Does History Matter?

New Podcast: Christine McLaughlin on General Motors, History Making, and Power in Oshawa, Ontario

December 15, 2011

“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. [...]

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The Memorial Library: History without Historians

December 14, 2011

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.

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Eating Like Our Great-Grandmothers: Food Rules and the Uses of Food History

November 24, 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 [...]

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A Town Called Asbestos: a NiCHE EHTV series by Jessica van Horssen

October 28, 2011

Over the next few Fridays, ActiveHistory.ca is re-posting a five part series of YouTube videos created for the Network in Canadian Environment & History’s EHTV. This week EHTV presents the first part of a fascinating history of Quebec asbestos by Dr. Jessica Van Horssen. For more than one hundred years, Quebecers have mined this unique [...]

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Family Ties: The Successes and Challenges of Genealogical Research

October 17, 2011

Trees are a common symbol for genealogy. Like lines of ancestry, trees contain many branches that are united through a common trunk but grow in their own direction. And like family history, we often only see the complexity of their roots when we start digging. In a previous post, I outlined strategies on conducting the research [...]

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The Return of the History Wars

October 11, 2011

Despite being declared over by many historians, the debates of the History Wars – where social and cultural history was pitted against political and economic history – have returned to public discourse in Canada.

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H-Net and Current Events

September 6, 2011

Last Wednesday I posted an essay by Dr. Patricia Daley that I first read on an H-Net Listserv, H- Urban. This is one of the hundreds of free email lists facilitated by the H-Net organization. Long before academic blogs, websites, and Twitter accounts, these H-Net lists were a key form of electronic communication among academic [...]

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My time in Hackney: Implications for youth

August 31, 2011

By Patricia Daley. [This article has already been posted on Pambazuka.org, OpenDemocracy.net and shared through the H-Urban email list. It was licenced on Pambazuka under Creative Commons, so we are reposting the full article here] I spent my teenage years on the Pembury Estate in Hackney – one of the locations of last week’s riots [...]

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Bringing history into current immigration debates…one post at a time!

August 17, 2011

As I write, I am supposed to be hard at work on the last chapters of my doctoral thesis… The final throes are not an attractive sight to behold. And the situation is made worse by the recent rhetoric on refugees, illegal aliens and war criminals in Canada. As someone studying the history of 20th [...]

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Podcast: An Environmental History of the Lower Lea River Valley, Site of the 2012 London Olympics

July 28, 2011

In this talk, Jim Clifford explored some of the findings of his PhD dissertation on the environmental problems created by half a century of urban-industrial development along the Lower Lea River Valley, and the challenges this history poses for redevelopment for the 2012 London Olympics.

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