Active History

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

May 12, 2026 No Comments

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 Active History.

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 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.

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A Modern History of Monsters

May 11, 2026 No Comments

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

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

May 5, 2026 No Comments

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.

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Global Fascism: Lessons from India

April 27, 2026 No Comments

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.

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

April 22, 2026 No Comments

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.”

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

April 17, 2026 No Comments

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.

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Piecing Together Fragments: Historians and True Crime

April 16, 2026 1 Comment

Shannon Stettner

As a child, on Friday nights just before 9:00 pm, I’d tuck myself under a living room end table. If I was quiet and hidden, I could usually get away with watching at least part of Dallas. I was equal parts enthralled and scandalized. The epic “Who shot JR?” storyline was my first memorable introduction to crime and, like millions watching, I was captivated. A few years later, I made the leap to true crime as a somewhat under-supervised, voracious reader with ready access to a bookshelf full of not quite age-appropriate content.

In recent years, true crime stories have become a ubiquitous part of the public conscience. There is no shortage of docuseries, books, or social media accounts dedicated to murder and mayhem. Analyses suggest women are drawn to true crime for a variety of reasons ranging from a sense of control over patriarchal/existential violence to more philosophical considerations about evil, retribution, and how well we can know another person.[i] For me, as a child, I recall being drawn to the unfinished stories. The idea that someone’s life could be interrupted in the middle of living, both horrified and fascinated me. As historians we try to piece together fragments of people’s lives in meaningful ways. I think this is why the true crime narratives have always held such an appeal to me. But where history tries to complicate its subjects, much true crime overly simplifies them.

For some time, I contemplated writing a true crime book. Looking through local unsolved cases, I encountered Geraldine Pickford. Not a lot of information is publicly available about her death.

Most of the material is available via the York Regional Police cold case website. Pickford was killed on the evening of September 18, 1965. She had worked a shift as a waitress in the dining hall at St. Andrews College in Aurora, Ontario. Her belongings were found on a path, and a search team found her body some hours later.

“The Woman Nobody Knew: The Story Behind a Murder Victim,” Toronto Telegram, September 20, 1965, p. 1.

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“No random historical exercise:” The Implications of Coupal v. Leroux

April 13, 2026 No Comments

By Andrew Nurse

This post is part of the Indian Act 150 series.

On March 11, 2026, Saskatchewan Court of King’s Bench Justice D.E. Labach issued a summary judgement against Darryl Leroux.¹ The issue was whether Leroux, a well-known authority on “self-indigenization,” had defamed Michelle Coupal, a Canada Research Chair at the University of Saskatchewan, because he suggested Coupal used a fake Indigenous identity to advance her career. The Court ruled he had and awarded Coupal $70,000.00 in damages. This case was, as journalist Jorge Barrera wrote, “no random historical exercise.” Its details are important for historians because they illustrate how the very policies that are supposed to move Canada and First Peoples toward reconciliation—in this case, a land settlement—carry with them odd, potentially even bizarre, implications for the practice of history that serve to reinscribe the very colonialism they seek to overcome. History is already a battleground in the reconciliation process. Coupal v. Leroux illustrates how a conflict over family histories is connected to Indigenous identities and land claims.

The Coupal v. Leroux case was decided by a judge from the Saskatchewan Court of King’s Bench in March 2026. Indigenous identity researcher loses defamation case in Sask. | CBC News

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The Complex Legacy of John Carr Munro

April 9, 2026 No Comments

By Daniel R. Meister

Official Portrait of John Carr Munro. Copyright, House of Commons, 1980

When it comes to periodizing the history of federal policy of multiculturalism in Canada, existing models have loosely associated changes in policy with the changing of the governments.^[1] But a closer examination of the earliest decades of the policy’s existence suggests that the Cabinet ministers responsible for the policy were more responsible for its evolution than the prime minister or political party in power. This is despite the fact that multiculturalism it was never considered a prestigious portfolio, and therefore some of the figures involved are also lesser remembered.

Take, for instance, the second minister of state responsible for multiculturalism: John Carr Munro (1931–2003). Munro was a long-time Liberal MP for Hamilton East (1962–1984) and although he was responsible for multiculturalism for just under three years (August 1974–April 1977), this was a comparatively long time for the era. Press coverage in his early years as a Cabinet minister emphasized his “social conscience.” For instance, in 1972, a lengthy article in Macleans relayed a series of revealing anecdotes that give a glimpse of a hardworking, grassroots, dedicated, and generally well-meaning politician. According to the article, his mother was his greatest political supporter, even in high school. He scraped through university, became a lawyer, got involved in municipal politics, and eventually ran for Parliament, finally winning in 1962 but accruing significant debt along the way. Despite prime ministerial ambitions, he spent over five years as a backbencher. Passed over for a cabinet post in 1968, he reportedly wept and considered quitting the Liberal party altogether.

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Poilievre’s comments on folklore aren’t quaint—they’re dangerous

April 8, 2026 No Comments

Chris Greencorn

A late-seventeenth century woodcut from “Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham,” black text against a brown background, and a depiction of people hunting deer in a forest with bow and arrow. — Woodcut from “Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham” broadside [ca. 1693–95], Eunig Ballads 306, University of Glasgow Library / English Broadside Ballad Archive 31723, University of California Santa Barbara

On 3 March, Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre delivered the keynote Margaret Thatcher Lecture for the Centre for Policy Studies in London, an influential British conservative think tank co-founded by Thatcher with the mission of keeping her ideas and policies relevant in today’s political landscape. Poilievre’s address to this room full of Tory movers and shakers thus was unsurprisingly a paean to free market capitalism, drawing on Adam Smith, Thomas Macaulay, Winston Churchill, and the Iron Lady herself.

About three-quarters of the way through his speech, Poilievre waxed about the ties that continue to bind the former dominion with its imperial metropole. “Canada and the United Kingdom share language, culture, parliamentary government, and most important of all, folklore,” he claimed, “including the possibly fictional legend of Robin Hood. And, by the way, I don’t mean the medieval Marxist of 20th-century retellings. Robin fought, as do we, for ancient liberties of the common people: to hunt, harvest, and keep what was theirs.”

I beg your pardon?

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