By Jim Clifford

Three  years ago, in the lead up to the Canadian Historical Association meeting, Christine McLaughlin, Ian Milligan, Thomas Peace, Jay Young and I founded ActiveHistory.ca.  At the time we were all graduate students in the history department at York University. The website emerged out of the Active History symposium held in September 2008. Having budgeted to disseminate the conference proceedings, we considered publishing an academic book or a special issue of a journal. But these options, we thought, seemed counter to the public outreach goals of the symposium. Instead we decided to launch a website that embodied the Active History mission, instead of simply publishing some of the essays presented at the workshop (though, Ian Milligan also worked with Left History to publish a special issue).

We launched a website with a certain amount of trepidation, as the conference attendees did not show much enthusiasm for submitting blog posts either before or after the workshop and there were not too many examples in Canada of successful history websites (Christopher Moore and Andrew Smith being the major exceptions to that rule). While cleaning up some papers one day I stumbled on a flyer for a British website called HistoryandPolicy.org. I thought I had found a model for a successful academic website.

The early months in the ActiveHistory.ca archive reflect our orientation towards Papers similar to those published by History & Policy. We issued a call for papers and published three submissions through to the end of 2009. This approach attracted some web traffic, but as Chrisopher Moore quipped in September 2009, ActiveHistory.ca needed to be a little more active. In November the Canadian Government published a new Citizens Guide and spurred Thomas Peace to write a short reaction piece. During the days that followed we watched our visitor stats jump significantly and realized people were linking back to our website. This quickly ended our reluctance to embrace the “blog” format and in the months that followed we started posting weekly Monday contributions from the editorial collective. During this same time period we started to embrace social media and started Facebook and Twitter accounts for the website. These two steps contributed to the significant growth of the website in the months that followed.

In the two and a half years since the blog started in earnest the visitor stats have grown from a few hundred visits a month, to a couple of thousand and now more than ten thousand during our best months. Our authors include a large number of regular contributors, dozens of one-off authors and six members of the editorial collective. One of our ongoing challenges has been to spread beyond our base at York University in Toronto. While none of the founding editors are originally from Toronto,  it is the city where most of us still live and this leads to a lot of focus on Southern Ontario. Thankfully we continue to add contributors from across Canada and even a few posts from people living further afield. Moreover, the editorial collective now includes three historians at universities outside of Toronto, with Krista McCracken at Algoma University, Ian Milligan at Western University, and Thomas Peace at Dartmouth College. The paper section continues to fluctuate in terms of submissions, but some of the essays, including Gérard-François Dumont’s The Berlin Wall: Life, Death and the Spatial Heritage of Berlin, remain some of our most visited webpages.

In addition to the blog and papers section we have also developed a number of additional features on our site. There is a book review section managed with the help of David Weber and George Buri.  We have cultivated a series of partnerships with the Canadian Historical Association, the Mississauga Library System, The History and Education Network, and various departments of the City of Toronto. In the fall, we look forward to an expanded Podcast section and directing more attention to the papers section of the site.

After three years it came time to renew our hosting service and we are very grateful that the history department at York University and the Avie Bennett Historica-Dominion Institute Chair in Canadian History, also at York University, both made sustaining contributions.

We’re happy to announce that ActiveHistory.ca is getting a new look! Over the next few days, we will be implementing some major changes to our website. This process should take about a week or so, so things may be in some flux.

If you have any comments about our new site, such as any features that may have been moved during our migration, or things you’d love to see, please let us know below.

A reminder to our readers that you are all invited to the final lecture in the Mississauga Library System’s ‘History Minds’ series, co-hosted with ActiveHistory.ca. This talk will be on Thursday, May 12th at 7:30PM in Classroom 3 at the Mississauga Central Library (see below the cut for directions).

“Understanding Slavery Past and Present”
With Karlee Sapoznik, Co-Founder of the Alliance Against Modern Slavery.

Interest in contemporary slavery and human trafficking have increased dramatically over the last two decades. Ms. Karlee Sapoznik has expertise in slavery in all of its forms. Her research integrates the study of historical and contemporary slavery. Although slavery is now illegal around the world it is still widely practiced. Experts place the number of living modern slaves at 27 million, twice as many as the number of Africans enslaved during the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade. As Sapoznik argues, if we can better understand both the successes and the failures of past abolitionist movements, we may better understand this paradox. We might hope to change it.

All talks will be held at the Mississauga Central Library, Classroom 3 on the second floor from 7:30-9 PM on the second Thursday in March, April, and May. The Central Library is located at 301 Burnhamthorpe Rd. W in Mississauga, near the Square One shopping centre and the Civic Centre. Importantly, it’s near the Square One GO Terminal and the Mississauga Transit central terminal.

Professor Geoffrey Reaume of York University’s piece on the successful wall tours he has been running at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) appears on ActiveHistory.ca today. Professor Reaume’s piece previously appeared in the Active History theme issue of Left History and we are very happy to cross-publish it here.

The purpose of the wall tours described in this article is to remember the men and women asylum patients who built, lived, worked and died behind the last remaining structures that still exist on the grounds of the former Asylum for the Insane, Toronto. The tours first started with a conversation. In spring 2000, Heinz Klein, one of the organizers for the Psychiatric Survivor Pride Week events, and an activist whom I have known since 1993, asked me to give a talk about the history of people who lived in the Toronto Asylum for the upcoming annual event organized to celebrate the contributions of psychiatric survivors/consumers in our community.1 I was skeptical and said a lot of people had recently seen a play based on my research which did a better job than I could of speaking about patients’ lives. Heinz then suggested I could give a talk outside by the 19th century patient built wall at the present day Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), not far from where the play had been performed in April, 2000. As we continued to talk the idea of a wall tour came up, though I can’t remember who suggested it first. Instead of a stationary talk by the wall, the idea was to give talks all along the wall about patients’ lives where they lived. The wall would be the central site of multiple talks woven together by the common theme of describing a history of patients’ life and labour on this site. And so began the wall tours with the first one held on July 14, 2000, Mad Pride Day as it is now called. To my amazement and delight, about fifty people showed up for the first wall tour, a harbinger of things to come in the following years. [READ MORE]

ActiveHistory.ca and Left History are delighted to announce the launch of Left History‘s theme issue on Active Histories. We are also delighted to launch our sixth short paper on our website, “Disappointment, Nihilism, and Engagement: Some Thoughts on Active History” by York University SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow Stuart Henderson.

The table of contents for the full issue are below the cut. If you are interested in receiving a copy of the Active History theme issue, we are distributing FREE copies to our readership (quantities are limited, so we will be generally operating on a first-come-first-serve basis). Please e-mail info@activehistory.ca with your name, mailing address, and a brief two sentence rationale for why you’d like to receive the issue. We would then be happy to send it to you free of charge. For information on Left History or to express interest in subscribing, please e-mail lefthist@yorku.ca.

LEFT HISTORY 15.1 Table of Contents

WHAT IS ACTIVE HISTORY?

Jim Clifford, “What is Active History?”
Tom Peace, “The Call of Passive History.”
Joy Parr, “The Terms of Engagement: Elements from the Genealogy of Active History.”
Victoria Freeman, “What is Active History?”

REFLECTIONS ON ACTIVE HISTORY

Stuart Henderson, “Disappointment, Nihilism, and Engagement: Some Thoughts on Active History.”
Craig Heron, “Workers of the World, Give Me a Call!”
Karen Dearlove, “Community History, Active Historians and Activism.”
Tim Groves, “Historical Plaques: Images from the Missing Plaques Project.”

ARTICLES

Nick Witham, “Kolko and the Functions of Revisionist Historiography during the Reagan Era.”
Ian Hesketh, “Weapons of Another Kind: Henry Thomas Buckle and the Case of Thomas Pooley.”
Wendy Cheng, Laura Barraclough, and Laura Pulido, “Radicalising Teaching and Tourism: A People’s Guide as Active and Activist History.”

ACTIVE HISTORY LOOKING FORWARD

Geoffrey Reaume, “Psychiatric Patient Built Wall Tours at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Toronto, 2000 – 2010.”
Joel T. Helfrich, “On Being an Active Historian and the Usefulness of History: The Case of the Ongoing Struggle for dzi? nchaa si’an (Mount Graham).”

REVIEW ESSAYS

Bryan D. Palmer, “The Democratic Revolutionary: Reviving Lenin.”
Michelle A. Hamilton, “Canadians and their Pasts.”

PLUS TWENTY-FOUR BOOK REVIEWS.

A reminder to our readers that you are all invited to the inaugural lecture in the Mississauga Library System’s ‘History Minds’ series, co-hosted with ActiveHistory.ca. The first talk will be on Thursday, March 10th at 7:30PM in Classroom 3 at the Mississauga Central Library (see below the cut for directions).

“A Brief History of Canadian Utopias:  Is There a Canadian Utopian Tradition?”
With Professor Colin M. Coates.

Since the arrival of European settlers, various ethnic, religious and political groups have attempted to establish self-consciously utopian communities in different parts of the country.  This talk examines some examples of these utopian communities as well as some of the literary expressions of utopian literature related to Canada.  It assesses the range and coherence of utopian thought in Canada from the 17th century to the late 20th century.

All talks will be held at the Mississauga Central Library, Classroom 3 on the second floor from 7:30-9 PM on the second Thursday in March, April, and May. The Central Library is located at 301 Burnhamthorpe Rd. W in Mississauga, near the Square One shopping centre and the Civic Centre. Importantly, it’s near the Square One GO Terminal and the Mississauga Transit central terminal.

The ActiveHistory.ca team is looking for more contributors for our collaborative blog on how history and historians actively engage communities and contribute to current debates.  This blog has a growing readership – last month we had nearly 4,000 distinct visitors – and it provides potential contributors the opportunity to reach a wider audience. If you’re interested in contributing, please read more to find out what we’re looking for!

Our blog posts are normally in the realm of four to six hundred words, and we aim to have them written in an accessible, lively, and engaging style. We have posts on a variety of themes, including but not limited to:

- Does History Matter?
- Environmental Issues
- History and Everyday Life
- History in the News
- History on the Internet
- Local History
- Teaching History

Participants will be listed as “Contributing Editors” and are welcome to take a role in shaping the future direction and mandate of our web project. Our contributors range from engaged community members to faculty members to graduate students, and the more diverse the better! Participation may vary from a monthly post to a few posts a year.

We would like to find historians from a wide range of backgrounds and expertise in all periods and geographic regions of history.  We also hope to encourage participation from historians outside of academia, whether this is people with historical training who now work in another field or laypeople with a passion for history. Please feel free to forward and distribute widely.

If you are interested please contact us at info@activehistory.ca. We look forward to hearing from you!

Today, we feature our sixth book review by somebody from outside of academia of a book written by a professional historian. Amnesty International volunteer, activist and fieldworker Gord Barnes, from Regina, SK, reviews Ken Leyton-Brown’s The Practice of Execution in Canada. Please read the full review HERE.

As always, if you’re interested in reviewing a book for ActiveHistory.ca please send us an email at info (at) activehistory.ca.

Today we are publishing our fifth review by someone outside of academia of a book written by a professional historian. Public relations consultant and blogger, Kurt Heinrich, reviews English’s second bibliography of Trudeau. Read the full review HERE.

If you would like to review a book for ActiveHistory.ca please send us an email: info (at) activehistory.ca

We would like to extend an invitation to join the Mississauga Library System and ActiveHistory.ca as we feature a series of engaging history lectures. This is building on last year’s successful History Matters series with the Toronto Public Library and aims to continue and build an ongoing tradition of professional involvement with the broader community.

All talks will be held at the Mississauga Central Library, Classroom 3 on the second floor from 7:30-9 PM on the second Thursday in March, April, and May. The Central Library is located at 301 Burnhamthorpe Rd. W in Mississauga, near the Square One shopping centre and the Civic Centre. Importantly, it’s near the Square One GO Terminal and the Mississauga Transit central terminal.

Below the cut, talk descriptions and abstracts follow.

Thursday, March 10th
“A Brief History of Canadian Utopias:  Is There a Canadian Utopian Tradition?”
With Professor Colin M. Coates.

Since the arrival of European settlers, various ethnic, religious and political groups have attempted to establish self-consciously utopian communities in different parts of the country.  This talk examines some examples of these utopian communities as well as some of the literary expressions of utopian literature related to Canada.  It assesses the range and coherence of utopian thought in Canada from the 17th century to the late 20th century.

Thursday, April 14th
“From a Pastoral Wetland to an Industrial Wasteland, and Back Again? An Environmental History of the Lower Lea River Valley, the Site of the 2012 London Olympics.” [part of the pan-Canadian NiCHE Speakers' Series]
With Dr. Jim Clifford.

The Lower Lea Valley, currently undergoing a massive redevelopment project in perpetration for the next Summer Olympics, underwent a number of equally remarkable transformations as London’s heavy industry migrated to the city’s eastern periphery in the second half of the nineteenth century.  In this talk, Jim Clifford will explore some of the findings of his recently defended PhD dissertation on the environmental problems created by half a century of urban-industrial development and discuss some of the challenges this posed for redevelopment.

Thursday, May 12th
“Understanding Slavery Past and Present”
With Karlee Sapoznik, Co-Founder of the Alliance Against Modern Slavery.

Interest in contemporary slavery and human trafficking have increased dramatically over the last two decades. Ms. Karlee Sapoznik has expertise in slavery in all of its forms. Her research integrates the study of historical and contemporary slavery. Although slavery is now illegal around the world it is still widely practiced. Experts place the number of living modern slaves at 27 million, twice as many as the number of Africans enslaved during the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade.  As Sapoznik argues, if we can better understand both the successes and the failures of past abolitionist movements, we may better understand this paradox.  We might hope to change it.