting Wars from WWII to ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’

The first panel discussion – “Resisting Wars from WWII to ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’” featured Frank Showler, conscientious objector during World War Two; Lee Zaslofsky, military deserter from the Vietnam War; Bruce Beyer,  draft resister and member of the Buffalo Nine; Carl Mirra, Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm conscientious objector; and Jamine Aponte, war resister from Operation Iraq Freedom. The panel was moderated by Luke Stewart of Historians Against the War.

This panel discussion was design in order to demonstrate that there is a history of resisting war in both Canada and the United States.

Saturday 24 September 2011

Veteran Testimony

L-R: Michelle Robidoux, Chuck Wiley, Dean Walcott, Kim Rivera. Photo: Alex Lisman

This panel featured veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom, including: Chuck Wiley, Dean Walcott, and Kimberly Rivera. By offering firsthand accounts by the war resisters themselves, we can gain a better understanding of how to stop future wars by educating the public about the importance of soldiers’ experiences and their decisions to stop participating in particular wars. Listening to the soldiers’ stories highlights the importance of solidarity work and building support structures. The panel was moderated by Michelle Robidoux of the War Resisters Support Campaign.

War Crimes and the Law of Conscientious Objection:
A North American Context

L-R: Lee Zaslofsky, Staughton Lynd, Michael Mandel, Jeremy Hinzman. Photo: James Swarts

This panel featured Staughton Lynd, radical historian and lawyer from the United States; Jeremy Hinzman, conscientious objector from Operation Iraqi Freedom and first war resister to come to Canada in January 2004; and Michael Mandel, international lawyer and professor at Osgoode Hall law school at York Unviersity. The panel discusses the law of conscientious objection in the United States and how Canada has shifted from a war resister haven during the Vietnam War to a war resister prosecutor in the fabled “war on terror”. The panel was moderated by Lee Zaslofsky of the War Resisters Support Campaign.

War Resistance and Canadian Immigration and Refugee Policy

L-R: Patricia Molloy, Alyssa Manning, Gloria Nafzinger, S.K. Hussan. Photo: James Swarts

This panel featured Alyssa Manning, war resister lawyer from Parkdale Community Legal Services; Gloria Nafzinger, refugee coordinator with Amnesty International – Canada; and S.K. Hussan from No One Is Illegal – Toronto.  The panel discusses the implications of not just war resisters from the United States, but those seeking refuge from wars and the 21st century’s humanitarian struggles. This panel discussed government policy, the courts, deportation, and Canada’s downward slide in international humanitarian efforts and what we can do about it. The panel was moderated by Patricia Molloy of the War Resisters Support Campaign.

Building  a North American Antiwar Movement

Photo: James Swarts

The final panel discussion featured Michelle Robidoux of the War Resisters Support Campaign and Sid Lacombe of the Canadian Peace Alliance (speakers were unfortunately unable to make it from Afghans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out). The panel discussed the history of the Canadian antiwar movement and the cross-border relationships with United States peace groups and how to move forward in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The panel was moderated by Jesse McLaren of the War Resisters Support Campaign.

The gathering was able to raise $1422.02 for the War Resisters Support Campaign which will go towards continued legal support as well as to other forms of support the Campaign is able to provide.

The gathering was endorsed by: the War Resisters Support Campaign, Historians Against the War, Christian Peacemaker Teams – Canada, the Canadian Friends Service Committee (Quakers), the Canadian Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers Toronto Area Council, activehistory.ca, the Canadian Peace Alliance, the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, Afghans for Peace, Conscience Canada, No One Is Illegal – Toronto, WPIRG, OPIRG-Toronto, Amnesty International, Military Families Speak Out, and OPIRG-York.

Luke Stewart is a member of Historians Against the War and is a Ph.D. Candidate in history at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Stewart was the main organizer of the conference.

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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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Canadian history section of Chapters bookstore, North London, Ontario, May 2010.

ActiveHistory.ca is happy to announce its first paper of 2012: “A Polyphony of Synthesizers: Why Every Historian of Canada Should Write a History of Canada,” by Alan MacEachern.

Here is Alan’s introductory blurb:

The following was my contribution to a 2010 Canadian Historical Association roundtable, “So What IS the Story? Exploring Fragmentation and Synthesis in Current Canadian Historiography.” In it, I tried to a) graphically illustrate the marginalization of Canadian historical scholarship, b) argue why demography is likely only to make this problem worse, and c) suggest a response. All in under 1400 words. As far as I know, only one person was at all convinced, let alone inspired, by my presentation: me. It got me thinking about how one might go about writing a history of Canada that would necessarily cover the entire country from the beginning to the 21^st century, that would treat Canada in global terms, and that would be relevant. Last month, I published a very, very early outline of such a history, “A Little Essay on Big.” In an uncharacteristic fit of confidence, I’ve dusted off my presentation and asked ActiveHistory.ca if they’d like it, largely unchanged. I welcome your thoughts.

You can read Alan’s paper here.

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Gate of former GM North Plant site in Oshawa

“Sam McLaughlin’s name continues to loom large over the city of Oshawa.  But the stories of working people offer alternate versions of history.  Spaces in the city ought to be made for commemorating and remembering these stories,” historian Christine McLaughlin (no relation to Sam) recently argued during her talk at a local library in Toronto.  McLaughlin’s presentation, “Producing History in an Auto Town: Oshawa After World War II,” explored the “highly political process” of how people have made and understood the historical memory of General Motors in Oshawa. 

McLaughlin’s talk is available here for audio download.

The presentation was the last talk of the 2011 History Matters lecture series, which gave 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 focused on two themes: labour and environmental history.  Podcasts from other talks from the series can be found here.

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Photo Credit: http://www.eastmarket.com/smash/honour_roll.htm

The failed campaign to “Save the Memorial Library” (STML) at Mount Allison University is a fascinating study of the importance – or, lack thereof – of history in contemporary Canadian culture. For the better part of the past nine months, a small but determined group worked to stave off the demolition of Mount A’s largely unused Memorial Library building. The Library was built in the 1920s to commemorate World War I dead but has not been used as a Library for at least a generation. The campaign organized an on-line petition, wrote a never-ending stream of letters to the editor, and even urged students to make a human chain around the building to protect it. My aim is not to wade post hoc into the merits of this campaign. Instead, my goal is to look at the STML controversy from perspective of “active history”: what does this debate over the Library tell us about history and historical culture in Canada today? What can those of us interested in “active history” — the dynamics of history in contemporary life — learn from this contentious issue? Clearly, I can’t address this entire issue in one short blog, but I will suggest that there are several matters to which we should pay attention. 

First, those interested in active history might note that history has been both omni-present and strangely absent in this controversy. The STML campaigners argued that Library was a “cenotaph” (a war memorial), that it was architecturally important, that old buildings should be preserved because they are particularly attractive, that it was a site of memory, that it is an ethical trust to preserve memorials, and that those favouring destruction are not connected to local history or culture. To sustain their case, the STML campaign referred not simply to memory but to local pride and ethics: the living had a moral responsibility to remember the dead. This point was reinforced with reference to archival sources that supposedly provided irrefutable proof of their case. In short, STML was about history and how history should be honoured and respected. The level of emotion it engendered demonstrates how intense debates about history can become.

Yet, history was also completely absent. I am not faulting anyone, but making an observation. To the best of my knowledge, not a single professional historian was interviewed for a Memorial Library news story. The STML campaign did not ask a single professional historian to assess their case (or, help them make it); no trained architectural historians were asked about the value of the building; nor was any historian asked about the use of archival evidence. In short, the STML campaign did not feel that they needed historians to make an argument about history, conduct historical research, weigh archival evidence, or assess the historical value of architecture.

Nor was the STML campaign alone in ignoring professional historians. It seems that the wider community didn’t feel the need for historians, or even (at times) for history. The STML campaign is the work of a relatively small group of intensely committed people. The degree to which the university community engaged this issue is a matter of debate. One example: the student body (despite urging from activists) ignored the issue. In a recent issue of The Argosy, a student leader noted that not a single student had asked the student council to take a stand, one way or another. A court case seeking an injunction did not involve any historians as witnesses; nor, from what I understand, did the provincial minister who denied an application that would have converted the Memorial Library to a heritage site.

This might not lead to particularly positive conclusions about the relevance of professional historians, but it is also true that few historians seemed particularly interested in wading into this controversy. Mea culpa. Historians were neglected but they also opted out. Am I odd in thinking that people who have devoted their professional lives to the study of the past and its meanings had nothing to offer? The STML controversy demonstrated an interesting characteristic of contemporary historical culture: it does not seem to need or want contributions from historians while historians don’t seem particularly interested in engaging at least some historical issues.

For me, the role of historians is not to arbitrate historical significance, but I do think that an opportunity to engage the meaning of the past has been missed. Engaging this issue carries a risk because historians needed to confront the different sides with tough questions about the complexity of the past, the character of war and its effects on Canadian society, and how and why people die and kill in the name of the greater good. For example, the STML campaign mobilized a war narrative that was shockingly simplistic and, according to the best scholarship we have on WW I, inaccurate. The STML narrative never moved beyond a “Coach’s Corner” Cherryesque discourse. All dead “paid the ultimate sacrifice” and “gave their lives for us.” The politics and ideology of World War I and its effects on Canada were never discussed.

Effectively engaging this issue required making people uncomfortable by disrupting cherished storylines (whether about sacrifice or archival evidence). It seems to me that the historians (again, mea culpa) who could have engaged this issue shied away for precisely this reason. Perhaps that is the most important lesson to learn: an active history will not necessarily earn historians any brownie points. Active history requires courage because it may make historians unpopular. If we want to contribute a new relevance for history, however, this may be a price we need to pay.

Andrew Nurse lives in Sackville NB and teaches Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University. His current research focuses on the history of participatory democracy and the history of arts activism in Canada. He can be reached at anurse [at] mta.ca.

Cover Image of Michael Pollan's Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (New York: Penguin Books, 2011).

by Ian Mosby

This month’s publication of a colourfully illustrated, revised edition of Michael Pollan’s 2009 bestseller, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, once again has me thinking about the role of historians in contemporary debates about the health and environmental impacts of our current industrial food system. As a historian of food and nutrition, I often find myself getting a bit squeamish whenever I hear anyone invoking the past to either defend or critique contemporary dietary practices. And Pollan, like other critics of the food industry, makes extensive use of history to guide his analysis of our current food choices.           

My first reaction when I read Pollan’s second rule ­– “Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” ­– was therefore immediately defensive. In part, this was based on my own reading of the often strange and wonderful recipes from the dozens of early- and mid-twentieth century cookbooks that were part of the research for my dissertation on the politics and culture of food and nutrition in Canada during the Second World War.

Arguably, for instance, most of us would have trouble recognizing mid-century Canadian food celebrity Kate Aitken’s 1945 recipe for “Green Salad” as something edible. With an ingredient list that includes gelatine, green food coloring, lemon rind, mayonnaise, chopped green pickles, and horseradish, this quivering green mass from Aitken’s Canadian Cook Book would be, to say the least, hard for most contemporary eaters to stomach. (I know from experience: I was recently left with a pretty much untouched salad after my 1940s food themed post-dissertation defense party.)

Kate Aitken’s 1945 recipe for Green salad from her Canadian Cook Book (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 2004), 224.

Kate Aitken's green salad (photo by author)

“Green Salad,” of course, is just the tip of the culinary iceberg. I could list dozens of other recipes that my great-grandmother might have read in cookbooks and magazines from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s that would seem alien to most of us in the early 2010s. I’m personally still not brave enough to try Mrs. Elmer Scott of Newington Ontario’s recipe for “Pork Fruit Cake” – which includes 1 lb of “salted fat pork, chopped fine” – from the 1941 Cornwall Standard Freeholder Cookbook.

In Pollan’s defense, he readily concedes that the rule doesn’t always work perfectly and he stresses that it’s main purpose is that avoid eating many of the industrial preservatives, flavour enhancers, stabilizers, and other food additives that have become the basis our modern food system since the 1940s. Pollan even adds an addendum that you could substitute your own great-grandmother if she was a “terrible cook or eater” for someone else’s great-grandmother – particularly if that person is Sicilian or French.

While it’s easy to quibble with the details of Pollan’s great-grandmother rule – pointing out, for instance, that something like Jell-O, one of the quintessentially modern, mass-produced convenience foods, was introduced in 1897 ­­– the rule itself nonetheless acts as a useful shorthand for Pollan’s broader point. Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, by and large, ate far less processed and heavily refined industrial foods than most of us currently do. The great-grandmother rule therefore provides a good place to start thinking about how our diets have changed over time. And, despite its faults, it’s probably much easier to wrap your head around than the confusing “servings” that form the basis of the contemporary Canada’s Food Guide  or the recently abandoned USDA Food Pyramid.

Pollan, of course, is not alone in pointing to the past for solutions to our contemporary problems. Whether it’s the current movements promoting the 100- mile diet, slow food, or the legalization of raw milk sales, food reformers often invoke the past as both a model and justification for changing contemporary practices. The same is also often true of the proponents of genetically modified foods, who point to the post-World War II green revolution and the history of famines and food shortages in the developing world to justify current drives to increase yields through the patenting of novel plants and animals. Even fad diets like the popular “paleo diet” often claim a certain level of legitimacy for their recommendations by invoking the supposed foodways of our ancestors.

In many ways, Pollan’s great-grandmother food rule and all of these broader attempts to use our knowledge of the past to deal with some of the most pressing contemporary issues is an extremely hopeful sign – despite the cringe inducing use of history by some, such as the “paleo diet” promoters. The general public and policy makers alike are, perhaps more than ever, looking to the past to explain our present predicament and to come up with viable solutions. This means that, not only can historians provide some important nuance and detail to these contemporary debates, but they can also help to encourage Canadians to engage more broadly with their past.

Ultimately, my own hope is that these kinds of calls to examine the diet of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers is accompanied by a growing interest, not just in how they ate, but in the role that food played in defining their lives and work, more broadly. While it is often easier to draw a direct line between the work of environmental and economic historians and problems with our contemporary food system, these kinds of invocations of our shared social and culinary history offer new outlets for other groups of historians to similarly engage with the general public.

In Canada, academic social and cultural historians, in particular, have been slow to meet this growing interest in food and culinary history. But the recent publication of an edited collection on Canadian food history from McGill-Queen’s University Press and a forthcoming collection from the University of Toronto Press – combined with a growing interest at a number of libraries and archives in cookbooks and other forms of culinary literature – are encouraging signs. Hopefully, by adding our voices to these contemporary debates over the future of food in Canada, professional social and cultural historians can find new audiences for our work and a more active (and activist) role in our communities.

Ian Mosby is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Guelph and studies the history of food and nutrition in Canada during the twentieth century

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

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

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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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For most professional historians the debate between ‘non-national’ social and cultural history and ‘national’ political and economic history has subsided.  In Canada, it reached its peak with the publishing of York University history professor J.L. Granatstein’s Who Killed Canadian History, but by the mid-2000s the debate had begun to abate as the principal figures concerned with the rising importance of social and cultural history began to retire.  “The battle has been won!” declared Christopher Dummitt in his provocative essay “After Inclusiveness.”  Citing a 2007 study in the American Historical Association’s magazine Perspectives, Dummitt observes that the three largest historiographical fields are now social, women’s, gender and cultural history.  For Dummitt and many other historians working in universities “the battle between social and political history has lost any of the intensity it once possessed.”

Last week’s article in Le Devoir suggests that this is a premature conclusion.  In Dummitt’s words: “the public is not with the professors.”  It is this disconnect on which the History Wars are being reignited.  The piece in Le Devoir is the most recent volley in a public political campaign to return to a narrowly focused vision of Canada’s (political and economic) past.  As Dummitt so clearly outlines, as the historical profession re-oriented and re-tooled, the public was left behind.  The chasm between the profession and the public has helped make the past a contested public space.

Canada’s Conservative government is leading the charge.  The first clear inklings of the government’s desire to shape Canadians’ understanding of their past was well laid out in the discussions following the release of the Discover Canada guide.  But the Conservative vision of Canada’s past has been building over the course of the decade.  In 2000, Jason Kenney, the minister under whom the Discover Canada guide was released, laid out the vision of his future government: “A country which does not know from whence it came,” Kenney stated, “is a country that has no direction for the future.”  The speech from which this line came makes direct reference to the History Wars’ terms of engagement as laid out in Who Killed Canadian History.  A decade later at a National Forum on Canadian History, Kenney was more explicit.  There he lamented that many Canadian historians place too much emphasis on social history, oppression and injustice in their work.  Stephen Harper was less direct but equally focused in a speech celebrating his five years as Prime Minister: “You cannot build a united country by burying and rewriting its history” – a subtle attack at the historians responsible for the historiographical shifts during the 1990s.  This was reiterated during the most recent election campaign when the Conservatives called for a restoration and renewal of Canada’s historical memory.  The clear implication in these statements is that the government is not satisfied with the current historical narrative.  In their view, it is critical for Canadians to return to a historiographical golden age.

Over the past five years, the arguments that fuelled the History Wars have continued in some of Canada’s most important corridors of power.  Despite a handful of laudable apologies (Residential Schools and the Chinese Head Tax), and recognizing Quebec as a nation, the Conservative government usually draws on (a narrow vision of) the past in order to edify The Nation or their party.  In 2009 the Prime Minister famously quipped that unlike so many other members of the G20, Canada has no history of colonialism.  Ignoring much of Canada’s past interaction with First Nations, he claimed that Canada “has all of the things that many people admire about the great powers but none of the things that threaten or bother them.”  More recently, the Prime Minister took aim at his predecessors, claiming to be the best travelled PM in our country’s history – a remark that was quickly corrected by the Liberal Party.  Most recently the addition of ‘royal’ to some components of the Canadian Forces – a move that has been condemned by historians on both sides of the History Wars – has been seen as an attempt to re-inscribe the monarchy into Canada’s past.

Rather than focusing on the factual merits of these statements, it is more important to emphasize the place this perspective seeks to occupy in the popular understanding of the past.   There is no room for an alternative narrative in this vision of the past.  From this perspective, Canada has only one uncomplicated past.  Framing Canadian history in this way means that the past cannot be questioned.  Whether intentional or not, this serves as an assault on critical engagement and it is an oversimplification of the work of professional historians.

Few (good) social and cultural historians ignore the political, economic, or national context in which their research is situated.  Many of the celebrated works in these fields demonstrate how these approaches are interconnected.  In adding these fields to historical practice, new stories – particularly related to women, First Nations, and immigrants – have emerged and become part of Canada’s popularly recognized past.  As Christopher Dummitt has emphasized, the resolution of the History Wars among professional historians has in fact helped lay the ground work – though not completely – for a re-invigorated revisiting of Canada’s political and economic history.

Despite a familiarity with the History Wars, though, few historians have engaged with its new political incarnation.  A handful have openly criticized the government’s depiction of the past in the Discover Canada guide (for a summary see our post on the guide or hear Ian McKay’s podcast), but for the most part the profession has been silent.  Last week’s article in Le Devoir demonstrates that the debate continues.  It is being fought in a different venue and requires a different set of tools than those used a decade ago.  But, in a profession with an increasing focus on public and community engagement, it is important for historians – on either side of the first History Wars debate – to enter into the fray.  The Conservative desire to restructure Canada’s past suggests the stakes have never been higher.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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