Local History

Ottawa House: Public History and Active History

March 19, 2012

By virtue of its very lack of polish, commitment to community artifacts, and desire to treat different social groups fairly, Ottawa House presents more than a frozen past. It is not perfect, but it shows an active past, where goods moved along a range of trade networks to reach destinations far from their starting points.

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Living History at New York’s Tenement Museum

March 5, 2012

By Jay Young I recently spent an extended weekend in New York City.  Along with the well-known sights, sounds and tastes of the Big Apple, I was excited to visit the Tenement Museum, a restored five-storey building at 97 Orchard Street that educates visitors about life in the Lower East Side during the late nineteenth [...]

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Active History on the Grand: Historic Gardens

February 27, 2012

This article provides examples of historic gardens and landscapes in Ontario.

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The Changing Place of Foxes on Prince Edward Island

February 9, 2012

by Ryan O’Connor I grew up on Prince Edward Island. As a youth I heard stories of the once-booming silver fox industry, which brought considerable wealth to the province in the early 1900s. While fox ranching has long since ceased, one need look no further than the provincial armorial bearings, adopted in 2002, for a [...]

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Sad, Empty Places? Marketing ‘Ghost Towns’ in Saskatchewan

January 19, 2012

by Merle Massie A new and fashionable trend in tourism is invading rural regions of western Canada. SUV crossovers, front windows obscured by maps and cameras, are driving down gravel backroads, sweeping around correction line curves and screeching to a stop when a wide-eyed fox creeps across to its den in the culvert. Are lazy [...]

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Active History on the Grand: Heritage Trees in Ontario

January 2, 2012

I think that I shall never see, A poem as lovely as a tree. – Sergeant Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) While many of us may be familiar with the designation of built heritage properties under the Ontario Heritage Act, recently municipalities have been using the Ontario Heritage Act to designate individual trees as heritage trees.  Municipalities [...]

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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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The Political Uses of Public Space: A Podcast of Craig Heron’s Talk on Labour Day Parades

November 28, 2011

Over the past few weeks, cities across Canada have evicted Occupy protesters from camping overnight in public parks.  Opinion remains divided over the tactics of the amorphous movement.  One lawyer recently defended the group by arguing in court that the occupation of Toronto’s St. James Park was a “physical manifestation of the exercise of … [...]

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Museum Closures, Heritage and Cultivating a Sense of Place in Toronto

November 21, 2011

If places have the power to shape our self-perception and how we situate ourselves in the world, as Basso and others have suggested, how has the uneven distribution of historical places influenced the culture and politics of Canada’s largest city?

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