Canada’s Presence in the World: A Discussion with the Right Honorable Joe Clark

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By Andrew Sopko and Sarah Dougherty

Clark w Carleton SeminarOn January 31st 2014, the Right Honorable Joe Clark came to Carleton University to discuss his new book, How We Lead: Canada in a Century of Change (Random House, 2013), with students in Professor Norman Hillmer’s seminar on nationalism, internationalism, and political culture. This book, by the former prime minister and foreign minister is, in his own words, “a reflection on what Canadians have accomplished at our best, specifically in international affairs.” (p.4) In his book and the discussion which followed, Clark expressed his desire to see Canada re-engage with international issues, to re-take its position as a global leader. He agreed with the Carleton students that Canada has abandoned its impressive tradition of global leadership.

How We Lead outlines the dramatic dismissal of activist international policy that has taken place under the watch of the current government. Continue reading →

Government Cuts Funding After Five Years of ActiveHistory.ca

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closed-sign.big_Happy April Fool’s Day! We’re happy to be celebrating our fifth year and thank you to our readers for all your support over the years!

After five years of operation, ActiveHistory.ca will be shutting down because of government funding cuts. This website, originally envisioned as a Canadian version of Britain’s popular History & Policy website, grew into a widely accessed collection of blog posts, podcasts, book reviews, and short papers. Continue reading →

Bones, Ghosts and Human Rights: How Science Can Further Justice

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A public lecture by Luis Fondebrider, recorded at the University of Saskatchewan on February 10, 2014

Luis Fondebrider teaches in the Department of Legal Medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. He is President of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team and has been involved in international tribunals on political violence and human rights, focusing on the use of forensic anthropology in identifying victims of mass violence, in over forty countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe.

Sponsored by the Department of History.
Funded by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity, College of Arts and Science, Humanities Research Unit, the Vice-President Research, and the CRC in Medical History; with the support of Departments of Psychology, Anthropology and Archeology, Political Studies, Sociology, Community Health and Epidemiology, and English. Jon Bath, the Director of the Humanities and Fine Arts Digital Research Centre, edited the film.

If you are hosting a public lecture related to history and have the funding or skills to record and edit the talk, ActiveHistory.ca would be happy to post it to our YouTube channel and feature it on this website.

Past Protection: Conservation at the Archives of Ontario

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By Jenny Prior

Meet Shannon Coles, a conservator at the Archives of Ontario. Shannon’s been stabilizing archival records and preparing them for digitization and reproduction for our on-site World War I exhibit, Dear Sadie, launching this summer.

Q: Shannon, what led you to your unique and interesting occupation?

A: Going to museums as a kid always frustrated me because I wanted to touch everything! With my job, there are no barriers between the records and me.

Conservation work is an eclectic mix of science, art, and history, and these disciplines have always interested me. You need to study chemistry to understand how and why the materials degrade. The artistic elements are fine-hand skills and an appreciation for the documents themselves. And of course being fascinated by history doesn’t hurt.

Shannon getting up close and personal with archival records. Photo credit: James Bowers .

Shannon getting up close and personal with archival records. Photo credit: James Bowers.

Q: How do you decide if a record can be displayed?   

A: In the Archives of Ontario’s preservation department, we’re responsible for the long-term physical protection of all the archival materials. Exhibiting records speeds up chemical reactions, which in turn accelerates deterioration. Continue reading →

Why is this time Different? Political Implications of prolonged Economic Downturns

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By David Zylberberg

Historians place a disproportionate emphasis on the 1930s when teaching European History. The decade looms large in our courses with discussions of economic depressions, the rise of far-right political parties and the onset of the Second World War. We generally try to instill greater complexity to our lectures but a fairly straight-forward narrative emerges: Economic collapse and high unemployment contribute to the election of far-right political parties, war and 6 million dead Jews. Interestingly, the Eurozone’s economic trajectory since the financial collapse of 2008 has been similar to that of the 1930s but political spectrums have barely changed. Why?

A number of economists and economic historians have noted that the overall European economy performed similarly between 2007 and 2014 as it had done between 1929 and 1936. Both continent-wide comparisons mask major regional hardships, since Britain in the 1930s or Germany and France in the 2010s have fared relatively well. The circumstances in a number of Eurozone countries are staggeringly bad. After 2008, Latvia lost a quarter of its economy within a year and 10% had emigrated within two years. The Greek economy contracted by 13.5% between 2007 and 2012 and continues to shrink with a quarter of the adult workforce unemployed. Meanwhile, in both Greece and Spain over half of the workforce under the age of 25 is unemployed. The lack of employment for those entering the workforce will limit their skill development, while the general hesitancy of employers to hire the long-term unemployed will hurt this cohort going forward. The current generation of 20-25 year olds in Spain and Greece might have the worst long-term employment prospects of any cohort ever. Economic conditions have also noticeably deteriorated in Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands and Denmark over the last six years. Continue reading →

Preserving History as it Happens: The Internet Archive and the Crimean Crisis

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By Ian Milligan

“Thirty goons break into your office and confiscate your computers, your hard drives, your files.. and with them, a big chunk of your institutional memory. Who you gonna call?” These were the words Bob Garfield used in a recent episode of On the Media, to address the storming of the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism. On Saturday, March 1st, 2014, during the Russian occupation of the Crimea, men with guns stormed and occupied the offices of the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism. The staff fled, managing to take only part of their files and equipment, although not everything. Over the rest of the weekend, the Center reached out to the Internet Archive to preserve their web material. The episode attracted the attention of the global media, web archivists, and historians. Historians deal with source losses all the time – sources destroyed by events (from wars, political malfeasance, and so forth) – but here we see how quickly the process of archiving and preserving has sped up.

The Internet Archive, which I’ve written about before for ActiveHistory, tries to back up much of the publicly-accessible web. It had not however captured comprehensive holdings of this particular site. If something happened, if the servers were wiped, there were fears that all of their past stories, information, and so forth would be lost. These would be critical for the group, but also, of course, for historians. So from their offices in San Francisco, the Internet Archive’s Archive-It service carried out a comprehensive sweep of the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism’s website, capturing it now 14 times between March 1st and 19th. 5,185 videos have been captured. Indeed, in case they were taken down off YouTube, they are now preserved.

Continue reading →

Soldier Suicide after the Great War: A First Look

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“Mud and barbed wire through which the Canadians advanced during the Battle of Passchendaele,” November 1917. William Rider-Rider / Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-002165

“Mud and barbed wire through which the Canadians advanced during the Battle of Passchendaele,” November 1917. William Rider-Rider / Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-002165

By Jonathan Scotland

On 20 January 1919 Charles Campbell killed himself. The resident of Brockville, Ontario was the first of many veterans of the First World War to commit suicide that year. Others included Ross Puttilo, Alexander Fowler, William Bailey, and William Dowier. There would be more. Their deaths remind us that recent suicides in the Canadian military are part of a longer historical trajectory of soldier suicide.

With few exceptions, Canadian historians ignore the question of soldier suicide.[1] The military has done a better job of studying the issue and now recognizes that solder suicide is a serious concern. In 2012, the Department of National Defence released Suicide in the Canadian Force, 1995-2012, only the second such report in the military’s history. It found no significant increase in suicide rates between the mid 1990s and the end of Canada’s mission in Afghanistan.  In fact, the report concluded that suicide rates in the military were lower than the civilian population.

This should be no surprise. Recruits, after all, are screened before they join the forces. That there was no statistically significant increase in suicide, despite perceptions to the contrary, is more surprising. This finding is supported by new research on suicide more generally and recent studies have found that old ideas about rising suicide rates, particularly in modern urban environments, are simply not born out by the evidence.

What we lack is a historical picture to put these deaths in context. Continue reading →

After All is Said and Done

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By Peter Seixas

After all is said and done, and The Historical Thinking Project has been laid to rest, the biggest question in history education is still up for grabs.  What is history education for?  Leaving aside whether it is well taught or poorly taught, what are we aiming for?  Here is a smattering of possibilities, as they surface from time to time in public discussion and debate.

  • We teach history to promote national solidarity, a shared collective identity among people, most of whom will never see each other face to face.
  • We learn history to meet obligations to our forebears, who struggled, sacrificed and suffered to make the world that we have inherited.
  • We teach history to transmit the wisdom of the great actors, thinkers and writers of past generations to the next.
  • We learn history to transcend the past’s follies and foibles, the “mistakes,” that we are otherwise “condemned to repeat.”
  • We teach history to come to terms with the crimes and injustices of the past.
  • We learn history to preserve traditions.
  • We teach history for its own sake.

Each of these has considerable currency.  Any talk show host moderating a discussion of history education is likely to get stuck on one or the other.  Yet, many of them are in large part mutually contradictory.  They do, however, have one thing in common (other than the last, which I find nonsensical): they underscore the connections among past, present and future. Continue reading →

The Need for Professional Development and Support for Teachers

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By Jill Colyer

When I first started teaching I didn’t feel very successful in my history classroom. (Of course, it is hard to feel successful at all when you first start teaching because the entire experience is overwhelming and incredibly difficult.) After a few years, my feeling that something was missing in my history classes hadn’t gone away.

I didn’t have this feeling in my other classes. When I taught psychology, or law, or politics, I felt that students were highly engaged in the subject matter and that they felt and cared deeply about the issues under investigation. Students would often come in to my class and share that they’d had an argument with a parent over dinner about an issue we’d explored in class, or that they’d seen a news item or documentary about something we’d explored together and they wanted to discuss the new information they they had learned.

Nothing like this ever really happened in my history classes, although I always had a few history buffs in my courseses who were excited about every minute detail we studied. These students often, in fact, had more historical information stored in their heads than I did. Continue reading →

Teaching History: Historical Consciousness and Quebec’s Youth

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By Jocelyn Létourneau
Translated by Thomas Peace
On peut lire la version française ici

Letourneau - 1Who was the first Premier of Quebec? In what year did the asbestos strike take place? What was the pivotal moment in the Quiet Revolution? Very few young people in Quebec can answer these three questions correctly. In trying to address this problem, scholars and pundits have explained to us that today’s youth have only a limited historical understanding and are generally disinterested in the past.

I don’t think that this is true, at least not entirely. Young people care about the past, though – with a handful of exceptions – their historical understanding is narrow rather than broad. In fact, my research suggests that rather than having no historical imagination or representations, they employ a somewhat simplistic understanding of the past as a useful tool for situating their lives in the present. In other words: youth understand without knowing; they have a strong personal vision of history at the cost of a comprehensive knowledge about the collective past.

Continue reading →