Teaching in Interesting Times: America @ 250 in the Canadian Classroom 

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Felicia Gabriele

The expression, “May you live in interesting times,” seems on its face, pleasant enough. Resembling a well-wish, its sunny exterior deftly cloaks the dark, cavernous depths within. To live in interesting times, is quite simply, to be cursed.

To teach American History in interesting times, is, well… akin to having a staring contest with the evilest of evil eyes. I should know. I teach American History at McGill University. The day after Donald Trump won the presidential election in November 2024, heartbroken and numb, there was still a lecture to give, emails to answer, coffee to drink. Teaching American History in America’s 51st state is hard work after all!

“All Men Are Created Equal?” April 2026 (Shared with student permission)

Due to its location and comparatively lower tuition, McGill attracts a substantial number of American undergraduates, many of whom enroll in my history classes.   

I’ve lost count of the times American students have told me they learned more of their own history in my classes than back home. Sadly, living in interesting times means living concurrently with the sanitization of historical truths; wholescale erasure of history and other subjects deemed too “woke”; and the unmistakable death-rattle of academic freedom. While Canada is certainly not perfect, at least professors are not compelled by law to teach blatant untruths such as slavery “benefitted” Black Americans.

With that in mind, I introduced a new assignment in my Early America survey: the America @ 250 Project. I asked students to reflect on the following questions:

  • What do the key ideas, values, and promises represented in the Declaration of Independence mean to you? What do you think they meant to Americans in 1776? To Americans in 2026?
  • How are you thinking and feeling about this occasion? How would you begin to express or articulate what America @ 250 means to you?
  • How would you begin to evaluate and assess the state of America @ 250?
  • What do you hope for America’s future? Think about what you hope America can achieve and how collectively we (the people) can help make it a reality.

To answer these questions, I gave students two options:

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Save Our Signs: Preserving Censored Histories in America’s Largest Outdoor Classroom

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By Amelia Palacios, Molly Blake, Jenny McBurney and Kirsten Delegard; co-founders of Save Our Signs

On the corner of Sixth and Market streets in Philadelphia sits a contested site at the heart of the origin story Americans tell one another. Nearly two decades ago, this particular National Park Service (NPS) site was the focal point for heated debates about the purpose of history and national identity. Today, these debates have resurfaced with dire consequences.

This corner in Philadelphia is home to the site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Liberty Bell, and the buried foundation of the first presidential mansion. Together, these sites make up Independence National Historical Park. 

A portion of the President’s House Site exhibit with missing interpretive text for the historical re-enactement in the video. Taken by Save Our Signs team members in April 2026.

In 2002, an activist group called the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC) organized for nearly a decade to demand that Independence NHP tell the full story of the nine individuals George Washington enslaved at our nation’s first “White House”. As a result of this years’ long advocacy and public engagement, in 2010, the National Park Service opened an exhibit called The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery and the Making of a New Nation. 

The President’s House Site is the first federally owned property to feature a slave memorial. It was hailed as a hard fought victory for activists seeking public acknowledgement of the history of slavery and a way to honor the people held in bondage. 

The exhibit invited visitors to grapple with the prevalence and violence of slavery and a central paradox: the role slavery played in a nation founded on the ideals of liberty and freedom. Each wall included interpretive panels that told of the intertwined lives of the 9 individuals enslaved at that site by the nation’s first president. 

Today, visitors to the President’s House will instead find ghostly outlines of exhibit panels and empty mounting hardware on brick walls. These spectral traces sit alongside screens playing historical re-enactments with no context. Chain-linked fences and caution tape barricade portions of the site, with signs stating: “Preservation work in process.”

This National Park Service site is one among 12 that have fallen victim to the Trump administration’s effort to restore “truth and sanity” to American history.

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Happy Independence Day 2026 – Mexico & Canada

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James Cullingham

Canada and Mexico approach an historic juncture in their relations with the United States. Both countries face a July 1 deadline over the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 2020 under the auspices of Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump and Andrés Manuel López Obrador. CUSMA is due to be formally extended for 16 years or to be continued under annual reviews. The Trump administration has already run roughshod over some aspects of the agreement and the unpredictable Donald Trump sometimes even seems prepared to walk away.  

It’s not the first time both Canada and Mexico have simultaneously confronted a moment of such significance with a wallop from the United States.

On June 19, 1867, the French appointed Emperor of Mexico, Maximiliano de Habsburgo, was executed in Querétaro some 220 kilometres north of Mexico City. On July 1, 1867, many citizens of the Dominion of Canada celebrated the creation of a new nation state. 

Consequently, each country can date the dawning of its independence within two weeks in the early summer of 1867. This independence is unofficially recognized in Mexico because while 1821 saw the overthrow of Spanish imperial rule, the official date of Mexican independence is September 16 with celebrations starting in the evening of the 15th to commemorate the beginnings of revolt against Spanish rule in 1810. The year 1821 marked the beginning of a highly conflicted independence that featured almost half a century of war between Mexican conservatives and liberals. Also in that period, war with the United States led to the loss of just over half of Mexico’s territory by 1848. Then in 1862, the French under Napoleon III invaded Mexico at the urging of some Mexican conservatives.

Both the French invasion of Mexico and Canadian confederation were motivated to a significant extent by events in the United States – specifically the bloody American Civil War 1861 – 1865. Napoleon III miscalculated that the south would win, become his ally, and renounce the Monroe Doctrine.  After the North prevailed on April 9, 1865, Napoleon III withdrew his troops and abandoned Maximiliano and the Mexican conservatives who supported him. Meanwhile in what would become Canada, British North American politicians like Macdonald, Brown and Cartier worried about an expansionary United States after the war, and having seen the internecine chaos to the south, wanted a form of union that would preserve the British political connection rather than emulating American style republican government.  In sum, the American Civil War served as political accelerant on both sides of the United States border.

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The Beach Cure – What’s Old is News

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By Sean Graham

This week I talk with Meghan Crnic, author of The Beach Cure: A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores. We discuss the origins of the beach as a place to get healthy, the conditions in 19th century American cities that led doctors to prescribe the beach, and the logistics of getting to the cost. We also chat about how beach areas were built up, the transformation of space from health to recreation, and the legacy of the 19th century on beach towns.

Historical Headline of the Week

Emma Loewe, “Going to the beach is good for your brain, according to science,” National Geographic, May 22, 2025.

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“We are in danger of becoming a stage without actors:” Contextualizing Contemporary Overtourism in Venice, Italy

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Michael Dawson

Today’s visitors to Venice are hard-pressed to ignore the locals’ frustration with their presence. In 2025, CNN lamented the impact of overtourism on this popular destination “hollowed out by vacation rentals.”[1] In 2024, the BBC noted that the city had introduced a daily entry fee, a ban on loudspeakers, and a limit on tour group size – all in an effort to counteract tourism’s negative impact on the local community.[2] When I visited the city that same year, the Ponte di Rialto, the Canal Grande, and Piazza San Marco competed for my attention alongside train-station graffiti urging “Tourists” to “Go Home” and strategically placed stickers featuring smiling cartoon excrement proclaiming that “Tourists Are Killing Venice.” Over the past decade, Venice has been at the forefront of a backlash against overtourism in Europe.[3] But the roots of Venice’s love-hate relationship with tourists go back at least as far as the middle of the twentieth century.

Anti-tourist graffiti outside Venice’s Santa Lucia train station. June 2024. Author’s photo

In the 1940s, Italian officials viewed Venice’s tourism allure as a key component of their postwar economic reconstruction plans. But in 1949, a visiting Australian correspondent struggled to grasp how this might be the case as he came face to face with the city’s poverty. “[M]ost of the Venetians,” Douglas Wilkie observed, “live in hovels.” Venice resembled other Italian cities, he noted, “where antique beauty, irresponsible wealth, and utter destitution go hand in hand.” In this context, Wilkie remained pessimistic. Pursuing “tourism to relieve Italy’s economic crisis,” he suggested, “seems about as helpful as wringing the necks of the pigeons in St. Mark’s Square to feed the beggars.”[4]

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Health care workers and the ‘third wave’ of occupational health

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Peter L. Twohig

On 16 April 2026, five thousand long-term care (LTC) workers in 56 facilities throughout Nova Scotia began a strike. A tentative agreement ended the labour action after eight weeks, another example of a lengthy labour dispute in a nursing home. Indeed, some of the longest strikes in recent Canadian history have been in LTC.[i]

Striking long-term care workers in Halifax, Nova Scotia, June 2026. Author photo

I have previously argued that focusing on nursing home workers opened up new analytical paths and that these offered an opportunity to contribute to the revitalization of Canadian working class history. My interest in this question was inspired by another Active History post.[ii] Specifically, I saw the opportunity to focus on groups that are, largely, without a history of their own. This would include continuing care assistants (CCAs), the largest group of caregivers in LTC. Striking CCAs in Nova Scotia earned $18.77 per hour when the dispute began, barely above the provincial minimum wage.[iii]

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The Great Acceleration of the Laurentian Dairy Transition

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Stéphane Castonguay and Colin Coates

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

The relationship between agriculture and the Anthropocene unfolds across a temporal and conceptual spectrum punctuated by the various proposals for a “Golden Spike.”1 At one end of this spectrum lie the first domestications of plants and animals, which initiated an anthropogenic alteration of Earth’s climatic trajectory. At the other end stands the Great Acceleration and its planetary dashboards that document the explosive growth of human impacts after the Second World War as indicated by the extinction of species, the expansion of domesticated land, deforestation, increased nitrogen in the atmosphere, and rising atmospheric methane concentrations.2 Together, these indicators reveal the transformation of agriculture into a global force reshaping the Earth system.

Yet the processes associated with the Great Acceleration did not emerge suddenly after 1945. At regional scales, earlier agricultural transformations set in motion socio-ecological trajectories that anticipated many of its defining characteristics. The dairy transition that transformed Laurentian agriculture in the late nineteenth century offers one such example.3 This was the most substantial agricultural change since the arrival of European settlers in the region in the seventeenth century. Driven by the growing demand in the British market for butter and cheese, it reshaped land use, livestock populations, patterns of farm ownership, and agro-industrial infrastructure in ways that foreshadowed later processes of agricultural intensification, specialization, capitalization, and environmental change.4 Viewed from this perspective, the Laurentian dairy revolution can be understood as an early manifestation of the processes later captured globally by the concept of the Great Acceleration.

The changes in Laurentian agricultural production resulting from the rise of dairy farming at the end of the nineteenth century can be summarized as follows: within fifty years, the average dairy herd on each farm increased by nearly two-thirds, while the proportion of land devoted to feeding dairy cows increased by more than one-fifth for pasture and more than doubled for forage crops.5

From an ecological perspective, mixed farming was far more sustainable than the cereal monoculture practiced since the beginning of European colonization. The reliance on the repeated sowing and harvesting of wheat led to the depletion of soil fertility. However, the crop and livestock specialization associated with mixed farming resulted in a loss of biodiversity in Laurentian rural environments and contributed to the industrialization of the countryside.

The growth of dairy cattle population—by nearly one-fifth across the province and slightly less than two-thirds on the average farm—occurred at the expense of sheep. The near stability of sheep numbers (from 824,981 to 856,169 head between 1871 and 1921) masks a relative decline in their presence in the Laurentian countryside, owing to the emergence of larger flocks on the fringes of the ecumene, where the number of small farms increased. Horses remained the primary source of farm labour until the Second World War, but they did not rival dairy cows in number, as cattle came to dominate the animal landscape. These changes concerned not only the size of the herd—the number of cattle increased from 406,542 to 796,029 between 1871 and 1921—but also its composition. Census data from the early decades of the twentieth century reveal the growing predominance of dairy breeds, particularly Ayrshires and Canadienne, within Quebec’s livestock population.

Line graph showing the number of bovines in the Laurentian valley, with gradual growth from 1700 to about 1800, with a massive upsurge after 1850.
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Colonial Newspapers – What’s Old is News

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By Sean Graham

This week I talks with Shelisa Klassen, author of Imprinting Empire: Land and Settler Colonialism in Manitoba Newspapers. We talk about late 19th century Manitoba newspapers, the audiences both in Manitoba and the rest of Canada, and how the press framed colonial practices. We also discuss how newspapers fit into other commercial projects, what information was included and what was intentionally omitted, and the legacy of the era’s newspapers.

Historical Headline of the Week

Clare Hennig and Jean Paetkau, “Digital archive of old B.C. textbooks highlights ‘constant dehumanizing of Indigenous people,’ CBC.ca, September 4, 2018.

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Fighting Fires: Quebec Separatism in Canada – Chile Relations, 1968

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Thomas Stroyan

In February 1968, the Quebec government agreed to loan Chile two Canadair CL-215s (also known as the CANSO). The CL-215 was an amphibious flying boat built for the purpose of performing firefighting tasks such as waterbombing. The loan came at a moment of need for Chile, in 1967 it had experienced a record drought the likes the country had not seen since the 1920s. This resulted in a climate emergency which threatened Chile with both crop failure and forest fires.  The provincial government of Quebec had no issue with loaning the planes to Chile. Due to the Southern and Northern hemispheres having inversed summers, Quebec had no need of the planes while Chile was at the highest risk for forest fires and vice versa. Quebec simply made the loan conditional on the aircraft being returned by April of the same year.[i] Quebec’s provincial government also had a secondary motive: the loan helped the Quebec-based Canadair, who had been pursuing sales in Chile for some time, showcase their aircraft to Chile.[ii] The two planes arrived in Chile without incident and were used to simultaneously train Chilean pilots and demonstrate the capabilities of the planes.[iii] The loan appeared to be a success, the Quebec Ministry of Transportation and Communications reported a great deal of Chilean media interest in the two CANSO aircraft and indicated that a major purchase was on the horizon.[iv] In the end, the loan did not lead to a direct purchase but this isn’t to say that the Chileans weren’t grateful, they were. The federal government in Santiago instructed the Chilean embassy in Ottawa to send a formal thank you to the Quebec government. This simple act of gratitude, however, turned out to be far more diplomatically complex than one would imagine. To understand why, one must examine the phenomena of the Quebec Sovereignty movement and how it affected Canada’s diplomacy with another developing country on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Gabon.

Since 1960, Quebec under the Liberal Party led by Jean Lesage pursued a policy of ‘Maîtres chez Nous’ – Masters of Our Own House. Maîtres chez Nous was the quintessential policy of the Quiet Revolution, a period in which Quebec underwent a rapid cultural, political, and technical transition. It shed the cultural and institutional supremacy of the Catholic church in the province, increased the strength of the Quebec government in internal affairs and increasingly pushed against what it thought of as colonial domination from Anglo Canada. Maîtres chez Nous was framed as a decolonialization process in which Quebec fought for increasing autonomy over its own affairs. In 1966, the Lesage Liberals lost to Daniel Johnson’s Union Nationale. The party left, but the policy of Maîtres chez Nous endured. Quebec sovereignty had become a bipartisan policy pursuit and by the late 1960s, Quebec’s quest for sovereignty was looking increasingly more like separation. As such, its quest for autonomy in its internal affairs, with some help from Charles de Gaulle, was spilling into external affairs, which was federal jurisdiction.

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Feeling Weird in the Archives

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Dani K. Inkpen

“History should make you feel weird.” So proclaims a widely touted slogan of history nerds. While there is much in the world foisting weirdness upon us today, too rarely do we intentionally seek the off-beat. History students should. “Weird,” though it has come to mean uncanny or bizarre, has its roots in the idea of the turning of events. The Old English wyrd meant the principle, power, or agency by which events are predetermined. In a word, fate. It may have come from older words meaning “to turn” or “to wind” thus referencing the Roman Parcae and their northern counterparts, the Norns: the three women, who spun, measured, and irrevocably cut life’s thread. Shakespeare’s “Weyard Sisters” retain this association in their scrying of Macbeth’s destiny. These are fitting associations for the study of the past. For is not history’s chief concern understanding how the threads of past events are woven into the ever growing, shifting, impossibly complex tapestry from which springs our present predicament?

But history should make you feel weird for less etymological reasons. The more recent meaning of “weird,” aligning it with the bizarre, is a good starting point for inquiry. Cultural historian Robert Darnton was on to this when he followed the trail of his own ignorance. He (understandably) didn’t get what was so funny to eighteenth-century Frenchmen about murdering and mutilating cats. “Our own inability to get [a] joke is an indication of the distance that separates us,” he observed, “the perception of distance may serve as the starting point of an investigation.” I tell my first-year history students: If you feel weird because you don’t “get it,” you’re in the right place to start learning.

Recently, I found myself feeling weird in a small room shaped like an uppercase E. Boxed in by looming rows of bounded journals, at the end of my worktable a young former Duke of Edinburgh was framed and mounted, his orca sleek hair dissolving into the black shadows surrounding him. Next to her husband’s portrait, an even younger Queen Elizabeth II, gowned and crowned, alighted from a royal Rolls-Royce at the doors of Lincoln’s Inn on December 9th, 1957. I was in the heart of Empire. To my left, on another rectangular wooden table, an old-fashioned ice axe with a smooth wooden shaft rested casually as if its owner would soon return for it. I later learned it belonged to Andrew (Sandy) Irvine, a young mountaineer who was lost on Chomolungma (Everest) with George Mallory in 1924. He wasn’t coming back for it.

I was in the library of the Alpine Club of London. The Alpine Club, first of its name, founded 100 years before Elizabeth arrived at the Lincoln Inn. Before me sat a large, royal blue binder with a black spine and black corner lapels. “Original letters” its cover stated, “Farrar, Freshfield, Adams, Reilly, Whymper.” These were storied names in the history of mountaineering. Indeed, so many stories have been pinned to these names that recently scholars and mountain history enthusiasts have rightly demanded other stories about other people. Toward the back of the volume, after pages of dizzying swirls and swooping curlicues the Victorian script gave way to a neatly printed letter:

LETTERS BY THE REV. CHARLES HUDSON AND EDWARD WHYMPER RELATING TO THE MATTERHORN DISASTER OF 1865

The Matterhorn Disaster. The triumph and failure that is said to have shuttered the “Golden Age” of Alpine Mountaineering in July 1865. Edward Whymper (1840-1911), Rev. Charles Hudson (1828-65), Lord Francis Douglas (1847-65), Douglas Hadow (1846-65), Michel Croz (1830-65), and the father (1820-1888) and son (1843-1923) guides both named Peter Taugwalder, had summitted the technically challenging mountain, but only three survived. The others plummeted to their deaths after the young Hadow lost his footing and dragged Hudson, Douglas, and Croz off the mountainside. All would have perished had the rope not snapped, sparing Whymper and the Taugwalders a mutilating 4000-metre fall.

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