Active History

Why Change Happens?

June 8, 2015 No Comments

PHOTO: Sir Jonathon Porritt reflects on the day’s events

Friends of the Earth in the UK and History & Policy organized a conference last Wednesday at King’s College in London to bring together historians and campaigners to discuss what we can learn from the past. The format of the conference was fantastic. In each of the four panels, three historians presented short 15-minute papers and a campaigner or journalist then commented on the papers. Instead of a question and answer session, the audience, who were carefully distributed in tables with a mix of participants, discussed the lessons of each session (note takers collected ideas from each table). At lunch we switched tables and engaged in a conversation with a new group.

The questions addressed by the different panels were difficult and any hopes for simple answers from the past were dashed by the end of the first session, which focused on: Why do norms change? Historians discussed what can we learn from the history of abolitionism, nineteenth-century gender dynamics, or the development of industrial-scale animal husbandry. These diverse papers were tied together by the commentator, Sarah Wootton, from Dignity in Dying. Wootton made it clear that her organization wants to learn all that they can from successful past campaigns, such as the growing cultural acceptance of homosexuality and the expansion of LGBTQ legal rights. This panel led to an engaging conversation at my table about what we can and cannot learn from these kinds of historical examples. We also ran into a core question: what is a norm and how is it different from an ideology? This was not an easy question to answer with two minutes left in our allotted conversation time. Continue reading →

Planting the Seeds of Citizenship

June 5, 2015 6 Comments

Undated Photo, Richmond, ON. From the Spring 1905 issue of the Queen’s Quarterly. (Reproduced with permission).

By Conrad McCallum,

A school garden in Bowesville, Ontario established by the Mcdonald-Robertson movement, from the Spring 1905 issue of the Queen’s Quarterly. (Reproduced with permission).

A sample of Canadian headlines about school gardens from the past few months: A two-year school garden project in Vancouver will contribute to fresher produce in the cafeteria and food literacy skills. Students at an ethnically diverse school in Windsor, Ontario will use a new community garden as a “living classroom” for discussions on healthy eating and plant science. Students went to work planting at a school in Pickering, Ontario that has been named ‘the greenest school on earth’.

School gardens have made a recent comeback, tapping into environmental consciousness and community-mindedness. But their roots belong to a much earlier period, when they appeared to offer a grab bag of pedagogical benefits. Continue reading →

“If Stephen Harper doesn’t support Canadian Studies, why should we?”

June 4, 2015 2 Comments

By Colin Coates

“If Stephen Harper doesn’t support Canadian Studies, why should we?”

So said the vice-provost of Duke University to Jane Moss, the director of the university’s Center for Canadian Studies, as he recommended “re-purposing” the endowment that had funded the Centre. This long-lasting centre closed as of 2014, turned into a “Council for North American Studies.” The place of Canada in this new structure has been reduced, and the funds originally intended for the study of Canada now will be used in different ways.[1]

Some Canadians may be surprised to learn the Duke University, located in North Carolina, had a Center for Canadian Studies. Even before the formal establishment of the centre in 1974, Duke was one of the most important universities in advancing the knowledge of Canada. A specialist in the history of the British Commonwealth, Richard Preston was appointed in 1965 as the William K. Boyd Professor of History. Preston directed a number of PhD dissertations on Canadian topics, including those of leading scholars like Andrée Lévesque and J.L. Granatstein. In the late 1960s, only a few universities in Canada offered the PhD in History, and given the climate of the time, it often proved difficult to justify pursuing a Canadian topic even in Canada. Many Canadians travelled abroad, to the United Kingdom, the United States or France to pursue their degrees. Anglophone scholars studied under specialists in the history of the British Commonwealth and Empire, one of the few ways that Canadian history could find its historiographical niche. Distinguished scholars like Richard Preston at Duke played key roles in developing the nascent field of Canadian Studies around the globe. Continue reading →

Vaccinations and the Decline of Diphtheria

June 3, 2015 No Comments

DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH FOR SCOTLAND (Wikipedia)

[Editors note: This is a second follow up post from our Infectious Disease, Contagion and the History of Vaccines theme week]

By Deborah Neill

In 1883, Bedford Brown read a paper before the Virginia State Medical Society, which was published two years later as Reminiscences of Personal Experience in the History of Diphtheria. It opened with a heart-breaking account of a consultation he was called to in 1856. The 10 year old patient, “an exceedingly bright, and interesting boy” lived “in a large airy residence, surrounded with grounds perfectly cleanly and well kept.” But the child was terribly ill, with an “enormously enlarged tonsil” covered in a “thick, tenacious, pearly white coating as if painted with a brush” and he “was suffering extreme distress from difficulty of breathing and deglutition.” After an agonizing few hours where the doctors could do little beyond watching his decline, the boy died.

Shortly after this heartbreaking death, Brown was called to see a family where six children were sick at once, including a small baby. “With the limited information then at hand, I was totally unprepared to act,” Brown said. He continued, “I know of but few more appalling scenes to the conscientious physician than that of an entire family prostrated with the malignant form of this disease.”[1] Continue reading →

Where has pre-Confederation history gone? The CHA and the changing contours of a discipline.

June 2, 2015 3 Comments

By Robert Englebert

For years now I have talked with colleagues about the rather anaemic pre-Confederation history representation at the CHA.[1] Most of these conversations have been anecdotal in nature, the seemingly self-evident decline represented by the fact that most of us pre-Confed types could fit around a couple of tables at the beer tent. Then about two years ago Thomas Peace began looking for trends using basic word cloud compilations for previous CHA programs to show the distribution of presentations by century (see yesterday’s post for this year’s instalment). Though cursory in nature, Tom’s study confirmed what many of us had long suspected, that pre-Confederation history at the CHA was on the decline, if not on life support. Continue reading →

What does Canadian History Look Like? The CHA in 2015

June 1, 2015 4 Comments

By Tom Peace

For the past two years I’ve written blog posts for the opening day of the Canadian Historical Association’s annual meeting (click here for 2013 and here for 2014). In those posts I created word clouds from the relevant paper and session titles in order to get a sense of what the field of Canadian history actually looks like. As historians gather today in Ottawa for three days of meetings (join us today at 5 pm for the Active History CHA group’s annual meeting), we have an ideal opportunity to take the pulse of Canadian history in order to get a broad sense of where the field is headed.

Today’s post is similar to those in the past. It is an overview (rather than a rigorous study) of the conference program (available here). Importantly, though, today’s post draws some slightly different conclusions than my earlier posts that are perhaps indicative of broader transitions in the field. This year’s program has some interesting things to say, I think, in terms of the place of Indigenous people, situating Canada in a global context, and the place of women in the past.[1] Continue reading →

Film Friday: British Columbia’s Contact Zone Classrooms, 1849–1925

May 29, 2015 No Comments

Film Fridays give active historians a chance to share their work in a new format. If you would like to submit a film about history, get in touch!

By Sean Carleton

Indigenous and settler children outside a public school in Prince George, Lheidli T’enneh Territory, BC, 1911. Royal BC Museum, BC Archives

Canada’s sordid history of colonial education has yet again become a topic of controversy and debate. While the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is coming to an end, new layers are still being added to Canada’s history of colonial schooling, including the horrific findings of abuse and torture and nutritional experiments in residential schools. The overall picture, of course, is disturbing. This is why many historians were confused and dismayed by Ken Coates’ recent suggestion that now is the time to move beyond this difficult past. In response, Crystal Fraser and Ian Mosby rightly reject such an assertion and argue that there is still much to learn about the complexities of colonialism and schooling in Canada, past and present.

My own research confirms this position, and, though I am still writing my PhD dissertation, I wanted to contribute to this important dialogue. Inspired by recent words of encouragement from award-winning filmmakers Alanis Obomsawin and Peter Raymont about the importance of history, activism, and film, I decided to make a short film to share part of my research that supports calls for the need to continue to critically examine Canada’s history of colonial schooling. Continue reading →

History as Rhetoric: Indochina and Contemporary Refugee Crises

May 28, 2015 1 Comment

By Laura Madokoro

Vietnamese Boat People: A reflection on policy or an Extraordinary Event?

Recently, and perhaps not surprisingly for a historian, I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between the present and the past. In particular, about the use of history by advocates seeking to draw attention to the current refugee crises in the Mediterranean and Andaman Seas. In the past few weeks, there has been considerable news coverage about the thousands of migrants from Syria, Eritrea and Libya who are making their way to Europe under dangerous and treacherous conditions. This past April alone, 1,200 people died trying to cross the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Europe. The plight of an estimated 6,000 to 20,000 Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants adrift at sea in a “game of human ping pong” in the Andaman Sea is also garnering international attention.

Many observers have drawn parallels between the current crises and the international efforts on behalf of three million Indochinese refugees following the end of the Vietnam War. These comparisons, especially the ones employed by observers pressing for humanitarian intervention, sparked my musings about the relationship between the present and the past. Specifically, how do references to the recent past affect our understanding of that history? And relatedly, what are the consequences of misrepresenting the past in service of the present? Continue reading →

A Review of The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir

May 27, 2015 1 Comment

By Kevin Plummer

“When I was at that school,” Joseph Auguste (Augie) Merasty writes of his years at St. Therese Residential School, “it seemed always to be winter time” (Merasty, 41). It’s little surprise, then, that certain anecdotes from that season stand out in the memoir he’s written with David Carpenter, The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir.

University of Regina Press, 2015
Casebound 120 pages, $21.95

One winter when Augie was 11 or 12, he recounts vividly seven decades later, he and another boy were forced to retrace their steps 20 miles across the lake and into the wild, by themselves and with the temperature plummeting, in search of the two mittens they’d lost. Out there alone, as the temperatures plummeted, the boys’ fright was only exasperated when they came across fresh wolf tracks and imagined having to fend off a pack with nothing but sticks. When they found all trace of the lost mittens erased by the blowing wind, they returned to school to admit their failure to Sister St. Mercy. “We, of course, got the strap, twenty strokes on both hands,” Merasty concludes (12).

This matter-of-fact tone is a strength of Merasty’s memoirs, underlining as it does the casual nature of the brutalities he and the other Indigenous children suffered at St. Therese. It wasn’t just that physical and sexual abuse occurred over and over again, but the school’s pervading climate: the hypocrisy of students subsisting on “rotten porridge and dry bread”, for example, while Brothers and Sisters feasted on roast chicken and cake (14). Continue reading →

Reassessing the Abortion Caravan

May 26, 2015 No Comments

York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, ASC04612.

By Shannon Stettner and Christabelle Sethna

The Abortion Caravan is a gutsy, fun, and bold example of direct action. The more recent attention to it seems to have resulted in a level of exposure and an attribution of importance that probably exceeds its actual historical significance to the pro-choice movement in Canada. When an event is popularized, perhaps even mythologized, there are new challenges to teaching its history. A reassessment of the Caravan underscores the importance of seeking balance when evaluating historical significance. If measuring accomplishment solely by the fulfillment of the demands of the Vancouver Women’s Caucus (VWC) to repeal the abortion law, it’s hard to call the Caravan successful since it took an additional 18 years before the Supreme Court overturned that law. But, there are several other ways to measure its significance in Canadian history. As the first national protest that called for unrestricted access to legal abortion, the Caravan brought important media attention to the issue. Through public speaking engagements, guerilla theatre performances, and feminist consciousness-raising sessions, Caravan participants connected with women across the country and learned from one another about their shared experiences with and fears of unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. As a woman-planned and woman-led event, the Caravan featured women stepping out from many male-dominated protest organizations of the New Left; they gained important experience and confidence from activism that emerged out of a period known as second wave feminism. Continue reading →

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