Letters in Wartime: Teaching the life of Harry G. Dickson, Jr. RCAF

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Kristen Jeanveau

Collection of materials from the file of Harry George Dickson R/18077. Courtesy of the Ley and Lois Smith War Memory, and Culture Research Collection, Western University.

For the last two years, I have been a Graduate Teaching Assistant for History 1810: Wars that Changed the World at Western University. For many students, the world wars are a remote experience, long out of living memory. This presents a challenge for a first-year survey course: how should the wars be presented to balance the broad implications of the conflict with microhistory case-studies that offer a deeper look at specific lived experiences?[1] I firmly believe the goal of a history course is not to instill rote memorization of dates and names. As an educator, I am more interested in hearing what questions the students will raise with the content that we present. My goal in the classroom is to foster a sense of curiosity about the World Wars and engage with the students collaboratively to develop our understanding of this contested past, and I try to achieve this through frequent use of material culture studies.

The History Department at Western University is lucky to hold the Ley and Lois Smith War, Memory, and Culture Research Collection and Wartime Canada archives, maintained by my supervisor, Dr. Jonathan Vance. With this access, I make regular use of newspapers, photos, maps, medals, sheet music, military gear, postcards, and letters from their holdings in the classroom. I have observed students who were hesitant to contribute to standard tutorial discussions become engaged when they handle surgical implements from our medical artefact collection, or function as detectives researching the authors of postcards from the First World War. Likewise, more than one student has shared the story of their relative’s military service while examining medals from the Second World War and asking if they could take a photo for their family as they look “just like the ones my great grandfather had.”

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Canada Post, Commemorative Stamps, and the Klondike.

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By Patricia Roussel and David Dean

This post is part of the Canada Post and Canadian Culture series.

This is the first post in a limited series dedicated to studying the history of Canada Post. Inspired by recent 2025 labour disputes and renewed public conversation about Canada Post, the intention here is to examine the cultural impact and historical legacy of a controversial yet essential Canadian Crown Corporation. A national institution and the nation’s leading postal operator, Canada Post in its earliest iteration proceeded Canadian Confederation itself.

In this co-authored post Patricia Rousell and David Dean will explore the connections between postage stamps, shaping national identity through processes of commemoration, and how this relationship plays out in praxis with a case-study of the 1996 Canada Post-issued Klondike Gold Stamp Series.

Canada Post and Imag[in]ing Canada on Stamps

In 1908, Canada issued a set of eight stamps commemorating a uniquely Canadian historical event: the founding of Quebec three hundred years earlier. Four of the stamps were strikingly different from any previously issued by the Dominion which had, with one exception, always featured a portrait of the ruling monarch.[1] The two highest level stamps offered imagined scenes of the French “discovery” of Canada: Champlain’s departure from France (on the 15¢ stamp) and Cartier’s arrival (on the 20¢). Equally unusual were the 5¢ and 10¢ stamps which depicted Champlain’s habitation and Quebec c.1700 respectively. The remaining stamps, used for regular postage, would have seemed more familiar, especially to anyone who remembered the 1897 issue marking Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Each of those stamps had featured a double portrait of the Queen, one from the beginning of her reign and one from the 1880s. Similarly, the remaining four stamps of 1908 were double portraits of, respectively, the Prince and Princess of Wales, Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and James Wolfe.

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Interregnums, Morbid Symptoms, and Climate Denial

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By Don Wright

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. – Antonio Gramsci

What will future historians – say in 2150 – call this historical moment? The 100-Year Terror, perhaps, a century marked by wars, migrations, and civil breakdowns, each worse than the last. Or the Great Derangement, when we knew that the climate was changing and we let it change anyway.

And will those same historians describe this moment as an interregnum? Possibly. But what if history isn’t unfolding from one regnum, or reign, to another? What if we are in a permanent and inescapable state of morbid symptoms, to use Antonio Gramsci’s phrase, or monsters according to a creative translation of fenomeni morbosi?

After all, the climate crisis is at once irreversible and getting worse, and yet when we should be talking about it and nothing else, we’ve largely stopped talking about it. There’s even a term for it: “climate hushing.” Fearing a backlash from an anxious and restless electorate, politicians have focused on other priorities. In his Davos speech, for example, Mark Carney didn’t mention climate change, not even in passing, and he’s someone who gets climate change and who understands that it’s a threat multiplier. 

For my money, the most morbid symptom, or the worst monster, depending on which translation you prefer, is climate denial, which has its own history.

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How Do You Remember a Sex Party? Telling the History of the Pussy Palace

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By Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown

Ange Beever, digital illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba for The Pussy Palace Oral History Project, LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. 2025.

“When they first came in, I was pissed off that they had crashed the party. […] like these stupid men tromping through this place. I’m just like, ‘You look like idiots. You’re stupid. These are just a bunch of women having a good time naked.’ […T]his is what you want to spend your resources on, really?”

-Ange Beever, Pussy Palace Patron

In September 2000, Toronto police raided the Pussy Palace, a queer women and trans bathhouse event held in a converted Victorian mansion just east of downtown. The raid quickly became a flashpoint in local LGBTQ+ history, sparking legal challenges, protests, and renewed debates about policing, privacy, and queer space. Ange Beever’s frustration captures something essential about the Pussy Palace—and about how this history needs to be told.

The police raid mattered. But so did the party it interrupted—and the worlds it briefly made possible. This project begins from that tension.

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Soundbite Histories – Part II (the Mea Culpa)

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“Prime Minister Trudeau raises his hands as he jokingly encourages stronger applause from students at Carleton University Tuesday night at the taping of a television show. The confrontation between the students and the prime minister was being filmed for Under Attack.” Calgary Albertan (25 February 1970), 1. Photographer unknown; photo courtesy Newspapers.com.

Daniel R. Meister

In the first part of an article I published with Active History in February 2024, I contested the authenticity of a quote frequently attributed to Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The quote in question: “We’ll keep them in the ghetto as long as they want” with regard to First Nations in Canada. However, while in search of a different quote recently, I accidentally stumbled upon proof of its existence. This article is intended to correct the record and provides the context in which the original quote appeared, as well as the sourcing.

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Call for Contributors: Canada’s Great Acceleration

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Andrew Watson

Long exposure photograph of light trails on a highway at night, with white and yellow streaks curving to the left and red streaks on the right against a black background

Proposal Deadline: 18 February 2026 Extended to 25 February 2026

As a social and political idea, as much a material and socioeconomic reality, Canada is a child of the Anthropocene. If the Earth has shifted from the Holocene into a new epoch of planetary history, then Canada has served as an incubator for its defining concepts, a laboratory for the experiments that gave it form, and ground zero for witnessing its consequences.[1]

So what would a framework for Canadian environmental history look like if scholars attended to the country’s role in, and contributions to, the rapid socioeconomic and Earth system trends that have come to define the human imprint on the planet, which are widely referred to as the Great Acceleration?[2]

The Great Acceleration refers to the period after WWII when the pace and scale of socioecological changes departed dramatically from previous trajectories. This reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history would need to evaluate the patterns of changing social relations, economic activity, and environmental transformation in Canada since 1867, which characterized the material precursors to the key indicators of the Great Acceleration after 1950. It would also need to extend the scope of analysis backwards to examine the ideas and ideologies that informed anthropocentric relations with the non-human world well before the mid-twentieth century, including imperialism, colonialism, liberalism, and capitalism.[3]

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“The Time of Monsters”: History in Challenging Times

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By Andrew Nurse and Roberta Lexier

A crisis, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote in response to the rise of fascism in the 1930s, occurs when: “The old order is dying and the new one is struggling to be born.” His point was that the crises societies experience have specific – if far from simple – historical causes. They also have serious implications: “Now,” he continued, “is the time of monsters.” 

Those monsters are all around us: the resurgence of fascism, an intensification of hard power in international politics, the collapse of the rules-based order, deceit on a level that is, in fact, so common that some have suggested we live in a “post-truth” culture, a dramatic effort to recast the meaning and implications of the past in ways that erase the work of a generation of scholars.  The monsters, Gramsci reminds us, are grounded in our particular historical conjuncture. 

We live in difficult times, characterized by extreme economic inequality, overlapping global health pandemics, a climate crisis, and the breakdown of liberal-democratic politics, however incomplete they have been in practice. Systems and structures and ideas developed over centuries – the nation-state, constitutional democracies, the ideal of universal human rights and the rule of law, free-market capitalism, and indeed our very ability to live on this planet – face concerted attack. 

For historians, this has significant implications: the suppression and destruction of critical sources; the outright rejection of evidence (broadly defined); book bans; threats to tenure and academic freedom; censorship; and the weaponization of the past by divisive forces.

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Looking Beyond the Indian Act

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By Bob Joseph

This post is part of the Indian Act 150 series.

Bob Joseph’s new book, 21 Things™ You Need to Know About Indigenous Self-Government.

This year, 2026, marks 150 years of the Consolidated Indian Act of 1876. This serves as a timely opportunity to discuss the dismantling of this destructive and restrictive piece of legislation. The Indian Act has constrained and controlled the lives of Status Indians for generations, and reconciliation will be hampered until the Indian Act is no longer intact.

My recent book, 21 Things™ You Need to Know About Indigenous Self-Government, invites Canadians to join the conversation about dismantling the Indian Act and has offered me the opportunity to have these important discussions with readers across the country. During these conversations, a question I have frequently been asked was: “So what comes next? What is your vision of Canada without the Indian Act?”

My answer is that a return to Indigenous self-government is vital and necessary. I say “return” because Indigenous Peoples have been self-governing since time immemorial. In fact, Indigenous self-governance is already happening and is a way for Indigenous Nations to regain their agency from the historical injustices of the Indian Act.

In order to best understand the lasting effects of the Indian Act and the necessity of the move towards self-government, I think it’s important to first have a quick historical overview.

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The power of oral history in piecing together archival fragments documenting 2SLGBTQ+ community histories

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Meredith J. Batt

P918-1067 Mullins Photography Ltd. fonds, PANB, Fredericton, N.B., October 1998. 

I have made an error.

These are not words that come easily to a historian, when evidence is the backbone of our work. However, as Tim Lacy notes in his Society for U.S. Intellectual History blog post On the Failures of Historians, “There is no question that historians in their role as content experts experience failure.  All humans are imperfect, and all historians are human, hence imperfect historians are not always on target.” It is how we correct the misinformation that matters; one way is by using tools, additional records and memories to add context to archival records where incorrect assumptions have been made.  This article thus follows my journey in correcting my own error in historical research using oral history to piece together archival fragments. 

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“The Testing Place of our Canadian Citizenship is Going to be Our Cities”: J.S. Woodsworth and the Settlement Movement in Britain and Canada.”

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Katherine Wilson-Smith

“A View From the Roof of the Residence.” Twenty One Years at Mansfield House, 1890-1911. Plaistow: W. S. Caines, 1911. 1.

“From the roof of the Settlement one looks over a vast, monotonous, dingy sea of houses, acre upon acre, mile upon mile, in long rigid rows – like frozen waves of the grey sea – broken only by gaunt chimneys and tapering masts to show the limit of the docks.”1

On 11 December 1899, this bleak scene greeted J.S. Woodsworth upon his arrival at Mansfield House, in London’s East End, where he spent two weeks over the Christmas break. Woodsworth resided at Mansfield House for a short time, but his daughter credited this brief sojourn with putting her father on the path to becoming the eventual leader of the CCF: the poverty he witnessed during his short time in the East End was both personally shocking and a jolt towards practical action.2 Less than a decade later, Woodsworth became the superintendent of the All People’s Mission in Winnipeg. There, his leadership would be inspired by the principles and practices he had observed in London and in particular, the use of Christian socialist values to foster a non-denominational environment in which the whole community was welcome. This somewhat overlooked period of Woodsworth’s life and his ties with the settlement movement are essential to understanding his political and ideological development, which is reflective of the broader climate of transnational socialism at the turn of the century.

Mansfield House was in Canning Town, an extremely poor neighbourhood that was reliant on the docks for work and home to large pockets of immigrants, east of the Metropolitan area of London and just before the Essex marshes. The settlement, which took up residence in a row of former shops, brought the charm and middle-class respectability of Mansfield College, Oxford to the notorious slum. Residents living at Mansfield were Oxford students and professors, “slumming” in the East End, simultaneously investigating the lives of locals and living among them.3 The public-facing rooms in the settlement were intended to be aspirational, as the house opened its doors to the community every day. Pre-arranged activities were held during the day for boys and girls clubs and in the evening for working adults. If sporadic visits occurred, there was also staff always on call to assist people on the doorstep.4

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