Is this the new normal? Let's hope not.

By Ian Milligan

The government claims that Library and Archives Canada needs to be modernized so all Canadians can access archival services. Yet the state of Canada’s online collections are small and sorely lacking when compared to their expansive on-site collections. LAC does need to modernize, and the goal of expanding access beyond just Ottawa is actually a laudable one. But what they’re doing here, under the guise of ‘modernization’, is simply cutting services and diminishing our access to Canada’s past. In this post, I want to show you how small and insignificant LAC’s online collections are, why they haven’t taken them seriously, and that if we’re fighting for better on-site access, we might as well fight for better online access too! They are, after all, despite the rhetoric of LAC and the government, not incompatible in the slightest.

What has been happening? Canada’s archives are under attack. Announcements made on May 1st confirmed that Library and Archives Canada will lose 20% of their workforce, that appointments will be needed to access the reference desk, and the shuttering of the National Archival Development Program. LAC is spinning this as a “new approach to service delivery” and makes the following point by way of justification:

LAC’s service statistics provide a vivid illustration of this digital revolution. Our website now gets close to half a million visits per month. In contrast, LAC’s in-person service hub located at 395 Wellington Street, receives about 2,000 visits per month. These two service points are also trending in opposite directions, with online consultations increasing rapidly, and in-person visits declining slowly but steadily.

Despite rhetoric of modernization and looking forward to the digital era, LAC has been comparatively slow in aggressively preparing for the next generation. It has been pointed out by several people that it will be even slower now that 50% of its digitization staff will be cut!

We need to contextualize LAC’s digital collections. Let’s quickly see what the Library of Congress (LOC) in the United States has been up to on this front. Their print collection is already dwarfed by their newest collection of archived born-digital sources. If each and every one of their 26 million books was scanned and digitized at 8MB per book, the collection would be about 200TB (a figure that you can now conceivably store at home). Just from websites alone, the LOC now has 254TB of data, adding 5TB a month. They’re taking the internet seriously. Library and Archives Canada, on the other hand, only collects a “representative sample of Canadian websites,” notably the government, and has about 7TB of data. While some recent pronouncements suggest that LAC is taking born-digital sources seriously are encouraging and should be celebrated, it is a pin compared to a much larger haystack of archival information.

Firstly, there simply isn’t that much there that has been digitized. LAC has an incredible on-site collection for Canadian historians: be it political history, social history, cultural history, military history, etc. If we go to their “about the collection” page, we see that they have: 71,000 films, 2.5 million architectural drawings, millions of books, 21.3 photographs, not to mention the thousands upon thousands of boxes. In that list I provide, they also note that as of 2007 they had “3.18 million megabytes of information in electronic formats.” Sounds, impressive eh? That’s only a bit over 3TB of data. Presumably that doesn’t include their web archive, which dwarfs that, but it starts to give you a sense of the mismatch in size between conventional and digitized historical sources.

They also don’t take many steps to make their online collections (what they have there) fully accessible to researchers. Canadiana.ca provides an Application Programming Interface (a way for a computer program to talk directly to another computer, and speed up research – and let you do new, cool things with the data). Library and Archives Canada does not.

If LAC was really serious about modernization, if they put more of their collection online in a comprehensive manner, if they were open to new forms of research, and if they didn’t do this at the expense of their on-site collections, this would be a good thing.

But, given the state of their online collections, I don’t see any reason to be happy here.

So, as we begin our fight to Save Library and Archives Canada, taking action by sending letters to the Minister of Canadian Heritage as well as the Librarian and Archivist of Canada, why don’t we also call out for better online services. There’s a kernel of truth to some government pronouncements: all Canadians, not just those who can come in person to Ottawa, deserve access to their national archive. But instead of using that chip as a talking point to justify cuts, let’s actually mean it. All Canadians deserve robust archives, be it on-site or online.

Ian Milligan is co-editor of ActiveHistory.ca and is also a postdoctoral fellow with Western University’s Department of History.

Former National Archives building, Ottawa

By Sean Kheraj

The conversation has been ongoing among Canadian historians for the past few years, especially since the federal government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, altered the contents of the official citizenship guide for new Canadians to place greater emphasis on military history and the monarchy while ignoring or downplaying the country’s history of progressive social policy, multiculturalism, and social justice movements. Many Canadian historians have been concerned that the Conservative Party of Canada is attempting to reinvent the narrative of the country’s past for its own political purposes.

Professor Ian McKay explicitly outlined this case in his keynote address at the 2011 New Frontiers in Graduate History conference at York University. He has also published a complete articulation of this argument in his forthcoming book (co-authored with Jamie Swift) called, Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety. A group of historians recently collaborated to publish the People’s Citizenship Guide: A Response to Conservative Canada in an effort to counterbalance the refashioning of Canadian history to suit the political interests of the governing party in Ottawa.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s recent transformation of the federal budget and his government’s policy of mass layoffs of federal employees has initiated a takeover of the public financing of historical research by the political branch of government. Cuts to the funding of the federal government’s three independent granting councils, including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), constitute a total budget reduction of more than $40 million dollars. While the funding to SSHRC is set to be reduced, Heritage Canada has increased its direct control over the funding of historical research directly out of the minister’s office through new program-specific funding opportunities, including the War of 1812 Commemoration Fund and the Diamond Jubilee Community Celebration fund.

“So you think this government is interested in Canadian History?” asks Professor Eric Sager from the University of Victoria in a recent Times-Colonist op-ed, “Think again.” These policy changes affirm the recent argument of Jeffrey Simpson in his Globe and Mail column in which he alleged that “[t]he Conservatives display two-facedness in the telling of history, systematically reducing the role of the informed and the neutral in explaining the country to Canadians, while enhancing the capacity of the government to cherry-pick what it chooses to highlight.” The role of the informed will be crippled through budget cuts like the ones to Library and Archives Canada. According to the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), these cuts “will have devastating effects on our nation’s ability to acquire and preserve its history.”

At first glace this statement may seem like an exaggeration, but the proposed cuts cited by CAUT suggest otherwise:
• the elimination of 21 of the 61 archivists and archival assistants that deal with non-governmental records
• the reduction of digitization and circulation staff by 50%
• a significant reduction in the number of staff that deal with preservation and conservation of documents
• the closure of the interlibrary loans unit

These so-called “austerity” policies have also led to the scheduled closures of several government libraries and archives. And Parks Canada, one the main branches of the federal government that conducts direct historical research, has recently suffered a massive round of job losses.
In short, within the wider Conservative Party of Canada’s ideological agenda to reduce the role of government in the lives of Canadians lies a contradictory policy initiative for direct cabinet control over the financing, research, and production of knowledge about Canadian history. If left unchallenged, this anti-intellectual politicization of history, as Simpson suggests, will result in “a deformed version of the past.”

Sean Kheraj is an assistant professor of Canadian and environmental history at York University. He blogs at http://seankheraj.com

By Ian Milligan

The splash page for the Globe and Mail's "Canada's Heritage Since 1844" website.

Online digitized newspapers are great. If you have access (either through a free database or via a personal or library subscription), you can quickly find the information you need: a specific search for a last name might help you find ancestors, a search for a specific event can find historical context for it (i.e. the Christie Pits Riots, or a certain strike), and generally the results are beautiful, render relatively well, and are – crucially – immediate.

In some ways, however, poor and misunderstood use of online newspapers can skew historical research. In a conference presentation or a lecture, it’s not uknown to see the familiar yellow highlighting of found searchwords on projected images: indicative of how the original primary material was obtained. But this historical approach generally usually remains unspoken, without a critical methodological reflection. As I hope I’ll show here, using Pages of the Past uncritically for historical research is akin to using a volume of the Canadian Historical Review with 10% or so of the pages ripped out. Historians, journalists, policy researchers, genealogists, and amateur researchers need to at least have a basic understanding of what goes on behind the black box.

An example of a "results list" from the Globe and Mail's newspaper database. It all seems so orderly and systematic.

And the ensuing results, a newspaper article focused on the Artistic Woodwork Strike of 1973

An amazing array of information at your fingertips (but…)

In Canada, when one thinks of online digitized newspapers, the Toronto Star’s Pages of the Past and the Globe and Mail’s “Canada’s Heritage from 1844″ often come to mind. There are other wonderful collections, of course, notably the incredible historical newspapers of British Columbia collection, but the Star and the Globe are most commonly used.

The Star and Globe can be accessed through an institutional or personal subscription (you can also access these two databases through libraries like the Toronto Public Library – with a valid library card). You can search by a specific word, or a specific phrase, and narrow it down by a date range. A keyword search (such as for “Artistic Woodwork” at right) and a date range can quickly take you to a seemingly systematic, quantified, and perhaps even complete listing of relevant articles. History laid before you, neatly ordered, from the comfort of your home, library, or office. Another click, and you’re brought to a PDF version of the scanned document: complete with placement, accompanying advertisements, etc.

An example of a feature, front-page, above-the-fold article on the Artistic Woodwork strike that does not appear in a keyword search.

But we need to use these databases with greater caution. In the example at right, for example, the Globe and Mail‘s database has correctly found a large feature article on the Artistic Woodwork strike of 1973. Yet it is a continuance of an article from Page One. That headline, the first page of the newspaper, does not appear in the search list. If one just uses the search engine, you miss this vivid headline, picture, and entire story.

Why?

Primarily, the issue lies in faulty optical character recognition (OCR). This issue is not just limited to these newspapers, and is an inherent flaw in large projects. Tim Hitchcock has described the uncritical use of digitized sources as “roulette dressed up as scholarship,” as historians are “not even bothering to apply the kind of critical approach that historians built their professional authority upon.”

What about the specific case of the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail online? These databases were assembled at the turn of the present century, and indeed, the Toronto Star is heralded on Paper of Record’s (the company responsible for the database creation) as the “first newspaper in the world to have its entire history … digitized.” It was created quickly, as Bruce Gillespie reported in 2003 in his “All the News That’s Fit to Scan”:

 Using technology developed in-house, Cold North Wind [Paper of Record's parent company] converts documents stored on rolled microfilm into digital computer files. It is an automated process that works quickly-Mr. Huggins says two million pages from The Toronto Star’s 110-year history were archived in less than four months.

This incredible speed and the use of microfilm originals comes at a cost, however. The former means that basic OCR is used: hyphenations are not covered (problematic in smaller columns, where Woodwork might be hyphenated as Wood-work across two lines), if microfilm streaks obscure a letter, if it was slightly tilted, or if the OCR just plain misses a character. This is currently unavoidable with large-scale digitization projects: I am currently OCRing a large collection of word processed documents from 1997 onwards – about as perfect a sample as you can get, and while the OCR under these ideal circumstances is well above 99%, it can never be perfect. Quite frankly, without human proof-reading and additional layers, you can never be completely convinced of your accuracy. Furthermore, comprehensive database use requires some limited understanding of Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is a complicated field of research, and a proper search query would also need to be formulated to pick up alternates such as ‘Woodworking,’ etc. without unnecessarily duplication of results.

Another issue lies in the proprietary nature of the Star and Globe databases: I have been trying to track down their technical support team to discuss a research project, to no avail. E-mails often bounce back from the addresses provided on their search portals, and they can be a bit impenetrable. This is understandable, in a way: unlike other national newspaper projects, they are run by private companies.

So what can we do?

Now, with a strike (as in my example above), one could pop the date ranges in, go through each newspaper throughout the period, and explore specific events. This would avoid the above problem. But studies that purport to trace social or cultural trends over a long period of time can fall into the habit of relying on these databases without critical reflection. That’s not to say that they should not use them – we can find most articles, especially by the postwar period and its attending better image quality. Indexes are hardly perfect alternatives. History has always had an element of serendipity.

Indeed, we cannot and should not abandon our use of digitized online databases. Despite their faults, they allow us to cover large swaths of time and space on a realistic timeline, and are much quicker than using microfilm. They also open up new frontiers of large-scale data and textual processing, although the current user interface and databases are not terribly amenable to this form of work.

But we do need to be cognizant. Dissertations and articles that extensively rely on these databases need to be up-front about the issue and at least mention how they have dealt with or recognized the very real and concrete limitations inherent in this form. In my on-going survey of English-language dissertations and other historical work, I have found that while these databases appear to be having some impact on citation counts, few scholars note their database use. Doctoral supervisors, journal editors, bloggers, public historians, etc. need to realize how these databases are potentially shaping professional and amateur historical inquiry in Canada.

So next time you’re using the databases, think about what’s going on. Are you getting everything? Are you missing something? Should you do some digging around a hotspot of hits on a given date? In all cases, we should be more up-front about the tools we’re using and how they might be shaping our research.

By Ian Milligan

Today’s Air Canada wildcat strikes, which led to widespread delays and cancellations at Toronto’s Pearson and Montreal’s Dorval airports, surprised many Canadians. That it could all begin with a seemingly minor issue – the suspension of a number of workers who sarcastically applauded Labour Minister Lisa Raitt as she debarked from a flight last night – is, however, familiar when compared to the “wildcat wave” that was in full swing throughout the summer of 1966.

Indeed, the events of the last 36 hours are reminiscent of several large events that swept the Canadian industrial scene throughout that hot summer of labour unrest. In this post, I’ll take us back to that wild summer of unrest, and help show that the Air Canada wildcat strike is hardly a unique phenomenon.

The “wildcat wave” of 1965-66 was without any statistical precedent. The comparatively quiescent labour movement suddenly exploded with roughly 575 strikes over those two years, with somewhere between 20 and 50 percent of them being illegal wildcat strikes (the statistics are notoriously opaque). I can’t do justice to it all in a short blog post, but I can give two stories that show how two very large case studies started.

SUDBURY – 14 July 1966

The spark was lit 2,200 feet below the surface in the Levack Mine (map), a remote and undesirable outpost of the International Nickel Company near Sudbury, Ontario, when a group of low-seniority young men opened their lunch pails in July 1966. Due to rising tensions between their union, Local 6500 of the United Steelworkers, and their employer over a recently expired collective agreement – languishing in Toronto-based conciliation hearings – they were forbidden to gather on the job. Their foreman stopped them from gathering, told them to close their lunch pails and carry on to work without eating; as the few “old hands” explained to the newer workers, this was a severe provocation. Miners worked “collar to collar,” or surface-to-surface, and work assignments were always to be given underground while they took an initial break. This was violating a twenty-year old tradition.

The miners refused and were sent to the surface. Word spread, the entire shift throughout the mine began returning to the surface, gathering at the cages that would return them to the surface: taunting foremen, banging lunch pails, singing songs and chants. By the next morning, word had spread, picket lines thrown up, and the union had lost control. It would take almost a month of significant union and police efforts to bring these young workers under control, and lead to enduring changes in union discipline within one of Canada’s most important trade unions.

Why did they strike? It was about sandwiches, but that is not all – that was the spark. There had been tense contract negotiations throughout 1966, a union that was seen as perhaps being weak (the United Steelworkers of America had only won the right to represent workers instead of the communist Mine Mill union in 1962 and had faced a re-vote in 1965), work-to-rule was ongoing, and graffiti throughout the facility argued “No contract, no work – - July 10.” Young people were gathered together, several had been brought in from Newfoundland en masse and were living together, growing angrier and angrier at a company that was perceived to be exploiting them, and the situation was ripe on many levels for an explosion. So here, we must understand the wildcat as part of a broader phenomenon: growing anger, structural issues, and ongoing concern.

Thanks to the role of youth, it was a unique event. As one anonymous striker reported to a researcher, “It was like a festival – there were a lot of people around the gates – there were a lot of ‘Newfies’ … around with their guitars and there was drinking and singing and dancing in the streets.” While the strike eventually ended with a mass vote of the workers to return, the contract made Inco workers better paid, although some gains would be lost in their drive to make sure everybody got rehired.

HAMILTON – 3 August 1966

Young workers took a militant lead elsewhere. Indeed, that same month, almost sixteen thousand members of Steelworkers Local 1005 wildcatted at Hamilton’s Steel Company of Canada (Stelco). Young workers had similarly been concentrated in an undesirable low-seniority position, and after being provoked by a foreman, ignored their stewards in walking out.

Stelco was dramatically expanding through the 1960s, growing from 7,258 employees in 1960 to 11,762 on the eve of the wildcat strike in July 1966. Young workers were thus getting hired en masse, and then put into the crappiest, lowest seniority positions en masse – a pressure cooker of tension and resentment. Tensions were growing throughout 1966, a bargaining year. The usual pressure for a settlement was compounded by fears surrounding technological change and automation. Low-seniority men, who would have the most to lose in automation-related job loss, felt this tension acutely. On the warm summer evening of 3 August 1966, negotiators met with the provincial Conciliation Board, a central instrument of postwar labour legislation designed to cool down tensions. It would not work here.

That night, young men gathered in the lunchroom of the Hot Strip Finishing Department, a unit comprised largely of low-seniority men. They were heatedly discussing the negotiating team’s progress, decrying their lack of information. As tensions rose, one young worker burst in. A foreman had told him that “you guys haven’t got the guts to walk out,” he declared, setting the room off. “Let’s show the f——!,” the young men declared, as they began shutting down equipment, and gathering others together. A union steward came over to tell them to “go back and settle it the union way” to no avail, as members streamed out of the plant and quickly set up picket lines. The first picket line was about 200 men strong and grew, especially after the overnight shift arrived and honoured it. Through the night, the line grew to about 3,000 members. Union leaders publicly declared the strike illegal, denouncing it as “irresponsible” and “futile,” and ordered members back to work, but were ignored.

This was, needless to say, an enormous industrial action. Some 10,992 workers were now on strike. Workers continued to honour pickets. The local president, John Morgan, came down to the lines himself to make his stance clear: the men had to return to work, the lines had to dissipate, and that penalties would be severe if they did not listen to him. “We’re fed up with you, we don’t want you,” shouted one picketer, and several physically assaulted Morgan. Hamilton Police placed a tearful Morgan into protective custody, before 300 officers (out of a total police force of 420) broke the picket line to allow management into the plant. Afterwards, picketers even managed to stop a freight train from entering Stelco through the force of their numbers. The street scene was remarkable. About five hundred men now milled around in front of Stelco, moving in and out of nearby restaurants and bars. Cars were burned. Thirty-three mostly young men were arrested for variously obstructing or assaulting police, or causing a disturbance. At one point, picketers sat down en masse, obstructing traffic.

It would take another five days for the wildcat to end, thanks to a majority vote of union members (many of whom decried the role of young workers). Police eventually restored order, the action moved off the streets, and a City Clerk-supervised vote at the Civic Stadium (today’s Ivor Wynne) saw 4,319 members favouring a return to work, 1,142 against, and hundreds more leaving without voting. Wives held the line while the Local held its largest union meeting in recent history.

CONCLUSIONS

Wildcats aren’t new. But in a context of growing pressure on the job, both from management and government (especially acute in the case of Air Canada), small provocations and sparks can unsurprisingly lead to massive eruptions. While today’s Air Canada’s strike was not on the scale of the Hamilton or Sudbury explosions, it does remind us of an earlier period where such labour unrest was relatively common.

By Karen Dearlove

Restored tall grass prairie at Chiefswood National Historic Site

Historic house museums and other restored living history sites provide visitors with firsthand experiences of what life was like during different periods of the past.  These types of sites generally involve restored historic buildings filled with period furniture and furnishings, as well as costumed interpreters.  Many of these sites now include historic gardens and other historic landscape re-creations as part of the visitor experience.  Like historic houses and artifacts, historic gardens offer a glimpse into the past.

There is a wide variety of historic gardens and landscapes in Ontario.  Fulford Place National Historic Site in Brockville, for example,  is home to recently restored significant historic designed gardens.  The original gardens were designed by the American landscape firm the Olmsted Brothers, known for their work on New York’s Central Park.  Using archaeological evidence of the original planting beds, historic photographs and sources, the Olmsted Brothers’ garden was brought back to life at Fulford Place.  Historic designed gardens range from restored elaborate designs like the Olmsted Brothers’ gardens at Fulford Place, to the whimsical “pocket garden” of McDougall Cottage in Cambridge.

Historic gardens take many forms, not just elaborate designed landscapes.  Vernacular historic kitchen gardens, or vegetable gardens, provide opportunities to educate about agricultural history, culinary history and household economies of the past.  In the Grand River watershed the living history site Doon Heritage Village, features several examples of historic vernacular gardens.  The Martin Farm Garden is a restored “four-square” kitchen garden, rife with religious symbolism drawn from Mennonite life.  In the nearby Sararas-Bricker garden a variety of heritage vegetables are grown that would have fed the family and supplemented the household economy.  The Joseph Schneider Haus museum in nearby downtown Kitchener also features a kitchen garden representing the early pioneer family.

Another type of historic landscape is the restored tall grass prairie found at Chiefswood National Historic Site.  Unlike vernacular gardens or designed gardens, Chiefswood’s tall grass prairie appears unplanned and wild.  As part of the restoration of the historic house in the late 1990s a Historic Landscape Conservation Study was conducted that utilized historical photos and accounts, as well as archaeological evidence to document the history of Chiefswood’s grounds from 1856 to the present.  The study concluded that during the period that Chiefswood was occupied by the Johnson Family, the grounds contained several distinct areas of use, including a productive nut grove (walnut, butternut and hickory trees), an orchard, a kitchen garden with a melon patch, cultivated grape vines and raspberry bushes, and a large grassy meadow.  The results of this study outlined plans for the restoration and conservation of Chiefswood’s grounds to their historical state.

Towering Indian Cup plant in Chiefswood's tall grass prairie.

Complete restoration or rehabilitation of the grounds was deemed largely unfeasible, and instead, rehabilitation or adaptive re-use was considered the most appropriate course of action for Chiefswood.  The study recommended rehabilitation of the meadow into a tall grass prairie featuring plants indigenous to the area.  Tall grass prairies are natural grassland habitats that used to be found throughout the central United States, Ontario and Manitoba.  Today, less than 1% of this original habitat remains, much lost to agriculture, development and invasive species.  Common plants in Chiefswood’s tall grass prairie include Ohio Spiderwort, Wild Bergamot, Milkweed, Virginia Mountain Mint, St. John’s Wort, Yellow Coneflower, and the towering Indian Cup Plant.

At Chiefswood visitors can walk along pathways through the tall grass prairie, and with the use of seasonal brochures (Spring, Summer and Fall), can identify the different plants and learn about their traditional medicinal and other uses.  The Indian Cup plant, for example, which grows to an astounding 12 feet tall at Chiefswood, was commonly used by different First Nations people for pain relief and to prevent vomiting.  The sap from the plant was also collected and chewed like gum.  Chiefswood’s tall grass prairie not only provides an important habitat for indigenous plants rarely found elsewhere in the Grand River watershed, but an opportunity to explore a historic landscape that demonstrates how First Nations people in the Grand River watershed interacted with their natural environment.

By: Luke Stewart

Conference Poster

The conference Looking Back, Moving Forward: War Resisters in North America took place at Steelworkers Hall in Toronto, Ontario, on Friday September 23 and Saturday September 24, 2011. The gathering addressed the plight of American war resisters who fled to Canada from 2004 to the present by providing a historical context for the roots of war resistance in North America. The conference also demanded action on the part of the Government of Canada to respect immigration and refugee law in Canada by rescinding Operational Bulletin 202 and to grant sanctuary to all American war resisters who fled to Canada during the “war on terror”. “This is of more than historical interest,” said Tom Riley, a Vietnam War resister and activist in the War Resisters Support Campaign. “It’s about learning from the past so we can support resistance today and in the future.”

The purpose of the conference was to offer public education about an aspect of North American history – cross-border migration during times of conflict and war – that is increasingly under attack in Canadian political circles in the early decades of the twenty-first century. The conference deconstructed the role of citizenship, civil disobedience, and conscientious objection during times of war. Moreover, we tried to illuminate the relationship between the Canadian and the United States governments during times of war and what this means for the twenty-first century.

We did this from the vantage point of those who have resisted wars: the veterans, the draft resisters, the family members of resisters, and support campaigners.  There have been other gatherings in 2006 and 2010 and we wanted to keep the cross-border dialogue going. Politicians and pundits try to score points with the public by making fancy statements of indignation towards these, in Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney’s own words, “bogus refugees”.

War Resisters June 2008. Photo: WRSC

We provided a space for war resisters to tell their own stories and for Iraq war resisters a chance to tell the public what information the Immigration and Refugee Board refused to hear up until very recently with consecutive appeals court victories for Dean Walcott and Chris Vassey.

Since January 2004 and the arrival of Jeremy Hinzman – who came to Canada as a conscientious objector to the war in Iraq – the War Resisters Support Campaign has supported hundreds of American war resisters and has mobilized public opinion to support these war resisters (64 percent in 2008, Angus Reid) who refused to participate in the illegal and immoral war in Iraq. “So long as they have wars, there are going to be war resisters,” said Frank Showler, a conscientious objector to the Second World War. “That is the continued importance of this advocacy work.”

Panel Discussions

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The conference featured a variety of speakers – such as Iraq War veterans, war resisters from World War Two to the ‘war on ‘terror’, lawyers, human rights activists, and academics– on five panel discussions. There were also information booths, letter writing campaigns, and a continued determination to see the granting of some kind of sanctuary to American war resisters.

Friday 23 September 2011

Resisting Wars from WWII to ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’

The first panel discussion – “Resisting Wars from WWII to ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’” featured Frank Showler, conscientious objector during World War Two; Lee Zaslofsky, military deserter from the Vietnam War; Bruce Beyer,  draft resister and member of the Buffalo Nine; Carl Mirra, Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm conscientious objector; and Jamine Aponte, war resister from Operation Iraq Freedom. The panel was moderated by Luke Stewart of Historians Against the War.

This panel discussion was design in order to demonstrate that there is a history of resisting war in both Canada and the United States.

Saturday 24 September 2011

Veteran Testimony

L-R: Michelle Robidoux, Chuck Wiley, Dean Walcott, Kim Rivera. Photo: Alex Lisman

This panel featured veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom, including: Chuck Wiley, Dean Walcott, and Kimberly Rivera. By offering firsthand accounts by the war resisters themselves, we can gain a better understanding of how to stop future wars by educating the public about the importance of soldiers’ experiences and their decisions to stop participating in particular wars. Listening to the soldiers’ stories highlights the importance of solidarity work and building support structures. The panel was moderated by Michelle Robidoux of the War Resisters Support Campaign.

War Crimes and the Law of Conscientious Objection:
A North American Context

L-R: Lee Zaslofsky, Staughton Lynd, Michael Mandel, Jeremy Hinzman. Photo: James Swarts

This panel featured Staughton Lynd, radical historian and lawyer from the United States; Jeremy Hinzman, conscientious objector from Operation Iraqi Freedom and first war resister to come to Canada in January 2004; and Michael Mandel, international lawyer and professor at Osgoode Hall law school at York Unviersity. The panel discusses the law of conscientious objection in the United States and how Canada has shifted from a war resister haven during the Vietnam War to a war resister prosecutor in the fabled “war on terror”. The panel was moderated by Lee Zaslofsky of the War Resisters Support Campaign.

War Resistance and Canadian Immigration and Refugee Policy

L-R: Patricia Molloy, Alyssa Manning, Gloria Nafzinger, S.K. Hussan. Photo: James Swarts

This panel featured Alyssa Manning, war resister lawyer from Parkdale Community Legal Services; Gloria Nafzinger, refugee coordinator with Amnesty International – Canada; and S.K. Hussan from No One Is Illegal – Toronto.  The panel discusses the implications of not just war resisters from the United States, but those seeking refuge from wars and the 21st century’s humanitarian struggles. This panel discussed government policy, the courts, deportation, and Canada’s downward slide in international humanitarian efforts and what we can do about it. The panel was moderated by Patricia Molloy of the War Resisters Support Campaign.

Building  a North American Antiwar Movement

Photo: James Swarts

The final panel discussion featured Michelle Robidoux of the War Resisters Support Campaign and Sid Lacombe of the Canadian Peace Alliance (speakers were unfortunately unable to make it from Afghans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out). The panel discussed the history of the Canadian antiwar movement and the cross-border relationships with United States peace groups and how to move forward in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The panel was moderated by Jesse McLaren of the War Resisters Support Campaign.

The gathering was able to raise $1422.02 for the War Resisters Support Campaign which will go towards continued legal support as well as to other forms of support the Campaign is able to provide.

The gathering was endorsed by: the War Resisters Support Campaign, Historians Against the War, Christian Peacemaker Teams – Canada, the Canadian Friends Service Committee (Quakers), the Canadian Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers Toronto Area Council, activehistory.ca, the Canadian Peace Alliance, the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, Afghans for Peace, Conscience Canada, No One Is Illegal – Toronto, WPIRG, OPIRG-Toronto, Amnesty International, Military Families Speak Out, and OPIRG-York.

Luke Stewart is a member of Historians Against the War and is a Ph.D. Candidate in history at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Stewart was the main organizer of the conference.

Canadian history section of Chapters bookstore, North London, Ontario, May 2010.

ActiveHistory.ca is happy to announce its first paper of 2012: “A Polyphony of Synthesizers: Why Every Historian of Canada Should Write a History of Canada,” by Alan MacEachern.

Here is Alan’s introductory blurb:

The following was my contribution to a 2010 Canadian Historical Association roundtable, “So What IS the Story? Exploring Fragmentation and Synthesis in Current Canadian Historiography.” In it, I tried to a) graphically illustrate the marginalization of Canadian historical scholarship, b) argue why demography is likely only to make this problem worse, and c) suggest a response. All in under 1400 words. As far as I know, only one person was at all convinced, let alone inspired, by my presentation: me. It got me thinking about how one might go about writing a history of Canada that would necessarily cover the entire country from the beginning to the 21^st century, that would treat Canada in global terms, and that would be relevant. Last month, I published a very, very early outline of such a history, “A Little Essay on Big.” In an uncharacteristic fit of confidence, I’ve dusted off my presentation and asked ActiveHistory.ca if they’d like it, largely unchanged. I welcome your thoughts.

You can read Alan’s paper here.

The Programming Historian

Depending on your vantage point, we have a looming opportunity – or a looming problem. Historical digital sources have reached a scale where they defy conventional analysis and now call out for computational analysis. The Internet Archive alone has 2.9 million texts, there are 2.6 million pages of historical newspapers archived at the Chronicling America site of the US Library of Congress, the McCord Museum at McGill University has over 80,000 historical photographs, and Google Books has now digitized fifteen million books out of their total goal of 130 million. Archives are increasingly committed to preserving cultural heritage materials in digital, rather than more traditional analog, forms. This is perhaps best exemplified in Canada by digitization priorities at Library and Archives Canada. The amount of accessible digital information continues to grow daily, making digital humanities projects increasingly feasible, and for that matter, necessary.

In this post, I will do two things. Firstly, I will give a sense of how much information is out there, and make the case for why Canadian historians need to start thinking about it. Secondly, I will introduce readers to the Programming Historian, a wonderful resources that at least puts you on the right track to a programming frame of mind.

TMI?

Too much information? (Photo of FEMA Publications Warehouse, WikiMedia Commons - http://bit.ly/zjmlYc

Information overload is not new. People have long worried about the impact of too much information. In the 16th century, the German priest Martin Luther decried that the “multitude of books [were] a great evil,” in the 19th century Edgar Allan Poe bemoaned that “[t]he enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age,” and as recently as 1970, American historian Lewis Mumford lamented that “the overproduction of books will bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance.” The rise of born-digital sources must thus be seen in this continuous context of hand wringing around the expansion and rise of information.

Despite the frustrations of microfilm for today’s historians, as well as the pitfalls of separating the wheat from the chaff amongst rising numbers of modern sources, historians have undoubtedly benefitted from these technical developments. This is perhaps disproportionately for those engaged in social and cultural pursuits. Historians will profit meaningfully from born-digital sources. These, however, do present added – albeit surmountable – challenges due to their scope and production processes. Sources do not always have attributable or reliable authorship, are often undated, but in aggregate can give a sense of the zeitgeist of a time.

Library of Congress (Photo from WikiMedia Commons - http://bit.ly/ArU8YZ)

Storage price is falling. For example, James Gleick [in his book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood] estimates that the Library of Congress collection is around 10TB (although the LOC itself claims around 200TB). These would previously have been unimaginable figures; I can now pick up 10TB of data storage for under a thousand dollars. Born-digital collections are larger, of course: the LOC’s digital collection is 254TB, larger than their print holdings, and the Internet Archive now has 3 Petabytes (PB) of information, growing at 12TB/month! In Canada, LAC has about 4TB of federal government web information and 7TB in its own internet archive. Information is also being preserved through programs such as the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s September 11th Digital Archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (focusing on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita), and, as of writing, the #Occupy archive. Online content is curated and preserved en masse: photographs, news reports, blog posts, and now tweets. These complement more traditional efforts at collecting and preserving oral histories and personal recollections, which are then geo-tagged, transcribed, and placed online.

What can we do about this conventional and especially born-digital deluge? There are no simple answers, but historians must begin to conceptualize new additions to their traditional research and pedagogical toolkits.

Where to Start: Programming

By the end of the Programming Historian, you'll have a basic know-how of Python and will be able to tackle projects requiring textual analysis.

One important thing we can do with this deluge of information is learn how to interact with digital information on a mass scale. Luckily, we have a tremendous resource available to us: The Programming Historian, by William Turkel and Alan MacEachern, hosted on the Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE) site. Why might you want to open up this free, open-access website book?

• If you were to try to deal with born-digital sources in a traditional manner, you would spend A LOT of time flicking through websites. Much of it hasn’t been curated, and realistically, you could not read every blog comment published on a given day in Canada, navigate the tweets, or so forth. For this, you will need computational analysis.
• The same holds true for the conventional array of information discussed above: if you want to use 2.6 million newspaper pages to their full potential, there must be a way to “distant read” it.
• Digital history is ‘hot.’ The American Historical Association, meeting right now, is full of panels and twitter has been afire with the field. Even if you do not necessarily see yourself using programming languages, it behooves you to be able to understand it.
• And, most importantly, it isn’t that hard, and it doesn’t take that much time. You could move through the whole guide in a weekend, or – better yet – break it into small chunks, spending 20-30 minutes here and there.
• Finally, I believe we’ll also have to equip the next generation of historians, as I’ve written about elsewhere on ActiveHistory.ca.

The Programming Historian is very straight forward, but by the end of it, you’ll be able to do the following:

• In an automated, systematic fashion, you will be able to take a website and extract all of the words from it for further analysis.
• Establish word frequency, similar to what a Wordle word cloud displays (the possibile utility of this is discussed elsewhere on this site). Indeed, you will be able to make your very own tag clouds!
• Move beyond word frequency to see the keyword-in-context – i.e. you see that the word ‘aboriginal’ appears a hundred times in a given site, so why not see where it has appeared. This enables you to move very quickly to the relevant information.
• Download and harvest information automatically. Say you find a large collection of a hundred websites. Rather than clicking repeatedly through each to download the information, a simple script can do it for you!

Conclusion (and a proviso about why we don’t all have to be programmers!)

Don’t be afraid. It’s New Years, so why not make it your resolution as a historian to figure out some of these very basic steps. It could make you a better historian, or in any case, will equip you to figure out what’s going on. In any case, it’s an additional tool in one’s toolkit. Unlike earlier social science histories of counting with computers in the 1970s (which did revolutionize areas of historical inquiry), it is important to remember that we can use broad analysis to find issues, but then move dynamically down into context.

That all said, historians will not all have to become programmers. Just as not all historians need a firm grasp of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), or a developed understanding of the methodological implications of community-based oral history, or in-depth engagement with cutting edge demographic models, not all historians have to approach their trade from a computational perspective. Nor should they. Computational history – to use only a few examples – does not replace close reading, traditional archival inquiry, or going into communities to uncover notions of collective memory or trauma. Indeed, computational historians will play a facilitative role and provide a broader reading context; yet there will still be historians, collecting relevant primary and secondary sources, analyzing and contextualizing them, situating them in convincing narratives or explanatory frameworks, and disseminating their findings to wider audiences.

Heritage White Oak Tree in Cambridge

- Sergeant Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)

While many of us may be familiar with the designation of built heritage properties under the Ontario Heritage Act, recently municipalities have been using the Ontario Heritage Act to designate individual trees as heritage trees.  Municipalities like Burlington, Pelham, Thorold, Cambridge, and most recently Brant, have designated individual trees under the Ontario Heritage Act.

First enacted in 1975, the Ontario Heritage Act enables municipalities to pass by-laws designating individual properties as having cultural heritage value through Part IV of the Act.  This designation provides some protection for the property from demolition, as well as regulates potential alterations to the property to maintain its heritage value.  Larger areas can be designated under Part V of the Act as Heritage Conservation Districts.

In recent years the definition of cultural heritage resources covered under the Ontario Heritage Act has been expanded to include not only the commonly understood Built Heritage Resources, defined as “one or more significant buildings (including fixtures or equipment located in or forming part of a building), structures, earthworks, monuments, installations, or remains that have cultural heritage value,” but also Cultural Heritage Landscapes.  Cultural Heritage Landscapes are defined as a “geographical area that human activity has modified and that has cultural heritage value.”  These areas can include “one or more groupings of individual heritage features, such as structures, spaces, archaeological sites, and natural elements, which together form a significant type of heritage form distinct from that of its constituent elements or parts…villages, parks, gardens, battlefields, mainstreets and neighbourhoods, cemeteries, trails, and industrial complexes of cultural heritage value.”  The addition of Cultural Heritage Landscapes as well as other amendments to the Ontario Heritage Act made in 2005, have included natural landscape features, such as trees, as integral parts of cultural heritage landscapes and built heritage properties that should be protected.

With these changes in the understanding of cultural heritage, municipalities began designating individual trees under the Ontario Heritage Act.  In 2008 the City of Cambridge passed a by-law to designate a 130 year-old White Oak tree under the Ontario Heritage Act.  This tree survived a disastrous flood of the Grand River in 1974.  Several one-hundred year old workers’ cottages in the vicinity of the tree had to be demolished after the ’74 flood, with the construction of a levee system along the banks of the Grand River and the raising of the grade of the land by five feet.  At that time John Kingswood, forester for the City of Cambridge, decided to save the then 100 year old White Oak Tree on the grounds.  He constructed a well around the tree and a system of drainage pipes to feed the tree’s root system.  Today the heritage designated White Oak tree is a center-piece of the Cambridge Sculpture Garden on the banks of the Grand River in downtown Cambridge.  At the time of its designation, Cambridge’s White Oak was only one of ten heritage designated trees in Ontario.

The most recent heritage designated tree in Ontario is a massive Black Walnut tree located in Brant County.  Estimated at more than 150 years old, the tree may have originally been planted as a cultivated nut-bearing tree on a country estate.

While there are few examples of preserved built heritage in Ontario dating back over 200 years, there are at least two heritage designated trees that have been standing for over 250 years.  Oakville has designated a 250-year old White Oak that was narrowly saved from being cut down for a road expansion project in 2006.  Nearby Burlington designated a 300 year-old White Oak, that for hundred of years appeared on surveyors’ maps as a significant landmark distinguishing borders like Brant’s Block, and the border between Burlington and Aldershot.

The designation of these trees and others in Ontario speaks to a growing realization that cultural heritage isn’t just about old buildings and quaint downtowns, but the preservation of diverse elements of our landscape, including natural heritage and trees, that capture our human history and the history of our environment.

The next Approaching the Past workshop is scheduled for Tuesday November 29th, from 5-7 pm at the Zion Schoolhouse, 1091 Finch Ave East, Toronto.  The theme of this workshop is Secret Lives: Affective Learning, Using drama to teach history.  The workshop features performances and demonstrations that integrate teaching history through historical drama.  The event is free, but please RSVP to approachingthepast-toronto.com.  Approaching the Past Workshops are sponsored by THEN/HIER, in partnership with the Archives of Ontario, the City of Toronto, ActiveHistory.ca and OHASSTA.