Active History

Godin chez les grecs

March 3, 2026 No Comments

“I vote for Mr. Godin. I don’t care for what party he belongs.” – George Zoubris¹

Bernard Vallée, « Portraits de Gérald Godin, Ministre de l’immigration, » 19 November 1980, BAnQ numérique.

1976 is best remembered in Quebec as the year the levee broke. The rising tides of québécois nationalism and the sovereigntist movement evolved into a majority victory in that year’s general election for the Parti québécois [PQ], the national progressivist party seeking a sovereignty-association agreement with the Canadian federal government. Under its founder and first Premier, René Lévesque (1922-1987), successive PQ cabinets passed legislation and reforms from 1976 through 1985 that radically altered the course of Quebec’s history. Amidst those years, narratives emerged about peoples on the margins of the province’s society challenging what it meant to be québécois and who could benefit from the Quiet Revolution. Montreal’s Mercier district played host to one such narrative.

Mercier was a provincial electoral district in central Montreal. Going into the 1976 general election, its deputy was Robert Bourassa (1933-1996), Parti libéral du Québec [PLQ] leader and Quebec’s Premier. Bourassa had held this largely francophone working class district in every general election since 1966. Mercier was considered a PLQ stronghold, a belief reinforced by a growing immigrant demographic commonly assumed to lean in the governing party’s favor.² A strong contingent of the electorate, however, had tired of their “absent” deputy and his party’s unpopular policies. Still, few believed that would help Bourassa’s underdog rival in Mercier, PQ candidate Gérald Godin. This burgeoning politician was a marginal figure in the popular imagination and his party, but Godin nonetheless conducted an intensive door-to-door campaign that turned him into a fixture of the community. His charisma and personability throughout countless hours of speaking with voters set a precedent which could not be matched by a Premier.³ And it paid off.

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Building a Radical Space: Inclusion, Fracture, and the Limits of Utopia

March 2, 2026 No Comments

By Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown

T’Hayla Ferguson, digital illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba for The Pussy Palace Oral History Project, LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. 2025.

“I think the intention was to make women’s sexuality and women’s play just normal. Not such a sideshow. We want to have a place to go and get naked and fuck and play, and it not be unusual.”

-T’Hayla Ferguson, Pussy Palace Patron

The Pussy Palace was built by naming things that were not supposed to be said out loud. From its earliest moments, the project challenged dominant ideas about women’s sexuality, public sex, and who bathhouse culture was for. But the Palace did not emerge fully formed as a radical, inclusive utopia. It was assembled through improvisation, disagreement, and ongoing negotiation. Inclusion was not a settled principle, but an aspiration—one that required constant work, generated conflict, and exposed the limits of what a single space could hold.

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The Indian Act as Wendigo

February 27, 2026 No Comments

By Jenni Makahnouk

This post is part of the Indian Act 150 series

The Indian Act is commonly treated as a governance structure: an object to be interpreted, amended, or dismantled through policy reform. This framing assumes neutrality where there is appetite. This article argues that the Indian Act functions less as a static legal instrument and more as a consuming force—one that survives through the ongoing ingestion of Indigenous self-determination. Read through Indigenous epistemologies, the Indian Act emerges as Wendigo, if you will, an Indigenous malevolent manitou animated by greed, selfishness, and insatiable hunger. What happens when the Indian Act is viewed as Wendigo? By framing the Indian Act as Wendigo, we can illuminate its predatory dynamics in ways that conventional settler analyses of the Act cannot capture, and we can draw on Indigenous epistemologies of how to cure Wendigo.

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Celebrating Black History and the Works That Shape It

February 26, 2026 No Comments

February 2026 marks the 30th anniversary of the first national celebration of Black History Month in Canada. This milestone offers an important opportunity to recognize the enduring legacy and resilience of Black Canadians and to reflect on a history that has often been overlooked.

Canadian historians especially must confront the mythology that depicts Canada solely as a haven from racism. In reality, the Canadian government and public have imposed deliberate, often legislated barriers to Black success. From immigration bans under the pretext of “climatic unsuitability” to provincial school acts that enforced racially segregated schools well into the 20th century, systemic exclusion was a core feature of the Canadian state.

Given these historic and ongoing systemic injustices, Canadian historians can center the experiences of Black Canadians and concepts of anti-Black racism within their work. We must move beyond symbolic celebration toward a methodology that weaves these essential perspectives into the very fabric of our historical research.

With such a project in mind, members of the Active History editorial collective offer the following suggestion on scholarship and resources that have shaped our own learning journeys. These articles, book chapters, and monographs have challenged the way we undertake our historical pursuits, and we hope they inspire similar deep reflection for our readership.

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Food Insecurity in the Russo-Ukrainian War and World War II: Reading the Present Through History

February 24, 2026 No Comments

Hannah Boller

*“No War,” photographed by the author in Vienna, 15 May 2023.*

I recently found myself conversing with someone who believed it was their job to point out that the topic for my master’s thesis was totally useless. “Food is not worth studying, and history even less valuable. I’m not sure why you would go to school to study that.” Most people eat three times a day, maybe have a couple of snacks, go out for drinks on the weekend, and plan birthday dinners weeks in advance; if you are privileged to live in the Global North, food and food culture are assumed rights.

And yet, in 2025, there is a global food crisis. Statistics Canada reports that in 2023 an average of 25.5% of Canadians were experiencing food insecurity, with families living in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut presenting disproportionate rates of 34.2% and 58.1% respectively. As of February 2025, the World Food Programme reported that 5 million Ukrainians are experiencing food insecurity, with severity increasing as the distance to the frontlines decreases. In a time of climate change, sustained conflict, and economic uncertainty, much of the global population is experiencing food insecurity and in 2025 there were two confirmed famines in Gaza and Sudan.

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

February 20, 2026 No Comments

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 and Canadian Culture

February 19, 2026 No Comments

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.

Series editors Annabelle Penney and Raffaella Cerenzia

Canada Post, Commemorative Stamps, and the Klondike

Canada Post, Commemorative Stamps, and the Klondike.

February 19, 2026 1 Comment

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

February 17, 2026 No Comments

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

February 16, 2026 No Comments

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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