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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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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.)
Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

Commemorative Controversies: Edward Cornwallis, Collective Contention, and Historical Memory

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“Cornwallis Park, Halifax, Nova Scotia,” 12 July 2011. Photo by Hantsheroes.

“Cornwallis Park, Halifax, Nova Scotia,” 12 July 2011. Photo by Hantsheroes.

By Lachlan MacKinnon

On 30 May 2013, the controversial statue of Edward Cornwallis standing in downtown Halifax was once again thrust into public debate. That morning, the rear of the monument’s base was found to have been graffitotagged with the word “fake.” Similarly, the plaque bearing Cornwallis’s name was defaced with the words “self-righteous ass.” This was the latest salvo in a contentious discussion about the role of public commemoration in Halifax, the importance of these sites in our historical memory, and contestations over “whose history” is memorialized, commemorated, and glorified.

Continue reading →

The Toronto Flood of 2013: Actions from the Past, a Warning for the New Normal?

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The storm with downtown in the distance. Photo posted by Amy Rensby.

The storm with downtown Toronto in the distance. Photo posted by Amy Rensby.

By Jay Young

This rain will never stop, I thought, as water cascaded from my apartment window and fell from the sky at record pace.  On July 8th, Toronto experienced the greatest amount of rainfall in a single day ever recorded in that city. A torrent of 126 millimetres of rain hit the ground, more than a whole month’s average for July. The storm flooded roads, transit infrastructure, and basements. Thousands went to bed that night without power.

The impact of the flood would have been much worse if governments hadn’t acted following the aftermath of Hurricane Hazel, a tropical storm that hit Toronto in 1954. Yet the storm of 2013 also shows that Toronto’s urban environment is still susceptible to damage from flash floods, a phenomenon likely to become more common in upcoming decades. Continue reading →

Podcast: Lyle Dick’s CHA Presidential Address

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Lyle Dick addresses the audience at the 2014 CHA Annual Meeting. Photo: Sean Kheraj

Lyle Dick addresses the audience at the 2014 CHA Annual Meeting. Photo: Sean Kheraj

On June 4th 2013 Lyle Dick delivered his Canadian Historical Association (CHA) presidential address, titled “On Local History and Local Historical Knowledge.” Dick spoke at the CHA Annual Meeting in Victoria, BC. A long time employee with Parks Canada, he is also the author of numerous books and articles on the history of Canada.

Dick’s address is part of a tradition in which outgoing presidents of the CHA reflect on the practice of history and the historical profession in Canada. Dominique Marshall, a professor at Carleton University, replaces Dick as CHA president and introduces him here.

ActiveHistory.ca is happy to present a recording of the address and thanks Lyle for his hard work as CHA president.