ActiveHistory.ca repost – Tracking Canada’s History of Oil Pipeline Spills

ActiveHistory.ca is on a two-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in early September. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our most popular blog posts from this site over the past five years and some of the editors’ favourite posts from the past year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers – see you again in September!

The following post was originally featured on November 7, 2013.

oilpipelinemontreal-maine

Crowds gather to watch cranes joining two ends of an oil pipeline before the official ceremony commemorating the joining of the pipeline of an oil tanker terminal, Portland, Maine, with refineries in Montreal, Quebec, 1941. Source: Library and Archives Canada, WRM 1054.

By Sean Kheraj

Last week, CBC News published a series of articles about energy pipeline safety on Canada’s federally-regulated system of oil and gas pipelines, revealing that between 2000 and 2011 Canada suffered 1,047 separate pipeline incidents. Its findings confirm my own earlier research on the history of oil pipeline spills on the network of interprovincial and international oil pipelines that fall under the jurisdiction of the National Energy Board.

Under an access-to-information request, CBC reporters obtained a data set of pipeline incidents covering a period from 2000 to 2011. It showed that the number of incidents swelled from 45 in 2000 to 142 in 2011. This roughly corresponds with what I found for the period from 2000-2009.

These new reports demonstrate the great difficulty and challenge of documenting the history of oil pipeline spills in Canada. Upon receiving a CD with 405 pages of incident reports, CBC reporters quickly realized that they needed to recompile this data to make it machine-readable for analysis. Furthermore, the data sets were inconsistent and, in some instances, incomplete. For the most part, the information on pipeline incidents on the federally-regulated system is provided by the pipeline operators and not by NEB staff. As such, the information arrives in an unpredictable format from incident to incident. This left CBC with no choice but to sift through all of the 1,047 incidents and fill in the blanks with other NEB documents and reports from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (the regulator responsible for reporting on major pipeline incidents).

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – Gin and Tonic: A Short History of a Stiff Drink

ActiveHistory.ca is on a two-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in early September. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our most popular blog posts from this site over the past five years and some of the editors’ favourite posts from the past year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers – see you again in September!

The following post was originally featured on August 14, 2012.

Gin and Tonic. Image from Wikipedia.

By Jay Young

The Gin and Tonic – what better a drink during the dog days of summer?  Put some ice in a glass, pour one part gin, add another part tonic water, finish with a slice of lime, and you have a refreshing drink to counter the heat.  But it is also steeped in the history of medicine, global commodity frontiers, and the expansion of the British Empire.

Let’s start with the gin.  Although it is commonly known as the quintessential English spirit, the history of gin underlines the island’s connections to the outside world. The origin of gin – unlike the drink itself – is quite murky.  Sylvius de Bouve, a sixteenth-century Dutch physician, is the individual associated with the development of gin.  He created a highly-alcoholic medicinal concoction called Jenever.  It featured the essential oils of juniper berries, which the physician believed could improve circulation and cure other ailments.  The berry, deriving from a small coniferous plant, had long been treasured for its medicinal properties, including its use during the plague.

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – An Unsettling Prairie History: A Review of James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains

ActiveHistory.ca is on a two-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in early September. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our most popular blog posts from this site over the past five years and some of the editors’ favourite posts from the past year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers – see you again in September!

The following post was originally featured on December 5, 2013.

By Kevin Plummer

“Those Reserve Indians are in a deplorable state of destitution, they receive from the Indian Department just enough food to keep soul and body together, they are all but naked, many of them barefooted,” Lawrence Clarke wrote in 1880 of near-starvation Cree around Fort Carlton. “Should sickness break out among them in their present weakly state,” the long-time Hudson’s Bay Company employee concluded, “the fatality would be dreadful” (Daschuk, 114).

Sickness did break out, with tuberculosis and other infectious diseases decimating a reserve population made vulnerable to disease by years of famine and inadequate government rations. The loss of life was immense, James Daschuk recounts in Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Lifeand amounted to a “state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities” whose effects “haunt us as a nation still” (186).

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – Slavery in Canada? I Never Learned That!

      Comments Off on ActiveHistory.ca repost – Slavery in Canada? I Never Learned That!

ActiveHistory.ca is on a two-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in early September. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our most popular blog posts from this site over the past five years and some of the editors’ favourite posts from the past year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers – see you again in September!

The following post was originally featured on October 23, 2013.

Slavery advertisement from Upper Canada Gazette, 10 February 1806.

Slavery advertisement from Upper Canada Gazette, 10 February 1806.

By Natasha Henry

The highly anticipated soon-to-be-released film, 12 Years a Slave, has garnered lots of attention following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film provides a shocking but realistic depiction of American slavery. It is based on the life of Solomon Northrup, a free man, who was kidnapped from his hometown in New York and sold south into slavery. Northup is able to regain his freedom after Canadian Samuel Bass, a carpenter from Prescott, Upper Canada, writes several letters to authorities in New York on his behalf. No doubt, Canadians are proud of the usual portrayal of us as crusaders against American slavery and wear the badge of “Canadians as abolitionists” with honour. Canadians readily embrace the notion of Canada as a haven for American freedom-seekers, who were escaping the same conditions that Solomon Northup endured. Once he was freed, Northrup himself helped fugitives flee to Canada, the “Promised Land.”

But what about Canadian slavery?

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – A Climate Migration Primer

ActiveHistory.ca is on a two-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in early September. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our most popular blog posts from this site over the past five years and some of the editors’ favourite posts from the past year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers – see you again in September!

The following post was originally featured on January 23, 2014.

By Merle Massie

So, I’m writing a book.

What follows, for your January darn-it’s-cold-and-I’m-ready-for-something-kind-of-fun reading pleasure, is a primer (briefing notes) about the book. Given the growing recognition that Mother Nature remains strong and rather angry about human-induced climate change – kudos to everyone who spent Christmas with no power – I’m writing about human migration.

Drawing lessons from families who pulled up stakes and moved during the Great Trek from one biome (prairie south) to another (boreal north) due to drastic climate and economic problems during the Great Depression and Dirty Thirties, this book is based on history but with an eye to practical suggestions for the future. Imagine me having a conversation with my Grandpa and Grandma: what should I do to be prepared? Some of the following five lessons may or may not apply to your situation. It depends if you have a horse. Lessons may be tongue-in-cheek or serious. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which is which.

The underlying premise of the book is that climate change is happening and is worsening, and that Canada (in particular, Canada’s middle north and north) has been pinpointed as a place to which climate migrants from around the world may flee.

So, let’s get started, shall we?

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – Of History and Headlines: Reflections of an Accidental Public Historian

ActiveHistory.ca is on a two-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in early September. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our most popular blog posts from this site over the past five years and some of the editors’ favourite posts from the past year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers – see you again in September!

The following post was originally featured on April 29, 2014.

By Ian Mosby

When I first heard Alvin Dixon’s voice I was driving along Dupont Avenue in Toronto with my partner, Laural, and our three-month-old son, Oscar. Dixon was talking to Rick MacInnes-Rae, who was filling in as the co-host of the CBC Radio show As It Happens. The interview was about Dixon’s experience at the Alberni Indian residential school (AIRS) where he had unwittingly been part of a recently uncovered nutrition experiment conducted by the federal government during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

VanSun

In addition to describing his memories of the experiment – in impressive and accurate detail – Dixon talked in a jarringly blunt manner about hunger and about the horrors of life in that notorious institution on the west coast of Vancouver Island. “It was totally inadequate food a lot of the time,” Dixon told MacInnes-Rae. “I remember all of us kids having to steal fruit, steal carrots and potatoes so that we could roast potatoes somewhere off site on a fire and eat them – because we were never full when we left the dining room table.”

Dixon had long suspected that something had been done to them at the school. “As early as 20 years ago,” Dixon told MacInnes-Rae, “I heard that there were these experiments from former students who worked in the kitchens.” And when asked what it said to him that his federal government was willing to do this, Dixon responded that it affirmed what he’d always believed: “That the federal government and most Canadians don’t give a shit what happens with us as First Nations people. They’re on our stolen lands, our holy lands and they’re not going to be happy until they have it all. They were trying to eliminate us. So that’s not surprising.”

By the end of the interview I was in tears – something that would happen with increasing frequency over the coming months as I met, corresponded with, and listened to the stories of survivors of these experiments and of Canada’s Indian residential school system more generally. While I’m still not sure what I expected to happen after I published my research on these experiments, I don’t think anything could have prepared me for how profoundly the strength, courage, and anger of survivors like Dixon would change my life and my perspective on what it meant to be an (active) historian.

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – Sudbury: The Journey from Moonscape to Sustainably Green

ActiveHistory.ca is on a two-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in early September. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our most popular blog posts from this site over the past five years and some of the editors’ favourite posts from the past year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers – see you again in September!

 The following post was originally featured on June 10 2013.

By Krista McCracken

Roast yard near Victoria Mines, Sudbury 1898.  Greater Sudbury Historical Database.

Roast yard near Victoria Mines, Sudbury 1898. Greater Sudbury Historical Database.

The image of Sudbury, Ontario has long been associated with mining, smelting, and a barren landscape.  Perhaps most famously, the landscape of Sudbury has been said to be comparable to the landscape present on the moon.  Similarly, the image of the towering Sudbury Superstack is one which holds sway in the minds of many Canadians.  However, since the 1970s Sudbury has put considerable financial and community resources into mitigating the ecological impact of mining on the community.

Nickel was identified in the Sudbury Basin as early as 1750. Despite this discovery the early years of industry in Sudbury were dominated by forestry. By the mid 1880s forest fires and clear cut logging had already contributed to significant alteration of the natural landscape of Sudbury.

The industrial scars on the landscape increased as the mining industry developed in the area.  In 1888 the first roast yard and smelter were established in Copper Cliff, and marked the beginning of large scale mining in the Sudbury area. Between 1913 and 1916 the Mond Nickel Company removed all vegetation from the Coniston area to provide fuel for the roasting yard.

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – The Berlin Wall: Life, Death and the Spatial Heritage of Berlin

 ActiveHistory.ca is on a two-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in early September. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our most popular blog posts from this site over the past five years and some of the editors’ favourite posts from the past year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers – see you again in September!

The following paper was originally featured on November 6, 2009.

By Rector Gérard-François Dumont
Translated by Thomas Peace, York University

Walls that divide are meant to be broken down. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the legacy of the East-West division can still be seen in the city’s architecture, economy and overall culture. This paper examines Berlin’s spatial and political history from the wall’s beginnings to the long-term repercussions still being felt today.

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History Slam Episode Forty-Nine: Coming Out in the Classroom

By Sean Graham

In the spring, I taught HIS 3375, History of Popular Culture in Canada, at the University of Ottawa. Since the course had a participation element, I thought it would be fun to have an ice-breaker activity. So I compiled a list of ten questions that ranged from the hard-hitting “What is the first movie you remember seeing?” to the nonsensical “You get abducted by aliens – would you rather be in their zoo or their circus?” (A question first discussed on Seinfeld) which ten randomly selected students would have to answer. In prefacing the activity, I stressed that the students should not be worried because none of the questions were particularly personal and that I would answer the questions too.

In the past, I’ve been accused of being too private, so it’s not surprising that I wouldn’t include personal questions in the class. Afterwards, however, a colleague asked why I seemed so averse to divulging personal information in class when, on occasion, it might be relevant to the course material. In the case of popular culture, for example, does the fact that I have an irrational dislike of the NHL (hockey is great, but the NHL has destroyed the sport) not shape the way I discuss the league’s significance to Canada?

Not long after that discussion, I read Justin Bengry’s post on Notches entitled “‘Coming Out’ in the Classroom: When the Personal is Pedagogical” in which he discusses the issue of professors revealing their sexuality to their students, with specific reference to queer history courses. In addition to questions over an instructor’s personal background influencing their interpretation of the past, the post also discusses whether including personal information can help foster positive relationships in classes by breaking down barriers, and thus improving classroom dynamics.
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‘1914-1918 In Memoriam’: A View from the Grandstand

At the “In Memoriam” event , July 31st 2014: the speakers’ platform, seating for distinguished guests, and flags of Canada, its provinces, and territories.

At the “In Memoriam” event , July 31st 2014: the speakers’ platform, seating for distinguished guests, and flags of Canada, its provinces, and territories.

ActiveHistory.ca is featuring this post as the first piece for “Canada’s First World War: A Centennial Series on ActiveHistory.ca”, a multi-year series of regular posts about the history and centennial of the First World War. 

By Nathan Smith

A sizeable audience turned out for a First World War commemorative event held at the University of Toronto’s Varsity Stadium this past July 31st.  The grandstand was more than half full, so there were probably three thousands of us in attendance.  We crowded near the centre to best view the proceedings on Varsity’s (sadly) artificial turf.  Passing clouds occasionally filtered or blocked a setting sun, which  dropped below the horizon near the end of the event.  The beautiful evening light perfectly suited organizers’ plans.

“1914-1918 In Memoriam” was, as the Master of Ceremonies explained, held at sundown to echo the poetic hour given to mourning and remembrance, as in Binyon’s “For the Fallen”.  The event’s timing, we were told, also paralleled the last hours of peace a century ago.  On August 1st 1914 Russia went to war with Germany and Austria, which in three short days pulled in France and Britain, and much of the rest of the world.  I quibbled to myself that a war was already raging on July 31st 1914 between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, but admitted such details, and others I noted during the evening, were not really the point at an event such as this.  Unlike the “1914-1918: The Making of the Modern World” conference at the University of Toronto’s Munk School for Global Affairs that was tied to this public event, “In Memoriam” was about performing big, collective meanings for a general audience.

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