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 [...]
Posts under ‘History in the News’
Contextualizing G20 Policing in Toronto
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.
The Moral Economy of the 2010 Toronto G20 Crowd?
A brief discussion of the G20 peaceful protests largely overlooked in the mainstream media, and the relevance of historian E.P. Thompson’s work to our times.
Waving the Flag in Distress
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 [...]
How far have we come? From Yellow Peril to the “Colour of Canada”
by Laura Madokoro 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 [...]
Preserving Health and Maintaining Illness: Petition to Save the Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine
By Jaipreet Virdi, IHPST University of Toronto 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 [...]
Remembering and Commemorating a Complicated Past
In this post, I look at controversies surrounding a statue of Nellie McClung, due to her early-20th century support of eugenics.
Volcanoes in European history: Exploring Environmental History Podcast
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 [...]
Active History, Hunt and Stoke
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 [...]
How Useful is the Library of Congress’ Twitter Archive?
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 [...]