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The People’s Citizenship Guide

February 13, 2012

A short review of the People’s Citizenship Guide on the eve of its Winnipeg launch on February 13th 2012.

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OYSTERS, PISTACHIOS, AND AVOCADOES: A CURSORY GLANCE AT EATING FOR LOVE

February 8, 2012

Lubricating relationships with an eye to the past, historian Britt Luby looks at eating for love.

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Prospects for the Profession

January 25, 2012

Recently, the American Historical Association (AHA) wrapped up its annual meeting in Chicago. While I did not attend the conference, I followed a number of the posted videos, blogs and websites covering the annual event. Among the usual fare offered, this year’s conference also focused many of the discussions on the future of the history [...]

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Eating it up: historical perspectives, popular media, and food culture

January 23, 2012

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 [...]

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New Paper: Alan MacEachern’s “A Polyphony of Synthesizers: Why Every Historian of Canada Should Write a History of Canada”

January 11, 2012

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 [...]

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Turnpikes and Toll Roads in Perspective

November 30, 2011

by David Zylberberg Last week I presented some of my research at a conference in Boston and drove from Toronto in order to do so. I have not driven in the north-eastern United States in a few years and was quickly surprised to learn that I-90 for most of its length from Buffalo to Boston [...]

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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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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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Population Control and the Environment

November 15, 2011

by Ryan O’Connor On October 31st the United Nations announced the birth of the seven billionth person. Many stories were published on this event, but to me the most revealing was by David Suzuki, the venerable leader of Canada’s environmental movement. As Suzuki pointed out, the human population has increased three-fold during his lifetime. Nonetheless, [...]

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