Reservoir Modernity: Lake Diefenbaker and the Great Acceleration on the Prairies

      No Comments on Reservoir Modernity: Lake Diefenbaker and the Great Acceleration on the Prairies

John W. Bessai

This is the third post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

Lake Diefenbaker concentrates the Great Acceleration within one prairie watershed. It shows how postwar Canada joined environmental transformation, settler state authority, hydraulic control, agricultural expansion, and the reordering of Indigenous sacred geography within one infrastructure system. Postwar governments accelerated production through large technical systems that reorganized environments and extended administrative control over land and water.1 Under a 1958 federal-provincial agreement, the Government of Canada and the Government of Saskatchewan advanced the South Saskatchewan River Project. Between 1958 and 1967, its main works, Gardiner Dam and Qu’Appelle River Dam, created a 225-kilometre reservoir, fixed the reservoir’s full supply level at 556.87 metres, and established storage of about 9.4 million cubic decametres of water. These dimensions mark a major transformation in the environmental history of the Canadian Prairies.2

Gardiner Dam gave that transformation its physical form. The dam stands 64 metres high and 5,000 metres long and remains one of the largest earthfill dams in the world. Its construction brought the South Saskatchewan River valley under a new regime of storage, release, and control. Seasonal flow became retained volume, scheduled discharge, and regulated supply. The South Saskatchewan River entered a system designed to stabilize production, expand irrigation, and support long-range settlement and development. Hydraulic engineering operated here as a large instrument of postwar environmental change. In Great Acceleration terms, Gardiner Dam converted a river system into a state-managed instrument of production, storage, settlement, and regional planning.3

Close view of the spillway gates at Gardiner Dam, emphasizing the infrastructure that regulates storage and water release.
Continue reading →

Canada Post and Labour Activism: An Interview with Evert Hoogers

      No Comments on Canada Post and Labour Activism: An Interview with Evert Hoogers

For the second feature in Active History’s series on Canada Post, we sat down with Evert Hoogers, a retired postal worker, long-time union activist, representative, and organizer with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. Throughout our interview Evert shared his recollections, memories, and insider knowledge from a long career in postal work and as a labour activist.

This interview was conducted by the series editors, Annabelle Penney and Raffaella Cerenzia, and has been shortened for publication.

Active History: Let’s talk about your initial involvement with the CUPW in 1972. Can you clarify how you came to be involved with the union itself and tell us a little bit about the atmosphere of the union when you first joined?

Evert: When I started in ‘72, it was only five years since the certification of what was called the CPU, the Council of Postal Unions certification. It was only three years since the first negotiated collective agreement under what was known as the Public Service Staff Relations Act, the act that governed labour relations in the federal government. In 1965 there was a recognition strike…by the postal unions that forced this emerging legislation to include conciliation and the right to strike rather than simply compulsory arbitration. So at the time that I started in ‘72, the vast majority of the leadership of the Vancouver Local that I was in, were made up of people who had gone through the experience of that recognition strike and were a product of the understanding that when workers get together, when they unite, when they decide that they’re going to make their case known, that many things can be accomplished.

Continue reading →

Commercial Tattooing – What’s Old is News

      No Comments on Commercial Tattooing – What’s Old is News

By Sean Graham

This week, I’m joined by Jamie Jelinski, author of Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tatooing in Canada. We talk about Jamie’s interest in the history of tattoos, the connection to art history, and the beginnings of tattoos as an industry in Canada. We then discuss questions over regulation and the criminalization of tattooing before chatting about some of the unique case studies in the book.

Historical Headline of the Week

Steven Dyer, “Tattoos in the workplace, how has society’s perception of ink changed?” CTV News, September 21, 2024.

Continue reading →

Hydro Power, Energy Transitions, and the Onset of Canada’s Great Acceleration

      No Comments on Hydro Power, Energy Transitions, and the Onset of Canada’s Great Acceleration

Daniel Macfarlane

This is the second post in a series exploring the potential of the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

If the Great Acceleration – the dramatic increase in human activity and the resulting impact on the Earth’s natural systems since the mid-20th century – is a valid framework, then surely Canada helped set the pace.1 After all, Canada emerged as a major producer of fossil fuels during the Cold War and has earned the moniker of climate villain with one of the highest per-capita emissions in the world.

The start of the Great Acceleration (GA) is generally held to be about the midpoint of the twentieth century (for many, the GA is intertwined, even synonymous, with the Anthropocene). That the 1947 Leduc oil strike, marking Canada’s ascent as a major oil-producing nation, occurred at this time seems to solidify the applicability of the Great Acceleration frame.

But Canada was an energy superpower long before fossil fuels became one of the country’s major exports. And that was in the realm of hydroelectricity. Electricity has proven to be the foundational driver of modernity (and also of both the GA and the Anthropocene). To illustrate, while fossil fuels are deeply embedded in the consumption patterns of most Canadians, I can imagine my life free of hydrocarbons much more easily than I can imagine it devoid of electricity.

Continue reading →

Child of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration and a Reconnaissance of Canadian Environmental History

      No Comments on Child of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration and a Reconnaissance of Canadian Environmental History

Andrew Watson

This is the first post in a series exploring the potential of the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

In 2016, J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke made the bold prediction that “the Great Acceleration will not last long. It need not and cannot.”1 A decade later, there are signs that this companion (some same synonymous) phenomenon of the Anthropocene endures. As one example, the energy required to generate the electricity needed to power accelerated servers that carry out the computational work of artificial intelligence (AI) is the next surge of the Great Acceleration.2 And as with so much else during the Great Acceleration, Canada seems poised to play an important role in the rapid rise in the use of AI.3

According to Steffen, et al., the term, the Great Acceleration, “aims to capture the holistic, comprehensive and interlinked nature of the post-1950 changes simultaneously sweeping across the socio-economic and biophysical spheres of the Earth System.”4 By many measures, as a social, cultural, and political idea, as much a socioecological and socioeconomic reality, Canada is a child of the Anthropocene. As the planet shifted from the Holocene into a new epoch, Canada served as an incubator for its defining concepts, a laboratory for the experiments that gave it form, and ground zero for witnessing its consequences.5

The concept of the Great Acceleration, therefore, offers a potentially valuable framework for a reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history, and a better understanding of the field within a broader global and planetary context. Several environmental historians have written synthesis overviews to provide coherence to the field.6 These early efforts to explain what is distinctive about Canadian environmental history will continue as scholars pursue new questions, sources, and innovative methods. What has been missing from these efforts, however, is a unifying theory or concept that researchers can apply, or work within, to investigate what helps the field hang together across time and space.

Continue reading →

A Modern History of Monsters

      No Comments on A Modern History of Monsters

Michael Egan

Somewhere, I’ve forgotten where, I remember César Aira writing that “monsters manage to escape from the net that brings humans to the surface.” It’s a compelling image, but I don’t think he’s right. I’m not so sure there is a clear distinction between humans and monsters—or that the net is so selective, or that monsters are particularly good at escaping the net’s clutches.

After years of teaching history, I can assert that monsters are good to think with. They are instantly recognizable and one of the great universals across time and place: because monsters are everywhere, their study invites comparative investigation of myth, stories, and beliefs all over the world. Monsters constitute a familiar entry point into tackling a broad array of social and cultural questions, because they hold up a mirror and reflect the fears and anxieties of a people as a means of warning. This prompted me to develop a course on the history of monsters at McMaster University in 2019; I have been teaching variations of that original course since. HIST 2GR3 (the course code may be some of my finest work…) meandered through foundational mythologies from every continent, the medieval and early modern worlds, before turning its attention to modern popular culture and the horrors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I never pretended toward any kind of comprehensive survey, but rather invited students to follow their own enthusiasm within (or beyond) the content I laid out. I subscribe to the notion that teaching and learning the tenets of historical methodologies is infinitely easier if students are already captivated by historical content that is meaningful to them. My presentation of the course had a clear narrative arc, but the real thrust of the course was around student discovery and helping them to navigate their own wonder and curiosity.

The Latin roots for monster—monstrum and monstrare—mean divine omen and to point out or show. These roots suggest that monsters have always been meant to show us something about the world. Contemporary scholarship takes that charge seriously, asking what lessons these creatures have to offer. Through these warnings, monsters and their stories foster conformity and discourage deviance. And they continue to possess considerable currency in the modern world. But history is full of human monsters too, and it is equally important to recognize the shared space between human and mythical monsters within a singular narrative.

PAZI SNAJPER: watch out: sniper. One of many such markings in Sarajevo. Photo credit: Paalso, July 1996

Continue reading →

Writing Canada’s Military History – What’s Old is News

      No Comments on Writing Canada’s Military History – What’s Old is News

By Sean Graham

In this episode, I talk with Jean-Michel Turcotte, Acting Chief Historian of the Directorate of History and Heritage at the Department of National Defence and the convenor of the 2025 Shannon Lecture Series. We talk about Jean-Michel’s background, how that influenced the series theme of ‘Revisiting Canadian Armed Forces Experiences’ and some of on-going projects at the Directorate. We also discuss the changing nature of military history, incorporating more voices into the stories of Canada’s armed forces, and how those changes relate to broader historiographical trends.

The final session of the Shannon Lecture Series, entitled The Transnational Making of United Nations Peacekeeping by Brian Drohan, will take place on May 6 at 4p ET on Zoom. You can find more information here.

Historical Headline of the Week

Defence Stories, “Web portal to military historical documents open to the public.” June 11, 2024.

Continue reading →

Global Fascism: Lessons from India

      No Comments on Global Fascism: Lessons from India

By Christopher Balcom

Understanding the far-right is key to making sense of our political moment.

We are witnessing a resurgence of explicitly fascistic organizations, like the “active clubs” springing up in several Canadian cities, as well as strains of right-wing populism that clearly recall the tactics and rhetoric of historical fascism. Debates over the fascism label/analogy have tended to gravitate towards discussions of Donald Trump and Trumpism.

Similar conversations have been taking place in many contexts, however. In India, the affinities between the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and European fascism have been subject of serious discussion on the left for decades. Attending to Indian anti-fascist criticism and considering the common features and differences between contemporary far-right movements around the world can enrich our understanding of the global right and its relationship to historical fascism.

In one sense, the relationship between Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and fascism is not a question of analogy at all.

Continue reading →

Repost: More than “Prisoners”: Discovering Welfare History in Holy Trinity Cemetery, Thornhill

      No Comments on Repost: More than “Prisoners”: Discovering Welfare History in Holy Trinity Cemetery, Thornhill

We, at Active History, were saddened to learn about the passing of Danielle Terbenche. Her academic work and community involvement leaves a lasting impact.

Danielle Terbenche completed her PhD at the University of Waterloo. During her time there, Danielle co-founded the Tri-University Graduate Students’ Association, published two peer-reviewed papers, and won the tri-university history programme’s award for “Best Paper or Article submitted to a Scholarly Conference or Journal.” Her dissertation, “Public Servants or Professional Alienists?: Medical Superintendents and the Early Professionalization of Asylum Management and Insanity Treatment in Upper Canada, 1840-1865,” was supervised by Wendy Mitchinson, along with guidance from committee members Heather MacDougall and Doug McCalla.

Danielle went on to complete a post-doctoral fellowship at York University (2012-2014) that focused on pre-Confederation Upper Canada/Canada West and the history of 19th century mental health care in Canada.

In 2018, Danielle pivoted and undertook a psychotherapy degree at OISE. In particular, she was interested in helping people through those times when life doesn’t quite work out as planned and believed that while you grieved the road not travelled, you also redirected yourself in meaningful ways that helped you adjust and grow.

Danielle was an active member of her church and was able to bring her love for and expertise of history to that community. In 2015, she shared her experiences with the cemetery board at the church. In honour of her contributions and passion for history, Active History is reposting her blog, “More than “Prisoners”: Discovering Welfare History in Holy Trinity Cemetery, Thornhill.”

Continue reading →

Who Digitized Your Sources? Exploitative Prison Labour and the Hidden Costs of Online Archives

      No Comments on Who Digitized Your Sources? Exploitative Prison Labour and the Hidden Costs of Online Archives

Kristen C. Howard

In today’s increasingly online world, historians, researchers, and students want and expect online access to historical documents offered by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. This includes not only journal articles and ebooks, but also primary sources and archival documents, which researchers increasingly expect to find online in searchable, digital formats. In turn, cultural heritage institutions have responded by trying to meet these demands, with various levels of success, for items ranging from census data to yearbooks to photographs. But offering access to digital and digitized collections has a very high cost, in terms of planning, scanning, adding metadata and accessibility features, and most crucially maintenance and long-term preservation. The invisible costs and labour behind online collections are frequently overlooked by researchers. This raises a question that few of us pause to ask: who did the work that made our digital sources accessible, and under what conditions?

This question matters because some of the digitization and data verification work that enables our online access to historical documents relies on the labour of incarcerated people—labour that is, I argue, exploitative. As researchers who depend on digitized primary sources, we have a responsibility to reckon with the hidden human costs of the online access we increasingly take for granted.

A worker operates a book scanner at a library digitization centre. The labour that makes digital collections accessible to researchers is often invisible to those who use them. Image: Book scanner digitization, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Continue reading →