Active History

“A Proud Canadian” or a Canadian too proud? Understanding Stompin’ Tom’s nationalism

March 12, 2013 12 Comments

Image from Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant (http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=60)

By Kaitlin Wainwright

Last Wednesday, Canada lost its “national troubadour”, an “icon”, and “one of [its] most prolific and well-known country and folk singers”; a man who ranked 13th in CBC’s The Greatest Canadian list. Stompin’ Tom Connors is credited with writing three hundred songs, many of which are loudly and proudly Canadian. Upon his death, online tributes poured in from the CBC, politicians of all stripes, and even Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s fake Twitter account. NDP Members of Parliament paid tribute to Stompin’ Tom outside the House of Commons with their rendition of “Bud the Spud”. The Globe and Mail suggested that the mainstream media “patronized him as a novelty singer” and questioned whether he was given enough attention during his life. Everyone seemed to have a different story of their experience with Stompin’ Tom, but they were all general positive and “pro-Canadian”.

Let me tell you my Stompin’ Tom story: I grew up in a non-musical family. My earliest experience of his music was when I was twenty, in a second-year Canadian history course, where Big Joe Mufferaw and the NFB’s Log Drivers’ Waltz were used as part of lessons on logging. The lens that I was given to look at him through was one of myth and memory, and the building of nationhood. I never made an emotional connection with his music, and in his death my recollection of his life’s work is maybe, therefore, more easily critical in nature. Continue reading →

Canadian Museum of Civilization, Stalked by a Trojan Horse

March 11, 2013 4 Comments

“Canadian Museum of Civilization” by ¡Carlitos

By Dan Gallacher, PhD FCMA

Ancient Troy withstood pressures at its walls for a decade. Ultimately the Greek attackers, applying an extraordinary ruse, swept in looting or destroying everything. Located on a major trade route with acquisitive Hittite hordes to its east and an aggressive Mycenaean host west across the Aegean, Troy was a highly tempting target.

In the past decade, invading and stripping half the Museum of Civilization became a vital mission to a handful of nationalist historians, and their choice of a Trojan Horse is the federal government. Those traditionalists, supported on record by a now boxed-in management, aim at replacing virtually all the main history galleries which now feature ordinary people and everyday life in Canada from AD1000 to 2000, east to west, by inserting instead displays portraying landmark political events, episodes, or persons. In short, the Museum would jettison its broad social history narrative for past parables stitched together with timelines, pictures, and labels covering the walls. Textbooks, anyone?

In case we miss the point, the Heritage minister wants the name changed, too. Soon we’ll know it as the Canadian Museum of History. And this is in itself a triumph for the old time academics; they had Jean Chretien and Sheila Copps convinced in 2003 to convert the National Conference Centre into such a museum, but Paul Martin squashed it (and saved an estimated $135 million). According to today’s Stephen Harper government, $25 million is earmarked for the “upgrade”, funding that the Museum must share with other institutions across the country to travel artifacts. Continue reading →

Development, Community, and Citizen Activism in Toronto’s Kensington Market: 1960s and 2013

March 7, 2013 3 Comments

By Daniel Ross

Photo by Dominique Russell

A few dozen locals braved the cold on February 16^th to march in the streets of Toronto’s iconic Kensington Market. They were protesting plans to open a big-box supermarket in the neighbourhood. Developer Tribute Communities plans to break ground soon on a condo development on College Street—just east of the market’s northern entrance—that will include a 20,000-square foot Loblaws store.

Demonstrators from the group Friends of Kensington Market fear that Loblaws will damage the community by driving the small shops that give the market its character out of business. As they marched down Augusta Ave., the Friends held signs reading “No Loblaws No” and “Save Small Kensington Businesses”. In an interview with the CBC, market shop owner Anna Cecilia Espinoza worried that the arrival of big retail could spell the end of small businesses like hers. A “Save Kensington” petition has since been started on Activism.com. News of the development comes at a time of acute insecurity about how rising property values are changing the area (by bringing in more chain stores, higher rents, etc.). The recent closure of local café Casa Acoreana has led some to speculate that the area has reached a “tipping point” for gentrification.

Flyer by Damien Boyer

Recently, my own research has led me to read about community responses to urban planning and development in Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s. I’ve been struck by the degree of success of certain downtown communities during that period at organizing and having their voices heard on projects that threatened their homes and neighbourhoods. One was Kensington Market.

This post fits the Loblaws protest into a larger history of people in Kensington speaking up about the market’s future. In the 1960s shop owners and residents organized to have their say in neighbourhood planning. While they weren’t able to follow through on many of their own plans to improve the area, they did set up an innovative community-based planning model, and blocked or altered several projects that would have dramatically changed the neighbourhood. Today’s Kensington owes a lot to those efforts to keep the area’s character intact. And that may be one of the best arguments for taking opposition to big-box retail in Kensington Market seriously.

Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Fourteen: Tim Stanley

March 6, 2013 No Comments

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By Sean Graham

B.C Premier Christy Clark has spent the better part of the last week apologizing for the provincial Liberals’ classified plan to win the “ethnic vote.” While the scheme had clear ethical issues by using provincial staffers for political purposes, what has garnered the most attention is the disingenuous manner in which the party hoped to get “quick wins” from minority groups. One of the ways they hoped to do this was to officially apologize for racist policies and acts from the past. And while not mentioned specifically, one of these racist policies that may have been considered was school segregation in the 1920s and 1930s.

In this episode of the History Slam I talk with Timothy Stanley, author of Contesting White Supremacy: School Segregation, Anti-Racism, and the Making of Chinese Canadians. Professor Stanley provides a unique take on the social construction of race and the power dynamics that lead to racism. We also chat about the Victoria school strike and the creation of a Chinese community in the region. The conversation also touches on the “history wars” as we debate how regional and national histories interact.

In addition to the podcast, be sure to check out this interview with Professor Stanley from 2011.

Sean Graham is a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa where he is currently working on a project that examines the early years of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He has previously studied at Nipissing University, the University of the West Indies, and the University of Regina and like any red-blooded Canadian his ultimate dream is to be a curling champion while living on a diet of beer and poutine.

Why Maritime Union Is a Bad Idea: An Environmental Historian’s Perspective

March 5, 2013 No Comments

Fraser Companies Ltd.’s pulp mill in Edmundston, New Brunswick, circa 1950s. Fraser was one of several large pulp and paper companies in New Brunswick that benefitted from the regional economic development programs in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly through increased control of the province’s Crown (public) forests. (Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, P225-1929)

By Mark McLaughlin

[Originally published on the Historians of the Environment of the Atlantic Region blog]

Maritime Union, or one united Maritime province, is an idea that predates Canada. The original rationale for the 1864 Charlottetown Conference, which eventually led to Canadian Confederation (1867), was a meeting of Maritime leaders to discuss some form of union between their respective colonies. The idea has resurfaced periodically ever since then, often proposed as a solution for what are perceived as the region’s economic woes. The most recent revival occurred in November 2012, when three Conservative senators, Nova Scotia’s Stephen Greene, New Brunswick’s John Wallace, and Prince Edward Island’s Mike Duffy, offered Maritime Union as a way to combat soaring provincial deficits and high unemployment.[i] Media commentators, such as John Ibbitson in The Globe and Mail and the editorial board of the National Post, wholeheartedly endorsed the idea in the days and weeks that followed.[ii]

This recent national discussion about Maritime Union lacked historical perspective and was saturated with neoliberal assumptions. While many reasons have been offered as to why Maritime Union is a good idea, I want to address one policy area that has not received much attention — natural resource management. My interest in the matter stems from my doctoral research on the environmental history of forest management in New Brunswick at the University of New Brunswick, and the fact that I am a New Brunswicker, born in Perth-Andover and raised nearby on a small family farm. As an environmental historian, I am concerned that this latest discussion about Maritime Union is relying upon the same type of reasoning that has been used to manage natural resources in the region. Continue reading →

Mapping the World: Perspective, Artistry, and Map Making

March 4, 2013 2 Comments

By Krista McCracken

World map by Heinrich Bèunting, 1581.

You ask for directions from a friend. They respond by drawing you map. The map you are given is hurriedly scribbled on the back of a napkin. At the time you graciously thank them for the effort. But, when you have to actually use the map you realize the jumble of crossing lines lacks proportions and is far from clear. The map makes you wonder about your friend’s ability to think logically.

The act of creating a good map is both a science and an art. Good maps can provide directions, details about landscapes and say a great deal about the world around us. Good maps illuminate the important details while minimizing distractions and extraneous information. Poorly designed maps are often frustrating, confusing, and at times misleading. The science behind maps can easily been seen in modern surveying techniques and commonly used cartographic standards.

What about the artistry of map making? The earliest maps fall more into the category of works of art than works of science. When cartographers had neither the geographical or cartographic knowledge to make accurate maps artistic license was used to express worldviews in map form. Maps during the middle ages and renaissance eras were often aesthetically pleasing and closely related to painting. Many of these early maps were in fact landscape paintings drawn with new perspectives. Continue reading →

Black Nova Scotian Women Working in Service: The Invisible History

February 27, 2013 1 Comment

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On Thursday February 7 Professor Wanda Thomas Bernard delivered this lunchtime lecture to the Lifelong Learners program at Acadia University.

Bernard’s lecture builds on her work with Judith Fingard on Black Nova Scotian domestic workers in the mid-twentieth century. In this lecture Bernard discusses the hardships these women faced and the complex worlds in which they lived. Interested readers should see their joint essay “Black Women at Work: Race, Family and Community in Greater Halifax” in Judith Fingard and Janet Vey Guildford’s Mothers of the Municipality: Women, Work and Social Policy in post-1945 Halifax. Continue reading →

#IdleNoMore, Histories, and Historians

February 26, 2013 2 Comments

By Adele Perry

Idle no more protesters marching along Government Street in Victoria on December 21, 2012

Recently, there have been some good cases for the utility of history as a discipline in explaining #IdleNoMore. Here I want to add to, and shift, the terms of this discussion by urging historians who study Canada, and the societies that preceded it, and who presume a connection between scholarship and social change, become active allies of #IdleNoMore.

Historians study change over time. A lot of the time the historical record seems to offer up a compelling but deeply depressing litany of horror and trauma: plagues, slavery, dispossession, war, relentless and deadening structures of patriarchy that stunted and ruined lives. Sometimes it seems to go on and on without much respite. But history also shows us that things change, sometimes in ways that we might never anticipate. For those of us committed to social change, history can provide remarkable evidence that however seemingly intransigent and unmoveable, political and economic structures can also give way, shift, and alter, sometimes when they seem perhaps least likely too. Continue reading →

What’s So Funny About Sexism, Racism and Harassment?

February 25, 2013 3 Comments

By Christine McLaughlin

Photo credit: Liz Henry
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhenry/

When I ask my students who identifies as a feminist, usually only a few hesitantly raise their hands. I appreciate their reluctance to label themselves. As Ruth Rosen aptly illustrates in a recent article, feminism has been forcefully infused with negative connotations. Students of women’s history learn how cartoons and other forms of humour have been a key means of demonizing suffragists and feminists, reinforcing negative perceptions of women seeking equal rights.

My focus here is on one tool for maintaining a language of masculine empowerment and feminine and racist oppression: the joke. Uh-oh! Here we go! Another “man-hating,” “over-reacting” “feminazi” who “can’t take a joke.” On the contrary, I love a good joke. But I believe that good jokes should be funny to everyone in the room, not just a historically privileged group. I think good jokes should not make anyone feel demeaned, afraid, hurt or like lesser of a human being. This is not just a personal opinion; many human rights’ codes clearly define jokes about historically oppressed groups as harassment. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Thirteen: Musician Del Barber

February 20, 2013 No Comments

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Last Saturday night in Ottawa, a young musician took the stage at the National Arts Centre and sang about a dream he had had. The dream was interesting because all his favourite historical figures – from Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie – had shown up for a party at his house. The Party Song is a terrific example of how history has an active presence in our lives and how pop culture can be a great disseminator of historical references.

In this episode of the History Slam I talk with singer/songwriter Del Barber about the use of history in his songs as well as how history has influenced his career. Apart The Party Song, we chat about personal histories and how the past plays a role in our daily lives. Given my affinity for the Prairies from my days in Regina and Del’s Winnipeg roots, we also talk about the changing face of the West.

It has often been said that you shouldn’t meet the people of whom you are a fan, because inevitably you will be disappointed. Some of the greatest tales I’ve ever heard have been horror stories about meeting a celebrity who turned out to be less than affable. Fortunately, my experience with Del Barber was the exact opposite of that. Apart from the fact that his show was great, he’s a great guy – generous with his time, gracious in his attitude, and sincere with his answers. It was an interview that I really enjoyed, and hopefully you will too.

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