Franklin Expedition, 1845

In 1845 the Franklin Expedition disembarked from coastal England in search of the Northwest Passage, but instead of achieving this goal, the voyage became the source of one of history’s most enduring stories that would continue to spark interest over 150 years later.

This summer Parks Canada has announced its intention to continue its search for the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror – the two lost ships of the Franklin Expedition – that it began in 2008.

In 1845, the Franklin Expedition, led by Sir John Franklin, set sail with a crew of 128 men and three years worth of provisions in the hopes of finding a Northwest Passage. After three years without news from the expedition, and at the behest of the British public, including Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane Franklin, the Royal Navy launched a rescue party in search of the missing explorers. In addition to the navy’s official parties, a number of other rescue parties set out, spurred on by interest and concern, as well as the promise of a £20,000 reward. By 1850, the first traces of the ill fated voyage were found off the coast of Beechey Island in the Eastern Arctic. Searchers found the remnants of a winter camp, along with the graves of three sailors. Still, the search for survivors or answers continued, and by 1854 explorer John Rae had collected the most conclusive proof of the expedition’s demise by gathering information form the local Inuit who told him of a large group of starving white men, as well as stories of cannibalism. The Inuit had also collected a number of artefacts from the expedition that were subsequently passed on to Rae. Rae transmitted these stories back to England and while his evidence was accepted, he was vilified by Lady Jane Franklin and her supporters for daring to suggest that British sailors could have taken part in actions as grim as cannibalism.

In 1857, Lady Jane Franklin commissioned a second expedition that located handwritten messages left by the Franklin crew under a pile of rocks. These messages reported that during the expedition both the Erebus and Terror had been locked in ice for over a year and a half and that twenty-four men had died during this time, including Sir John Franklin. Running out of provisions, the remaining crew members abandoned ship and began to trek south. No man survived this journey.

Ironically enough, while Franklin has been credited by some of his countrymen with finding the Northwest Passage, in truth, it was actually the various search parties that did far more to map the landscape of Canada’s Arctic.

In the 1980s interest in the Franklin Expedition was renewed and new technologies were used on discovered human remains to determine that the crew had likely died from a number of causes that may have included pneumonia, scurvy, tuberculosis, and lead poisoning, caused either by lead in the tinned food or in the ship’s water filtration system. Theories of cannibalism were also confirmed by examining blade cuts found on human bones. Despite these findings, the Terror and Erebus remain lost at sea. It is this mystery, along with the fate of the Investigator, a rescue ship that sank while trying to locate the Franklin Expedition that archaeologists working for Parks Canada hope to solve by using the latest in sonar technology alongside the oral traditions provided by the area’s Inuit.

While a historical mystery underscores this government funded venture, its timing is also no accident. This expedition comes at a time that Canada is reasserting its claims over the Far North. As global warming causes Arctic waterways to open up, there is increased interest within Canada, and globally, about the materials, including vast amounts of oil and minerals that may lie underneath these waters. In the years ahead this changing landscape will continue to be the cause of international interest and competing agendas of national governments, businesses and environmentalists. With this in mind the Canadian Government is reasserting its sovereignty in the area and investing heavily to chart these waters.

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South of Queen Street During CLC Protest (Picture by Author)

This post is a continuation of yesterday’s post by Christine McLaughlin, which looked at the moral economy of the G20 crowds.

As Sean Kheraj noted last week, many commentators seemed surprised about the police violence that gripped Toronto through the G20 weekend. Many of my contemporaries were surprised that Mayor David Miller and most of his counterparts (except for some subsequent rumblings from the provincial NDP and mayoral candidates) expressed their firm and complete support of police actions. “Figures,” many resignedly noted, “politicians always have to support the police.” (To be fair, it was a bit less surprising when the polling numbers were released) Well, no, they don’t, and a brief trip through Toronto’s 20th century past can show us two things: firstly, that police violence and arbitrary use of power has a long history in Toronto. More importantly, however, we see that citizen action can spur meaningful regulatory change. We can do something (for some hopefully helpful suggestions, along with a personal account of the G20, please scroll to the bottom of the post).

Let me preface this by noting that much of this is dedicated towards policing structures and some of their senior leadership. While there are certainly abuses by rank-and-file officers, many others are hard working, decent men and women – which I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with firsthand in my personal and professional life. The focus needs to be on structures rather than the individuals, although the latter certainly need to be held accountable.

Bainbridge was arrested by the Toronto police for his political beliefs, part of a broader strategy of silencing dissent throughout the war and interwar period. His son remembers that he even buried his copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, fearful of having anything seditious!

Sean Kheraj has documented some instances of police violence up until the turn of the 20th century; let’s add a few more vignettes to this tale (it will be far from exhaustive, I’m afraid, but hope it will give a bit of contextualization to the post-G20 discussion). Through the First World War, Toronto police were noted for their vigorous prosecution of individuals who held contradictory political views. In 1917, Toronto newspaper editor Isaac Bainbridge was raided by the Toronto police for possessing anti-conscription literature that dared suggest that the war was fought for territory rather than liberty, and that the ruling classes were responsible for the war as opposed to the working people of all countries. Through the 1930s, the Toronto police under former Brigadier General Denis Draper deployed its “Red Squad” to brutally suppress dissent and break up any public demonstrations that threatened the public order. Indeed, English would be the only allowed language at any radical public gathering (to ease police surveillance). Violators were arrested. Indeed, in a fascinating paper, Robert Oliver has argued that through the 1930s, “Spadina, Soho, Queen, Albert and Yonge streets became the new battlegrounds between the police and the Communists. While public meetings may have been crucial sites for party building, the suppression of them presented a greater propaganda opportunity.” [Robert Oliver, "Revolutionary Claims: Recalling the Politics of the Pavement in Toronto, 1928-1932," Great Lakes Geographer, 9 (2003)] For those of you not from Toronto, the G20 protests and events were centered around these very streets and intersections. The more times change, the more they stay the same.

Picket line violence in November 1973 at the Artistic Woodwork plant. (McMaster University Archives, Canadian Textile and Chemical Union collection, photo by Janice Acton)

It was not until the 1970s that serious calls appeared to challenge the power of Toronto’s police. At the 1973 Artistic Woodwork strike in North York, the Metropolitan Toronto police ended up arresting 108 picketers and strikers during an especially lengthy strike by an immigrant workforce supported by the broad Toronto New Left milieux. This saw widespread violence: police were brutally assaulting young men and women, removing their identification numbers, fabricating charges (most notably accusing 78-year-old temperance crusader and former CCF MPP William Temple of assaulting a police officer and of being publicly drunk, which stretched all credibility), and essentially rioting against a large picket line. Once a video of the violence became available to Toronto City Council, several councilors – led by future mayor Art Eggleton – actually called for the Metropolitan police to be recalled from the police line. Councillors such as Dan Heap, Dorothy Thomas and John Sewell also voiced their discomfort with police actions. Indeed, the police chief stormed out of one meeting after refusing to provide his surveillance tapes to the council. Not that things weren’t polarized even then, of course: North York City Council voted their support of the police just as Toronto Council voted their non-confidence. [This is the subject of my own research]

Police from Barrie marching off to arrest peaceful protestors moving from the courtyard of the TD Centre to the Novotel Hotel. One of the officers from the Barrie Police told us to "go home." We realized the irony about 30 seconds later, which in all honesty was probably a good thing.

Through the mid and late 1970s, attention increased towards police brutality, as discussed in Jeffrey Ian Ross’s Making News of Police Violence: A Comparative Study of Toronto and New York City. In October 1974, after a series of stories in the Globe and Mail, the province carried out a Royal Commission (the Morand Commission) on police brutality, which subsequently called for a complaints commissioner. On 26 August 1979, 35-year-old Jamaican immigrant Albert Johnson was shot dead by police. Conflicting police accounts and a coroners finding that the man was either crouching or kneeling when killed led some to speculate – as advanced by Johnson’s 9-year-old daughter – that police had forced him to kneel and shot him execution-style (as Christie Blatchford reported in the Toronto Star of 28 October 1980). Two constables were charged with manslaughter and acquitted, leading tto the formation of a defense committee, and Nathan Phillips Square became the site of many protests. This, as well as several other incidents, at least led to the creation of the Office of the Public Complaints Commissioner (OPCC) in 1981 and the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) in 1990; however flawed these institutions continue to be due to the use of former police investigators.

A moment of jarring contrast (Torontonians will note that these RCMP officers are pushing the crowd south, towards the G20 summit barrier).

Police brutality in Toronto is nothing new, nor is the use of police to suppress particular political messages. However, if there is any consolation, my impression is that many of the police excesses on the Sunday/Monday were motivated more by confusion and lack of effective leadership than any deliberate strategy of suppressing a particular message in favour of another (the case of the young Quebecer arrested on spurious ‘breach of the peace’ charges because she had an anarchist book and black clothing aside). Let’s hope that we can all learn from the recent and not-so-recent past, and help us all move forward as citizens. Only a small minority of police officers abuse their power – I’ve noticed that several have gone out of their way to be extremely polite lately – but let’s make sure they have the structures to enable them to do their jobs effectively, fairly, and constitutionally.

So with that, let me end with a call to action. Let’s help make history. During the G20 Summit and protests, I was witness to both the strange moments of seeing no police whatsoever (such as on Yonge street, hours after windows had been smashed) but also the over-policing of Sunday and Monday: random police ‘checkpoints’ (read: gaggles of police officers) set up at my local subway station in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood as well as at Queen’s Park station before a protest at police headquarters. Young men and women were zip-tied, searched, IDed and released without any charges evidently being leveled. What happened was inexcusable, and let this be one more voice adding to the calls for a public inquiry. Please consider donating to the Legal Defence Fund (set up through OPIRG York – the paypal is down but you can send a cheque the old fashioned way), affixing your name to a range of petitions, attend any local protests in your community, or by writing your MP or MPP (postage is free for the former). Even if you don’t believe in the specifics of G20 protests, it is my firm belief that we need to show that our rights of assembly and to be free from arbitrary detention need to be vigilantly defended at every turn. Again, as Torontonians in the past have demonstrated, we can make a difference – and we must.

These images were captured on 26 June 2010 at the G8 & G20 public rally and march. My thanks are due to Ed Dwyer of the Retirees' Chapter of CAW Local 222 and Ian Milligan for sharing photos with me.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a group of historians sought to rescue terms like “crowd,” “mob” and “riot” from the “condescension of posterity,” illustrating that crowd actions of the past were often more than the thoughtless acts of thugs and criminals.

The late British historian E.P. Thompson has undoubtedly made the greatest contribution here.  His 1971 “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” explores food riots in eighteenth-century England, suggesting there was indeed a well-thought purpose inspiring rioting English crowds.  Agitating against the free market ideology propagated in Adam Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations, rioting crowds sought to protect their “moral economy,” rooted in a tradition of paternalism, protection of the poor, and a just price, from the turn to a profit-driven economic system underway in England at the time.

Some readers may wonder what eighteenth-century food riots have to do with twenty-first-century Toronto and the G20?  Very much, I would suggest.  Having attended the public rally and march that took place before the G20 Summit on 26 June 2010 in Toronto, I had great difficulty reconciling the media coverage of this event with what I witnessed from my position in the crowd.

The mainstream media largely focused on the ‘violence’ of the day, often through images of attacks against corporate and police symbols perpetrated by a very small few of the thousands who turned out.  Terms like “mob,” “riot,” and “thugs” were deployed frequently, often associated with protesters, brimming with negative connotations linked to vandalism and violence.

Silenced in all of this has been the peaceful message that an overwhelming majority of people who turned out sought to convey.  What I found most incredible about this event was the way in which such a large group of people – estimates range between 10,000 and 25,000 – representing a wide array of diverse, and sometimes contradictory interests,  joined together in an enormous display of solidarity.  Among this broad coalition of interests were people from the Canadian Labour Congress, Ontario Federation of Labour, Council of Canadians, Canadian Federation of Students, Greenpeace, Oxfam, No One is Illegal, Make Poverty History, socialist, communist and anarchist groups, to name just a few, along with concerned citizens unaffiliated with any single group.  Carrying messages of peace, social justice, environmental responsibility, human and animal rights, agitating against gross profit and exploitation, it would be difficult to reduce this crowd to a single ‘moral economy.’

One activist, speaking with Steven D’Souza of the CBC, nonetheless tried.  While allowing that the crowd gathered expressed a number of diverse messages, he suggested that they were perhaps united in their belief that the G8 and G20 are undemocratic or illegitimate organizations, that decisions affecting the world ought to be made in a global forum, where more than the wealthiest few nations are welcome to participate – democracy, after all, should be about more than allowing voice from the richest few.  This forum already exists in the United Nations, or what some have termed the G192. 

The UN is often limited by budgetary constrictions, but as some critics point out, estimates of the security costs alone incurred by hosting the G8 and G20 for a few days in Ontario are less than half of the entire UN’s annual budget.  Despite this, the oft-posed question by many in the media was not whether these meetings should take place, but rather whether they should take place outside of urban centres, with ‘world leaders’ isolated from citizens.

Images of smashed windows and burning cars no doubt feed fears of the need for protection from “thugs” who perpetrate violence.  And violence has certainly been a prevalent theme in the coverage of this G20 Summit, whether it was used to describe acts against property or people – yet surely it is important to distinguish between violence against people versus acts of vandalism.

Leading up to the G20 protests, I was told many times that I was crazy to go, that there would be riots, that the army would be there, and people were going to be hurt or killed.  Hadn’t I heard how many cops would be on site, and the weapons they might deploy against the crowd?  Police were certainly showcasing a range of weapons for crowd control leading up to the Summits, and telling people to stay away.

But idealist that I am, I believed that I could trust in this crowd of protesters.  I believed that, like Thompson’s English crowds of the eighteenth century, they would not commit thoughtless acts of violence against their fellow people in a worthy tradition of popular protest.  And as it turned out, there were no serious injuries, although accusations of police brutality have certainly abounded in the aftermath of protests.

But my purpose here is not to focus on the violence of this event – there has been enough of that.  Instead, I’d like to share the main images I’ll take away from my G20 experience, those of thousands upon thousands of people gathered in peaceful protest, walking side-by-side in an incredible display of unity, harmony and festivity, calling for a fairer world.  And police pointing weapons at me, as early as when the peaceful protest passed the American consulate within minutes of leaving Queen’s Park.

But these weren’t the dominant images beamed across the world; only a few lines of many featured stories of the day were devoted to the large peaceful protest, setting up the ‘main’ story of riots, vandalism and violence.  Those who advocate more drastic measures say that peaceful protest doesn’t work, that something more sensational or extreme is required to carry a message – “propaganda of the deed,” so to speak.  Events as they were covered in the media during and after the G20 protests certainly seem to confirm that peaceful protest doesn’t work in this respect.

Meanwhile, the overwhelming focus on images of vandalism reinforce the collapsing of terms like “thug,” “riot,” and “protester,” associated with senseless acts on the part of a mindless “mob,” even though these images represent the actions of a very small minority.  The real “mob,” the great crowd of protesters, was indeed moved by thoughtful purposes – apparently just not those sensational enough to make headlines.

E.P. Thompson’s attempt to free the term “riot” from its negative connotations, to illustrate some of the positive aspects and purposes of popular protest, not only held resonance in eighteenth-century England; Thompson was also speaking to the political currents of twentieth-century England, believing that knowledge of the past could effect positive change in the present.  It seems we still have much to learn from him in twenty-first-century Canada.

Stay tuned for the next instalment in this series, where Ian Milligan will explore Toronto’s police presence.

Suggestions for further reading:

Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth, eds.  Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority

Bryan D. Palmer, E.P. Thompson: Objections and Oppositions

Bryan D. Palmer, The Making of E.P. Thompson: Marxism, Humanism, and History

E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class.

Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland, eds.  E.P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives

Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain

Today is the one-hundred and forty-third anniversary of Canada’s Confederation and the formal birth of the country’s federal political system.

And instead of waving the flag in a perfunctory fashion (yes, I know the Queen is visiting), I’d like to wave it in distress over the present dysfunction in our federal politics by briefly singling out four serious issues in the form of a short reading list.

This is not a review or even a formal examination of the sources mentioned by any means; rather, it is an attempt to share ideas and provoke debate on a day reserved for national reflection that is seldom used to actively further a collective discourse.

While some readers will perhaps favour more drastic structural and electoral changes, I would argue that it is worth considering a few subtle alterations before entertaining more ambitious renovations.

GOVERNOR GENERAL’S DISCLOSURE

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s suspension of Parliament in 2008 was widely perceived as an abuse of power. When he did it again the following year, it was considered an unprecedented breach of convention and provoked considerable protest across Canada.

Since both prorogations required the consent of Governor General Michaëlle Jean, many questioned her role in permitting them. However, as Lorne Sossin and Adam Dodek’s chapter in Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis (2009) details, the governor general is not obliged to “disclose” her reasoning and there is no public record of her conversation with Harper on either occasion.

Sossin and Dodek recommend adopting a fairly recent Australian precedent, whereby the governor general’s reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with a prime minister’s request (to suspend or dissolve parliament) are shared in a brief public letter. While this will not necessarily prevent similar abuses, it may empower the (unelected) governor general to make decisions without fear of incurring a contemporary reenactment of the so-called King/Byng Affair of 1925.

INCLUSIVE PARTY

Green Party leader Elizabeth May’s recent book, Losing Confidence (2009) highlights a number of parliamentary dysfunctions, including the fact that party leaders are selected almost exclusively by party members.

May suggests that parties should open their leadership elections to all Canadians, regardless of party affiliation. While any sitting MP (member of parliament) is technically able to conduct a leadership challenge if the caucus will entertain a vote — as Australia’s new prime minister, Julia Gillard did last week — May’s remedy takes into account the fact that parties do not generally tolerate such leadership challenges and will likely continue to hold extravagant leadership conventions outside of the caucus.

May also sees this as a means of encouraging more people to become involved in their political process.

LEAVE YOUR LEGACY OBSESSION BEHIND

Ron Graham’s Walrus (Jan/Feb 2010) essay, “The Stranger Within” follows the Liberal Party of Canada’s leadership struggle in the aftermath of Paul Martin Jr.’s fall, and his surprise succession by Stéphane Dion in 2006.

Graham explores how a handful of legacy-minded “kingmakers” have traditionally presided over party leader selection (excluding spontaneous selections like Dion). The most recent party brain-trust helped select Martin (himself the son of a three-time would-be Liberal leader), and handpicked Michael Ignatieff, the man who would replace Dion in 2008.

Dealing with legacy baggage is a problem that all parties encounter from time to time; however, it can seriously impair their ability to govern or hold the government to task in opposition.

The present success of the now united Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative Party left their seven year-old amalgamated offspring, the Conservative Party of Canada, largely free from the influence of former leaders and to campaign on a blank slate. In fact, it has let them openly quarrel with former leaders associated with the new party.

The merger between the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress in 1961 that created the New Democratic Party is similar example.

In short, Graham’s article works to suggest that voters should not reward parties looking to coast on past achievements or stale solutions and ideas.

CIVILITY, DAMMIT

Mark Kingwell’s Walrus (March 2010) essay, “The Shout Doctrine” laments the deficit of wit, ideas, and civility in exchanges between MPs. Both obstructionism and increasingly partisan attacks have triggered a “race to the bottom” at the expense of governance and discourse, he says.

While this is to be somewhat expected and does play a role in parliamentary history (Sir John A. Macdonald’s behaviour comes to mind), Kingwell suggests that the longer this persists, the more damage it does to our political fabric and only increases the number of alienated voters.

This problem is more difficult than most but maybe there’s something to be said for writing your MP about their apparent inability to behave or play well with others. They don’t have to agree but they should at least attempt to get along.

POINTS OF DEPARTURE

The main reason I wanted to share a brief reading list and highlight a few problems was to encourage readers to do the same.

So, what do you think and what have you been reading about our federal political woes?

One last thing: Canada Day (or Dominion Day, until 1982) means different things to different peoples. Some celebrate a lot, others a little, while others do not — perhaps in light of different perspectives or strained relationships and the historical events from which they proceed. That’s a part of Canada’s history, too.

Still, July first is, at the very least, the belated inauguration of summer (for a northern nation) and the arrival of a cherished long weekend. So, wherever you are today and whatever you happen to be doing, enjoy.

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On Wednesday 14 April, the United States of America’s Library of Congress (LOC) announced a deal with the popular social networking service, Twitter, to archive all public messages on the site right down to the first “tweet” from @jack (Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder) on 21 March 2006, at 3:50 PM.

Response to the news can generally be described as positive and set “Library of Congress” as a top trend for the remainder of the week. Considering that the site has evolved into one of the most efficient means of spreading information (even by Internet standards) such enthusiasm is understandable.

Still, the LOC’s initial announcement carried little description of the archive itself or the conditions of access. As hype matured into curiosity, the LOC released a short FAQ to follow-up on questions from the public two weeks later.

Let’s break it down:

Archive Description

• the archive was a gift
• it includes all public messages (but excludes “private account information” and “deleted tweets”)
• it excludes links or pictures (such as short URLs and location based services like Foursquare)
• tweets are made available to researchers approximately half a year after their publication

Archive Direction

• “…Library…[to work] with academic research communities to explore issues related to researcher access”
• “…serve as a helpful case study [in the development of] policies for research use…”
• “…Library…will not try to reproduce [Twitter's] functionality”
• “…interested in offering collections of tweets…” related to current events

Archive Access

The FAQ identifies access issues as a priority but does not elaborate on conditions. Shortly after its release Martha Anderson (director of the LOC’s National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program) told Randall Stross of the New York Times that “[t]he library plans to dole out its access…only to…qualified researchers” due to privacy concerns.

However, exactly what “qualifications” means is unclear. Hopefully the LOC will further clarify this and elaborate on their overall archive strategy as it develops over the coming months.

HOW USEFUL IS IT?

While it is perhaps too early to properly assess just how useful such an archive might be, it is difficult to dismiss its potential value to the historical community as a source of contemporary cultural commentary in future. It is thus less a question of whether or not researchers will use the archive but how.

Overall, the LOC’s interest indicates that the still infant networking service may indeed have a staying power beyond others within the same rapidly evolving medium with a notoriously fleeting attention span. This may set a powerful precedent and persuade us to reevaluate otherwise “everyday” content on the Internet as well as reflect on new roles for archives.

On the other hand, it would take very little for Twitter to incorporate a more advanced, research-ready option into their existing search. Some researchers are already using Twitter for their own purposes without a formal archive structure or support beyond the platform itself. This does not dismiss the significance of the LOC’s decision to build and maintain an archive at considerable expense and effort, but it does suggest that not all prospective researchers need it.

For now, the only safe conclusion here is that Twitter has become socially significant enough to merit an archive at a publicly funded institution — which is not only unprecedented for a four-year-old start-up but also somewhat prophetic for researchers and the historical community in general.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

What do you think about the LOC’s efforts to collect and collate messages on Twitter (now estimated at over 15 billion)?

Do you agree with the Washington Post‘s Monica Hesse that this an important example of history from the bottom up?

Are you a Twitter user?

Do you have any privacy concerns about your content? And if so, will the collection of public messages alter how you use the network?

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CBC radio recently announced that “the face of Canada is changing colour.” With all the news about global warming and melting ice cap, such a headline might make you think that something horrific had happened to the Canadian environment. You would be mistaken. Au contraire, the news was about the latest Canadian census results that reveal a greater number of “inter-racial’ marriages in Canada than ever before; up by 33.1% since the 2001 census.

As a product of an inter-racial relationship (what a clinical term!) myself, I was disturbed that colour was the manner in which Canada’s national news network chose to describe the latest census results. I remember far too easily the painful playground taunts of “banana, banana” because I was “yellow” on the outside and “white” on the outside.

Poster for 1965 film The Face of Fu Manchu (from Wikipedia)

Colour, as a means of describing people, is shorthand for all kinds of discriminatory attitudes.  At the beginning of the twentieth century the term “yellow peril” was used to attribute a wide variety of dangers to migration from Asia including loose morals that would corrupt society and cheap labour that would take away jobs from hard-working Canadians and Americans. The subtext was that Anglo-Saxon societies everywhere were going to be harmed by yellow hordes. Such imagery quickly captured the imaginations of editorial writers, filmmakers and the North American public at large, who used it to conjure up images of Attila Hun and masses of threatening, raging, invading Mongols. Fu Manchu, a fictional character, created by Sax Rohmer, came to embody the archetypal Chinese threat, with his evil laugh and sinister moustache.

This imagery of difference had major repercussions as it reinforced beliefs about the impossibility of assimilating Chinese migrants into North American society and contributed to the imposition of head tax legislation and outright exclusion from Canada in 1923. The CBC’s casual references to colour as a way of earmarking ethnicity ignore the long legacy of racism and discrimination that such usage encapsulates and perpetuates. With a little lesson in the geneaology of colour-coded racism, the CBC might have chosen a more appropriate term to describe the many celebrations of love that have been taking place in Canada. It is people who are getting married after all, not colours.

Laura Madokoro is a PhD candidate in history at the University of British Columbia.  She studies twentieth century global migration with a special focus on political refugees in Asia and the Commonwealth in the post-1945 period.

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Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine

On March 21, 2010, the United States Health Care Reform Bill passed in Capitol Hill, voting to provide medical coverage to millions of uninsured Americans. The New York Times article emphasized how Democrats hailed the votes as

“a historic advance in social justice, comparable to the establishment of Medicare and Social Security. They said the bill would also put pressure on rising health care costs and rein in federal budget deficits.”

The New York Times also captured various quotes from various Democrat Representatives, signifying the historical milestone of the bill:

“This is the Civil Rights Act of the 21^st Century” (Representative James E. Clybum of South Carolina)
“This isn’t radical reform, but it is major reform” (President Barack Obama)
The bill heralded “a new day in America” (Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio)

And so forth. The bottom line is this: it is clear that the Health Reform Bill was not only an important milestone in the history of the United States, but also raises significant political, social, economic, and cultural issues, and thus embodying these issues within the fabric of the nation.

10 days after the bill passed, the Wellcome Trust in London, England abruptly announced that intended to withdraw its funding from the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. The Center does not supply health care for its population but rather provides an institutional source for historians of medicine to evaluate the history of health and illness. In 2000 the Trust reviewed the history of medicine in the United Kingdom and explored the developments of medicine, its current status, and the role of the Center within the area. The Center has thus become an important staple in London and as a friend of mine so eloquently exclaimed, the Center has since then been considered as “the Mecca for historians of medicine.”

The Center has been committed to furthering the knowledge of medicine’s history in health and illness, not just in the United Kingdom, but also in other nations as well. The Center has produced and led by some of the most eminent historians of medicine, historians whose texts and articles built the bedrock of history of medicine courses. The late Roy Porter, wrote and edited over a hundred books and played a pivotal role in producing a new generation of social historians of medicine. Historians William Bynum, Vivian Nutton, Janet Browne, Christopher Lawrence and other wonderful scholars have worked and studied there—so has a great number of graduate students and postdocs. This is evident from the number of international scholars expressing their support against the closure.

Having already expressed worries to my fellow peers at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology about the place of history of medicine in HPS departments, this announcement came as a tremendous blow. I imagine its worse for those who risk losing their livelihoods with the closure, or those academics, like my supervisor, who were once trained at the Center and may lose a part of their (academic) identity. Yet, for me, this announcement places the future of the history of medicine on immensely shaky ground. To make matters worse, no reason has given for the closure—although fiscal considerations are probably the culprit— nor has a debate been held prior to the announcement.

I invite you all to sign the petition against the closure that is now online at:
www.petitiononline.com/WTCHOM/petition.html

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Nellie McClung 1910

In Saturday’s Globe and Mail, reporter Patrick White wrote a national story about how a Winnipeg human-rights lawyer, David Matas, is opposing plans to erect a statue of Nellie McClung – the well-known Canadian feminist and moral reformer, perhaps best known for being one of the ‘Famous Five‘ who fought the ‘Persons Case‘ – on the grounds of the Manitoba legislature:

“It’s misconceived,” he said. “It’s minimizing and putting aside some of the things she stood for.”

While Mr. Matas doesn’t deny Ms. McClung’s influential role in gaining the vote for Canadian women, he does take umbrage at her prominent support of the eugenics movement.

“It was the scientific basis of racism,” he said. “The whole eugenics movement is very problematic.”

White continues in his article to discuss some of the basic historic contours of eugenics in Canada, noting briefly that Tommy Douglas – the social democratic father of Medicare – was a proponent, and sterilization was made provincial policy in Alberta and British Columbia. There was a long and brutal history of eugenics in Canada, with patients being sterilized without their knowledge. For example, in Alberta, Leilani Muir received appendix surgery in 1959 and was sterilized without her knowledge, a fact that she discovered only years later when she was unable to conceive. It wasn’t until 1996 that she was able to achieve some justice, setting the path for many other victims to settle with the provincial government.

In my own teaching this year, I found eugenics a tricky subject to tackle.We had a great debate in our tutorial. The prevailing view was that eugenics was ‘fascist,’ thanks to an article we had read that week on Nazi reproductive policies. Thanks to the memory of the Second World War, this is the popular memory, and was instrumental in dismantling many forced sterilization and eugenics programs after it all came to light. Yet once I began bringing up the history of eugenics in Canada, from Tommy Douglas to Leilani Muir, one student gutsily argued that eugenics was ‘progressive’ for the time, with respects to public health, poverty, etc. It was an uncomfortable discussion, to be sure, when speaking of these devastating policies that had such an impact on people’s reproductive rights and privileges. But these are the same questions that must vex people as they ponder whether to honour somebody like Nellie McClung. At the time, how common were her views? Ought she to know that they were wrong?

The question of honouring public figures who held public views that today are beyond the pale is a fascinating one, and a common one for public historians and those seeking to honour past individuals. The most notable is the case of Louis Riel: convicted of treason in 1885 and executed, but today many historians and members of the public call for a posthumous pardon. Another significant moment of public honouring conflicting with past behaviour was that of Clara Brett Martin, Canada’s first female lawyer. Plans to name a government building after her were scuppered when her early-20th century anti-Semitic views came to light.

On the other hand, we do honour many historic figures despite their involvement in historical activities now seen as dubious or un-heroic. The city of Moncton itself is named after Robert Monckton, an integral figure in the story of the Acadian deportation and subsequent diaspora. Edward Cornwallis, commemorated with a statue in Halifax’s aptly-named Cornwallis Park, called for a bounty on Mi’kmaw natives in the mid-18th century. Should we be revisiting these statues, or honours?

What do you think? Should this weigh on officials and the public when we consider whether or not to erect another statue, or a plaque, or any form of official recognition? How should one respond to Matas, the seemingly principled human rights lawyer? How does one teach these subjects with an eye to historic sensitivity, but also a full and honest sense of how deleterious these policies were?

My thanks to Tom Peace and Christine McLaughlin, who provided some great examples when I was thinking out this question.

The Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud at 06:00 UTC on 17 April 2010. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Dr Jan Oosthoek has produced a podcast on the history of volcanoes in European history.  The podcast can be found here or you can subscribe on iTunes here.  This podcast and its supporting website are under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, so we have republished his text introducing the volcanoes podcast and the further readings lists below:

On 14 April 2010 the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted for a second time in two month after having been dormant for just under 200 years. The second eruption caused an ash plume that was ejected into the stratosphere and transported by the wind to Northwest Europe and all air traffic was shut down. As a result the eruption became a major news story. A secondary reason why the eruption became a major news story is the fact that volcanic ash clouds have not affected Europe in such an immediate way in living memory. But looking at the historical record of volcanic eruptions it becomes clear that these events have affected Europe and other parts of the world in significant ways and sometimes even altered the course of history. This extra edition of the Exploring Environmental History podcast considers a small sample of such volcanic event events, including the 536 AD dust veil event, the Black Death and the Laki eruption of 1783.

Resources and further reading
Nature as Historical Protagonist by Bruce M. S. Campbell
The Tawney Memorial Lecture 2008
Watch the lecture online

Gavin Schmidt, 536 AD and all that, RealClimate

L. B. Larsen et.al., “New ice core evidence for a volcanic cause of the A.D. 536 dust veil”, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 35, L04708, 5 PP., 2008.

Stephen Self, Icelandic eruptions, open2.net

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Photo credit David Rayner CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license

By David Zylberberg, PhD Candidate, York University

The United Kingdom is in the midst of an election campaign with a May 6 poll. Despite numerous suggestions that this is the ‘most important election in a generation’, the limited media coverage on this side of the Atlantic has tended to focus on which opposition leader invoked recent Canadian developments as a reason to vote for their party. There are many aspects of this election that should interest Canadians but I would like to take this opportunity to discuss one that is of particular importance to the Active History project, namely, the controversy over the Labour Party nomination in the constituency of Stoke-on-Trent Central.

Following the recent retirement of long-time MP Mark Fisher, the seat became vacant. Labour Party practice is to have interested candidates apply to the central party, who then send the constituency party a three person short list to vote on. Interest was high in representing the party in one of its safer seats and many applied. The resulting short list included the prominent historian Tristram Hunt, but none of the three nominees have any connection to the region. Hunt received the nomination on April 1, after which Gary Elsby, secretary of the Constituency Labour Party in Stoke-on-Trent Central, resigned from the party and is running as an independent. Similar things have happened in recent years, notably in 2005 in the South Wales constituency of Blaenau Gwent, which had been an even safer Labour seat. At that time the central party sent a short-list of three non-local women in the hopes of improving the gender balance of MPs, the local constituency got upset and has taken to returning independent socialists at every level of government since.

Stoke-on-Trent is an industrial city of 250,000 about halfway between Birmingham and Manchester (60-80km from each). The area first boomed in the 17th and 18th centuries as local deposits of clay and coal made it a leading centre of ceramics manufacturing with the conurbation still known as The Potteries. Recent decades have not been kind to the region as the coal, steel and ceramics industries have moved elsewhere, leaving 1 in 5 adults currently receiving out of work benefits and the city ranking in the bottom quintile for every measure of educational attainment (oneplace.direct.gov.uk). Politically, the area has a strong tradition of voting Labour with each of the three Stoke constituencies having returned Labour MPs in every election since they were created in 1950.

While there are many fascinating aspects to the Hunt controversy, I would like to discuss its implications for the Active History Project. Hunt is an intellectual historian of 19th century Britain, whose most important book is Building Jerusalem. In it he argues that the civic pride of leading citizens inspired them to use municipal governments to create impressive architecture and important infrastructure that made their cities better place to live. The book’s conclusion claims that contemporary Britain would be well served in learning from the prominence of municipal government and urban life in the late nineteenth century. He also has a regular column in The Guardian, where he uses the knowledge gained by historians to offer intelligent insights into contemporary politics. (a recent example) In this regard he has increased the level of public discourse and embodies what Active History seeks to do in Canada. The quality of his analysis and the vision offered for improving the country suggest that he will make a very good cabinet minister.

As historians, we spend our time researching, discussing and thinking about how past societies functioned. Along with the analytical skills developed in the process, our research leads to insights that make us well suited to various levels of elected office. However, this incident also demonstrates some potential pitfalls in our involvement. Local representation and an understanding of both the desires and specific problems of each constituency is an important element of the Westminster system. The early Labour Party was the embodiment of this, collecting subscriptions to pay elected coalminers and factory workers so that they could afford to leave work to represent their constituencies in the days before MPs received salaries. This has been lost in the past decades and there is some uncomfortable irony for a historian who champions civic pride to seek to represent a constituency to which he has absolutely no connection. Had he ran in his hometown of Cambridge or one of the East London constituencies near where he teaches, this problem could have been avoided. For historians generally, this incident raises questions about how to contribute to our communities without trampling on the agency of less-educated people that so many of us champion in our academic work.

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