The network of links stemming from ianmilligan.ca (activehistory.ca alone was too big!). This gives you a visual sense of the power behind hyperlinked information!

We will need to make dramatic changes to history undergraduate curriculums by aggressively implementing digital literacy programmes. This will benefit both our students and the historical profession.

Why? Let’s imagine how a future historian will tackle the question of what everyday life was in September 2011 – today. She will have a tremendous array of sources at her fingertips: the standard newspaper and media reports and oral interviews that we use today, but also a ton of added sources that would help give a sense of the flavour of daily life. Two hundred million tweets are sent every day. Hundreds of thousands of blog posts. Incredible arrays of commentary, YouTube videos, online comments, viewership and readership numbers will all hopefully be available to this historian.

But how will she read it all? Realistically, nobody is ever going to be able to get through all the tweets for even just one day: let alone categorize, analyze, and meaningfully interact with it. She’ll need to use digital tools. We are at a crossroads. This sort of history won’t be the be all and end all of future historical research, but I believe that somebody is going to do this sort of social history. Let’s make sure our future students are ready for it!

Using Mathematica, I have been able to track the rise and fall of the terms "war" (red) and "peace" (blue) across a comprehensive Top-40 Lyrics Database.

We need to begin thinking about how we are going to train historians of the future, today. Somebody is going to do this work. They are probably sitting in high school or elementary school classrooms today. When they show up at the university, let’s make sure that we’re ready to train them to write the history of today.. tomorrow. This is not simply for historians who fashion themselves as social scientists, as opposed to those who see themselves as pure humanists. It’s about deploying a tool which can provide information through which we can drape our stories, our interviews, our human anecdotes, etc.

Historians need to begin thinking about digital literacy and writing programs that will help access these sources. What’s going on right now? Tons. I have previously discussed one of the biggest current projects, the Culturomics project and their accessible Google n-gram viewer. You can see the rise and fall of a word or phrase (an ngram) and see how much it has been used across several centuries. It’s an incredible project, albeit not without some caution needed in how it is approached. There are also several digital history projects ongoing, some of which has garnered considerable attention (such as the Criminal Intent project in the New York Times).

This is just a hint of what’s to come. We need to be able to populate these future projects with even more historians. Which means thinking about how to train them today. Training these people by graduate school is simply too late, however. We need to begin training undergraduates in their first year. Indeed, as a recent study carried out at the University of Rochester indicates, students won’t adopt new technologies by the time they get to graduate work – the risks are too high. Let’s get them as undergrads.

What could a digital literacy programme look like for the next generation of historians, so that they’re ready to begin thinking and tackling these issues?

• We’ll need a firm grasp of the historiographic context of this shift – i.e. the old school quantitative historians, who crunched the census of Hamilton for example, or poured considerable time and effort into understanding demographic shift.
• Basic digital tools: What is cloud computing? How can we secure and backup our data?
• How can we digitally organize conventional sources? I’ve discussed this before in my post on Zotero.
• Grasping the SHEER SCOPE of large digital depositories. It’s one thing to say that Google Books has fifteen million books. It’s another to really grasp this. And to further realize what a drop in the bucket that is compared to other repositories of automated data being collected every day.
• Basic programming? The ‘Programming Historian‘ is a great start. What most of us will have to do won’t be so complicated and we need to be able to do it ourselves. While well-funded projects may be able to raise the funds to recruit teams of programmers to join them, or others may form collaborative and interdisciplinary work-teams, many historians will not be able to do so. They should be self-sufficient in this regard, at least for more simple and routine data mining exercises.

Our students should be able to come out of undergraduate history programs and be truly equipped for our knowledge economy and for the future demands of the profession. This will help teaching, research, and labour market outcomes. Information is increasingly being generated by the internet, written on the internet, and being consumed by internet users. People need to be able to create it, interact with it, in a fluent, comfortable manner.

What do you think? Should historians make this shift? Or are there disadvantages that I’m overlooking in my enthusiasm for this field of research? I’d love to hear from you all, especially as I begin my next project (a digital history of postwar English-Canadian youth).

Generally speaking, I am against the censorship of literature. Taking a look at the American Library Association’s list of Banned and/or Challenged Books, which includes a list of books, place and years of bans and/or challenges and the reason behind the challenges, can be a frustrating, and even a saddening experience for anyone who cherishes free speech, great literature and the dialogue over ideas, no matter how challenging some ideas may be. It is because of my typically strong feelings on this issue that a story that was published this week in Publishers Weekly caught my attention. It was announced this week that a small publishing company, New South Books, would be printing a new version of Mark Twain’s classic, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and in this revised version, by English Professor and Twain Scholar Alan Gribben, the word “nigger” will be omitted from the text, and replaced with the word “slave” and the term “Injun” will be replaced by “Indian”. What was particularly interesting to me in this story was the author’s and the publisher’s justification for these changes. As a person who has devoted his life to the works of Twain, Gribben has reworked the American masterpiece in the hopes of expanding the readership of the book, especially among young students and the general public who presumably may be offended by the original language, or in the case of students, too young or lacking the intellectual context to properly understand Twain’s intent behind the language. According to Gribben, the book has been banned countless times for reasons of language, or it has simply not been taught by teachers who felt uncomfortable in introducing the work into their classrooms. For Gribben, the removal of what essentially amounts to a little over 200 words was worth any criticism he might face if the end result is that the book is introduced into many more American classrooms and more young people are afforded the opportunity to be introduced to Twain.

My own views on this story are mixed, and perhaps the reason why I write this post, to gauge the reactions of others to this particular case. On the one hand, I wonder about what seems like an attempt to whitewash history and to pretend as if this type of language was never a normal part of American life. By neglecting to use the original works in the classroom, or by using this new version of the text, are educators missing the opportunity to delve into the realities of American history and into the state of race relations, both past and present in the United States? Furthermore, are students being robbed of the opportunity to be offended by language in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain was a keen observer, as well as critic of American life, and he was ahead of his time in exposing some of the hypocrisies in American race relations. In forming a meaningful friendship with the slave Jim, the character Huck is forced to confront some of the lessons that he has learned in his own short life, and to question that values that he was brought up with. Huck, in his journey down the river, comes to recognize the humanity of Jim and is forced to grapple with a number of moral issues, including the contradiction between his newfound realizations and his old language.

On the opposite side of the issue, I am also sympathetic to Gribben’s reasoning. Gribben is simply looking for way to make Twain a bigger part of American English curriculums, and to expose more children to the writing of Mark Twain – surely not a bad goal in and of itself. By omitting a small number of words Gribben may be able to do this. The ultimate hope is that once exposed to Twain some children will become hooked and go on, in later years, to read the original versions as Twain himself wrote them.

On the Publishers Weekly online comments section to this story the debate on this issue has been fierce, with the majority of commentators opposed to the editorial changes for both reasons of literary purism and a perceived whitewash of history. The full story, as published by Publishers Weekly, is available at Publishersweekly.com, and a portion of the author’s introduction and explanatory note as it will appear in the revised version is available for view at the NewSouth Books website, www.newsouthbooks.com. Decide for yourself what you think on this issue.

by Jamie Trepanier

Strike!Red09: The Strikers' Chorus in the 2009 annual production in Winnipeg. Photo by Andrew Sikorsky

Playwright Danny Schur is convinced that the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 has more than enough compelling storylines for a major musical production, and that its message is one that is still relevant today. “The story has all of the elements of high drama:  societal unrest, government suppression of rights, aftermath of war, dramatic death in the streets,” he wrote by e-mail, “[but] what first inspired me was the untold story of the immigrant at the epicentre of the drama – the forgotten Ukrainian everyman, Mike Sokolowski [killed by police during the violence of a June 21 protest known as “Bloody Saturday”].  It was his story that defined the period for me and lead to a new and, I believe, deeper understanding of the era – one that is relevant to us today:  that the story of the Winnipeg General Strike is a cautionary story about the dangers of nativism.”

Winnipeg General Strike - Victoria Park: Caption Winnipeg Strike -1919. Meeting in Victoria Park. Source: The University of Manitoba, Winnipeg Tribune Photo Collection : Winnipeg - General Strike 1919.

After taking in the sold-out final night of the second annual production of Strike! The Musical during a recent research trip in Winnipeg, I felt compelled to explore Winnipeg’s commemoration of the strike a little more deeply. Schur is undoubtedly an important local force in education and awareness of the legacy of the strike. His musical, which he co-wrote with Rick Chafe, has been produced twice indoors in Winnipeg and once in Saskatoon, and was even staged outside Winnipeg’s City Hall (a focal point of the 1919 violence) in the summer of 2009 for a crowd of over 5,000. He has developed teaching materials and curriculum-based kits for teachers (in Manitoba the strike is now part of Grade 6 and 11 curricula). He also is working on securing performance space for the production with the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Furthermore, after last year’s outdoor staging of the musical, he donated the replica streetcar used in the show to become a free museum in Winnipeg’s downtown which interprets the history of the streetcar in Winnipeg as well as its iconic moment in the Winnipeg General Strike. Finally, he also runs an annual public walking tour focused on the life of Sokolowski. In recent years, perhaps inspired by Schur’s work, the Winnipeg Exchange District Business Association has begun to run a General Strike themed walking tour as part of its tourism strategy (though it was developed only in recent years).

Ultimatum09: The cast of the 2009 Winnipeg annual production of Strike! in Winnipeg singing "Ultimatum." Photo by Andrew Sikorsky.

Schur’s research and writing of the play – for which he interviewed locals who lived in Winnipeg during the strike as well as family members of strikers, did archival work and read enough secondary material on the strike to “be able to write a book about how scholarly opinion on the strike diverges” – came shortly after the designation of Winnipeg’s Exchange District as a National Historic site by the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board. Protected by municipal and provincial heritage legislation, the Exchange District is experiencing a renaissance of sorts as new trendy condo developments and businesses move back into the former industrial and banking focused area of the city. As in many cases of historical preservation and urban revitalization, the question often arises:  which history to preserve, and in whose interests? Many of the landmarks of the Winnipeg General Strike, such as Victoria Park (site of numerous rallies and staging point for many marches) and the Winnipeg Labour Temple, have long since been paved over in favour of parking lots or newer buildings, while the strike itself is only commemorated on a small plaque near the newer city hall building. Strike! has helped revive interest in the legacy of the strike, and could very well represent an important beachhead in allowing for more historical experiences and voices to be heard in Winnipeg’s growing historical tourism sector, particularly as it prepares to welcome the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Red River Campus: Red River College's Princess Street Campus in the Heart of the Exchange Distric. Photo: Jamie Trepanier

While these issues did not come up directly in my conversation with Schur, he maintained that the legacy of the strike needed to extend beyond labour issues to more basic ones of social justice. “I could not help but notice that the recollection/historical memory of the Winnipeg General Strike fell mostly to labour i.e. the legacy of it was as an exclusively labour event,” he noted. “My research indicated that, although the event had its origins as a labour action, its outcome (and hence my story focus) was as an event of national significance insofar as it represented a suppression of rights within a democracy.  From an artistic perspective, that suppression of rights yielded fantastic dramatic opportunity to display the primary theme of overcoming prejudice.”

As historians we often grapple with the dilemma of balancing narrative and analysis. Schur, with his popular, yet nuanced musical drama, has revealed yet again that history which truly engages can have complexity and inspiration in it. As he put it, “All of the high-minded themes that I mentioned previously, matter not a wit if an audience is not engaged in the story…audiences leave with a profound sense of ‘the world changes one heart at a time and, if the world is to change, I must be that agent of change’ – in whatever manifestation that audience member chooses.  And if we’ve done our work (and I think we have), the audience is inspired AND learns a ton of history.”

Abstract

The content of history textbooks and curriculum is an important factor in the political socialization of succeeding generations of students. This study of representative classroom textbooks authorized for use in Ontario at three distinct eras of the 20^th century shows how the main lines of interpretation have shifted over time. During the pre-World War II era, the persistent underlying tone was one of reverence for Canada’s connection to Britain. By mid-century, the main theme was Canada’s bilingual dualism within North America. As the end of the 20^th century loomed, the textbook authors were focusing much more on previously marginalised groups within the Canadian multicultural mosaic. Each era produces its own historical narrative, but within the school context, an authorized interpretation impacts the beliefs of the generation to follow. The ultimate goal must be to nurture democratic citizens of the global future with a sure understanding of their own national identity.

Link to full paper