“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.

Share/Save

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]

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 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.

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!

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

Share/Save

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.

Demolition of forty buildings in Brantford's downtown - courtesy of Kalvin Clark

If you’ve read my previous blogs, you’ll notice that I talk a lot about Brantford, Ontario.  Since completing my PhD in History from McMaster University I’ve been working as the Executive Director of the Canadian Industrial Heritage Centre (CIHC), a not-for-profit organization in Brantford dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Canadian industrial history and the establishment of a museum site in Brantford to do just that.  This experience has expanded my understanding of how local communities understand and experience history, and the challenges of being an active historian.

In my last post “History, Heritage and Municipal Elections,” I discussed how the issue of heritage preservation was becoming a topic of debate in the realm of municipal politics.  In Brantford the need for a municipal Heritage Master Plan entered the political landscape last summer.  At the annual general meeting of the CIHC in June 2010, I gave a public presentation describing various examples of the adaptive re-use of industrial buildings in the Grand River valley, providing several examples from nearby Cambridge, Ontario.  In 2008 Cambridge became only the third municipality in Ontario, after Toronto and Niagara Falls, to adopt a municipal Heritage Master Plan which provides guidelines for protecting, conserving and enhancing the city’s heritage resources.  Recently, the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals recognized Cambridge’s Heritage Master Plan with the 2010 Heritage Planning Award.

Since my talk last June, the idea of a Heritage Master Plan for the city of Brantford has had wide circulation.  Brantford the issue of heritage preservation came to the forefront in the wake of the demolition of forty buildings in the historic downtown core, many of which dated to pre-Confederation times.  Although the grass-roots movement to save these buildings failed, what emerged was a new Brantford chapter of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario, which was recently recognized with an award for its local advocacy.  Other grass-roots efforts paid off in Brantford when an independent investigation concluded that the municipal task force responsible for the expropriation and demolition of the forty buildings downtown, the so-called “South-Side Six,” violated the Municipal act by holding in-camera meetings and failing to give the public adequate notice of its activities. Brantford heritage advocates were also rewarded with the results of the October 25^th municipal election.   Of the “South-Side Six,” the five councilors plus the mayor who pushed through the expropriation and demolition of the buildings in the downtown, only two councilors were re-elected.  Brantford’s newly-elected mayor Chris Friel immediately spoke of his plans for a Heritage Master Plan and Heritage Trust for the city, as well as his support for the Canadian Industrial Heritage Centre museum.

While it’s been a tough year for those trying to preserve and promote heritage in Brantford, it is rewarding to see the dedication and activity of regular citizens driven by a desire to protect what’s left of Brantford’s physical reminders of its past.

Share/Save

It accurately distills the blind conspiracy between the exponential availability of high-speed Internet, the gradual decrease in the cost of personal computers, the rise of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and websites like Napster and its clones (built largely on BitTorrent protocols) and, of course, the generation of youth at the centre of it all.

This evolution in communications has changed consumer habits, challenged traditional media, and kindled still-raging debates about ethical use and legislative reform.

But most of all: it has given file-sharing a bad name.

This even extends to whistleblower sites like WikiLeaks — which was responsible for the unprecedented disclosure of approximately 90,000 United States military files on the War in Afghanistan on Sunday 25 July. Three newspapers (Der Spiegel, the Guardian, and the New York Times) were given advanced access to write an initial wave of articles but any user may download the files (for free) directly from WikiLeaks.

While the exposure of these files fulfills a democratic deficit that many in participating countries associate with the Afghanistan campaign, their unapproved release and the anonymous means by which they were obtained is also perceived as a direct threat to national security and government authority.

Despite the Internet’s responsibility for spreading this leak, there is nothing new about them. Daniel Ellsberg’s exposition of the “Pentagon Papers” through the New York Times in 1971 is perhaps the most recent and high-profile example with a potential correlative impact on policy.

Still, WikiLeaks’ specific use of file-sharing has important implications for the future of historical research. Specifically, the circumvention of the various freedom of information laws practiced by most democracies that limits researchers behind the “30 year rule” or its equivalent convention before declassifying most sensitive files.

The exact legality and broader implications of this exposure will be the focus of intense debate for weeks and months to come.

For now, let’s return to the idea of file-sharing and consider its most basic role (while also avoiding the longstanding dispute most commonly associated with it): it is a critical part of research acquisition and publication (both online and off) — between any combination of individuals, groups, archives, libraries, students, and schools.

In short: if we can’t share files, we can’t share history.

Redeeming the role of sharing files as a community is something to seriously explore in the future. Obviously this needs to occur within the context of fair use or dealing but that is already a core value and part of established practices.

As far as the immediate future is concerned, you may be frustrated with the limit on email attachments and want a useful means of avoiding spamming your contacts with multiple messages.

Toward that end, I offer my favourite file-sharing platform, drop.io, which I have used on several research projects. I particularly like the fact that you can set each “drop” to self-terminate after a certain date, and it will process emails, faxes, and audio files set to it externally.

Sites like this are part of a growing wave of start-ups and you may even have your own preferred site (do feel free to share below). Best of all, they allow for the controlled distribution of files among groups (account for increasing file sizes) and may go a long way in the broader effort to redeem the perception of file-sharing.

Share/Save