History Slam Episode Twenty-Seven: Heather Murray and LGBT History

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By Sean Graham

This Friday, Capital Pride kicks off its ten days of festivities in Ottawa. With film showings, pub nights, and, of course, the parade, the event seems to get bigger and garner more attention each year. This growth has been mirrored in the historical literature on LGBT communities. Over the past couple of years, Active History has contributed to this with a number of terrific articles on LGBT history. These include Mathieu Brulé’s examination of the history of pride, Donald W. McLeod’s look at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, and Krista McCraken’s recent study of LGBT advocacy in the United Church.

One of the works that has pushed the historiography further by taking a different look at LGBT history is Heather Murray’s Not in this Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America. In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Professor Murray about concepts of family, evolving notions of sexuality, and questions of community. We also chat about the idea of private as public and public as political.
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History Slam Episode Twenty-Six: The Black Panthers in Saskatchewan

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By Sean Graham

I often say that Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan is one of my favourite cities in the country – in part because of the way it has capitalized on Al Capone and the possibility that the legendary Chicago gangster conducted business in the city in the 1920s and 1930s. This is perhaps best exemplified at the Moose Jaw tunnels tour that takes visitors through a day in the life of a bootlegger.

But this is not the only connection between Chicago and Saskatchewan. Only weeks before his death, famed Black Panther Fred Hampton gave a speech at the Regina Campus of the University of Saskatchewan – now the University of Regina. The visit was met by mixed emotions in the community and highlighted the commonalities between the civil rights struggles of African Americans in the United States and First Nations in Canada.
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Open-Letter calling for the release of all relevant documents related to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

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Last week Adele Perry, a historian at the University of Manitoba, spearheaded an open-letter by historians in Canada calling on the Government of Canada to ensure the release of all records related to residential schools and the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The letter builds on similar letters and demonstrations by First Nations communities, librarians, archivists and museum workers. Over the weekend, it was circulated by e-mail (see signatures below) and we have now uploaded it to change.org in order to include additional names. Click the link if you would like to be included as a signatory.

To:

Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada
Bernard Valcourt, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development
Shelly Glover, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada needs full and timely access to archival records related to the administration and activities of residential schools. The work of the Commission depends on having access to all relevant records held in federal repositories.

As people who study and teach about the past historians realize the importance of archives and the important role they play in scholarship, education, and public debate.  I join other historians in calling for the release of all relevant records so that the Commission may, in particular, fulfill its goals related to promoting awareness and public education about residential schools and the creation of a historical record to be made accessible to the public.

The expedited release of these records is required for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada to fulfill its mandate by 2014.  As historians, we urge the federal government to release the necessary documents and allow the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to do the important work it was created to do.

Sincerely,

Adele Perry, University of Manitoba

Thomas Peace, Acadia University

Veronica Strong-Boag, University of British Columbia

Mary Jane McCallum, University of Winnipeg

Karen Dubinsky, Queen’s University

Jarvis Brownlie, University of Manitoba

Angus McLaren, University of Victoria

Sherry Farrell Racette, University of Manitoba

Gillian Poulter, Acadia University

Jennifer Bonnell, McMaster University

Tom Nesmith, University of Manitoba

Jim Clifford, University of Saskatchewan

Dan Rueck, York University

Ian Milligan, University of Waterloo

Donald Fyson, Université Laval

Colin Coates, York University

Sneja Gunew, University of British Columbia

ADD YOUR NAME ON CHANGE.ORG

Attention Loblaws Shoppers: Economic nationalism for sale in Canada’s retail history

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By Katharine Rollwagen

Loblaw Groceterias Limited, store No. 1, 2923 Dundas St. W., Toronto, Ontario, ca. 1919. Postcard. Source: Wikipedia Commons

Loblaw Groceterias Limited, store No. 1, 2923 Dundas St. W., Toronto, Ontario, ca. 1919. Postcard. Source: Wikipedia Commons

On July 15, 2013, the chairman of Loblaw, Canada’s largest supermarket retailer, announced the company’s purchase of Shoppers Drug Mart, the largest pharmacy chain in the country. The merger of two of Canada’s most recognizable retail brands was quickly hailed as a mega-deal that will create a “homegrown juggernaut” – a $12.4 billion acquisition that positions the merged company to compete with the growing tide of American-owned competitors such as Walmart and Target. It also keeps Shoppers Drug Mart out of the hands of other American suitors such as Walgreens (as commentators noted here).

As a historian, news of the deal and the rhetoric of economic nationalism that followed brought to mind another merger that reshaped the Canadian retail landscape more than 60 years ago. The marriage in 1952 between Canadian retailer Simpsons and the American department store Sears, Roebuck and Company was justified at the time as an attempt to compete with Canada’s largest retailer – Eaton’s, which garnered nearly as much of the retail market in Canada in the 1930s as Walmart does in the United States today.[1] However, despite Eaton’s dominant size in the Canadian market, it was the American company, Sears, that some of those involved in the deal feared would be seen as the enemy of Canadian enterprise. Continue reading →

Digital History isn’t for everyone

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By Thomas Peace

Most of the work that we do here at ActiveHistory.ca is what I have called elsewhere, passive history. Though there are a number of important exceptions (such as the History Matters lecture series, Approaching the Past, community and institutional partnerships), we generally take a ‘field of dreams approach’ to our online content.  If we post it, readers will come. This has been a successful strategy. Since our beginning in April 2009, the website’s readership has continued to grow (now averaging about 15,000 unique visitors a month).

Active History as an idea, however, is broader than the online forum we have created. At its core, an Active History approach to studying the past seeks to be socially transformative and publically engaging. To accomplish these goals, it is important for our work to resonate both online and in the material world (meatspace for those of you familiar with cyber-jargon). In order to be successful Active Historians, then, we need to understand how these two worlds are connected and what possibilities and pitfalls exist when we share our work in one or the other space.

Digital History isn’t for everyone. Continue reading →

Want to Review a Book for ActiveHistory.ca?

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You can review this interesting and quirky read about the history of the donut in Canada.

Enjoy reading about the experiences of people who lived in the past?  Love learning about the history of places that mean something to you? ActiveHistory.ca is looking for people outside of the academic history community to review history books for us.

Are you not an academic and a regular visitor to our site? Great! Consider writing a book review for us. You will receive a complimentary copy of your book and your review will be added to our book review section. We will set you up with a book that matches your interests or professional expertise.

Or how about this book about the history of the Canadian Rangers by P. Whitney Lackenbauer?

Or how about this book about the history of the Canadian Rangers?

We hope to provide a new perspective on history books not regularly found in academic journals. This approach has been interesting so far, with some excellent reviews of recently published books on Canadian history. Check out Emily Beliveau’s review of Charles Wilkin’s A Wild Ride: A History of the Northwest Mounted Police, 1863-1904, Ruthann LaBlance’s post on Dale Barbour’s Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900–1967, and Kayla Jonas Galvin’s piece on Neil White’s Company Towns: Corporate Order and Community.

 

If you would like to review a book for ActiveHistory.ca, and you are not currently a graduate student or professor in a history department, please contact our book review editor Kaleigh Bradley at bookreviews@activehistory.ca. Tells us a little about yourself and what type of history you are interested in. Happy reading!

 

 

Ten Other Things You Might Not Have Known About 20th-Century Aboriginal History in Canada.

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By Sean Kheraj

2013-07-17 10.53.17

Ian Mosby’s research on nutritional experiments on Aboriginal people in the 1940s and 1950s featured on cover of Toronto Star.

If there was a weekly prize for active historians in Canada, Ian Mosby would have been last week’s winner. Canadian national news media (including print, radio, television, and web) prominently featured Dr. Mosby’s recently published Histoire Sociale/Social History article, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942-1952.”

This paper originated from some documents Mosby found at Library and Archives Canada while working on his dissertation. He discovered evidence of a little-known federal government program of nutritional experiments on starving Aboriginal people. Nutrition scientists conducted a series of experiments on malnourished Aboriginal children and adults for a period between 1942 and 1952. The federal government did not seek informed consent from the more than 1,000 residential school children from provinces across the country who were unwittingly included in this biomedical research.

When news of the publication hit Twitter, national news media outlets quickly picked up on the story and profiled Mosby’s work in numerous publications and broadcasts. Here are a few examples:

History Slam Episode Twenty-Five: Budget Cuts and the Study of History

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By Sean Graham

Over the course of the past week, Ian Mosby’s work on nutritional experiments on aboriginal students in residential schools has received plenty of attention in the national media. While it will take a while before the full impact of the research is felt, there was some immediate excitement within the historical community that the issue had/has such traction nationally. In addition to uncovering the terrible abuse, the media interest of the past week has also shown the importance of historical research.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying that it’s good that these experiments happened because it gives historians something to talk about nor do I think historians should try to exploit these types of horrendous acts to further their own careers. (Ian walked this line beautifully last week – listening to several of his interviews and following his comments on Twitter, you never got the sense that he wanted to be the story. What was important was the research and bringing the events to light. It would have been easy to engage in self-promotion or to champion himself as a great researcher/writer, but that never happened.)
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Canada and the New Colonialism

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The Queen inspects the Guard of Honour mounted by the Ceremonial Guard on Parliament Hill, July 1, 2010. [This is a copy of an official work that is published by the Government of Canada. The reproduction has not been produced in affiliation with, or with the endorsement of the Government of Canada.]

The Queen inspects the Guard of Honour mounted by the Ceremonial Guard on Parliament Hill, July 1, 2010. ***

By Jon Weier

 

The Canadian government announced this past week that Canadian forces members will no longer wear the Maple Leaf as a symbol of rank.  The Maple Leaf is to be replaced on the shoulder boards and collar tabs of Canadian soldiers’ uniforms with the crown or pip that had been used to indicate rank in the Canadian Forces before unification in 1968.  Further, the most junior Canadian enlisted personnel will be referred to by new rank designations.  These new rank designations, and the re-introduced pip and crown, mirror rank and rank indicators that are used in the British armed services, and represent a return, in the words of former Defence Minister Peter McKay, “to the insignia that was so much a part of what the Canadian Army accomplished in Canada’s name.”

This new policy comes two years after the three component arms of the Canadian Forces were renamed.  Rather than being Land Command, Maritime Command and Air Command, their names since unification, they became the Canadian Army, the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Canadian Air Force, again mirroring the Canadian Forces’ British counterparts.  This change was, in the words of Peter McKay, about fixing a “mistake,” suggesting that somehow a move away from British symbols and names was taking the Canadian Forces away from their true identity.  These changes met with widespread criticism and were characterized by military historian Jack Granatstein as “abject colonialism.” Continue reading →

Internal Conflict: 25 years of LGBT Advocacy in the United Church

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By Krista McCracken

Though the government of Canada legalized same-sex marriage in 2005, marriage remains a contested point of debate within many Canadian religious denominations.  Since the 1980s Christian denominations across Canada have debated and developed policies around human sexuality, marriage, and ordination.

Currently, the Catholic Church and the Presbyterian Church in Canada do not condone gay marriage or the blessing of same-sex unions.  Both the Presbyterian Church and the Anglican Church of Canada will allow gay or lesbian individuals to be ordained in the church, providing the individuals are celibate and not ‘practicing’ their sexuality. In the Anglican Church blessings for same-sex couples (not marriage) can be performed in 10 Anglican dioceses across Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada is slated to vote on same-sex marriage in 2016. [i]   These denominations are still struggling with policies relating to sexuality and have made very little movement to change their positions based on the 2005 legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada.

Conversely, this August the United Church of Canada (UCC) will mark the 25 anniversary of the flagship decision to allow gay and lesbian candidates be ordained.  This decision was the first of its kind by a mainstream Christian denomination in the world. The UCC’s consistent support for same-sex relationships and equality has contributed to the UCC being seen as a ‘one-issue church’ or the ‘gay church’ by outside commentators.  Considering the current position of the other major Christian denominations on same-sex relationships the UCC’s early advocacy, acceptance, and support of LGBT rights was ground breaking.

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