The thoughts and sentiments shared in this essay are our own and do not represent the Nova Scotia Museum or Shelburne Historical Society.
As part of the significant cuts set out in the 2026-2027 Nova Scotia provincial budget, the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage announced last week that they needed “to focus [their] efforts where they will make the most difference.” Those efforts will no longer extend to the 12 rural museums they suddenly, and without warning, decided to permanently shutter. Shelburne’s Ross-Thomson House & Store was among the casualties.
In their statement, the department indicated that they considered several factors when deciding which museums to close, but noted especially that these sites had low visitor attendance. This measure does not acknowledge the value of these heritage spaces to their communities or the important histories they preserve.
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.
In March 2026, a Canadian historian and an American Geographer met in Cambridge, ON to begin a collaborative project, literally “between friends,” inspired by Canada’s 1976 bicentennial gift to the United States, the coffee table book Between Friends/Entre Amis.[i] The year 2026 marks the 50th anniversary of this gift. And we are those two scholars. Looking at this book together, as friends and scholars from opposite sides of the border, inspired questions about the current relationship between Canada and the United States. What did this book mean to the two countries at the time of its publication? What does this book mean 50 years later? How has the polarization of the Canada-U.S. relationship changed the meaning of this gift? This essay is our reflection on the historical context of the book and some possible answers to these questions.
First edition publication of the book Between Friends/Entre Amis. Photo by authors.
Between Friends/Entre Amis was Canada’s official gift to the United States on the occasion of its bicentennial in 1976. Twenty-six Canadian photographers were commissioned by Lorraine Monk of the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board of Canada, and some 220 photographs were ultimately included in the volume. Designed to celebrate “the longest undefended international border in the world,” photographers were tasked with capturing images within 30 miles of the Canada-U.S. border, beginning in the Arctic, down the Alaska panhandle and across the Rockies, prairies, Great Lakes, Quebec, and the Maritimes. McClelland & Stewart’s press run was the most ambitious Canadian publishing project to that time. Indeed, some 200,000 copies were printed, and the book received outstanding praise and criticism in the press on both sides of the border. A special Presentation Edition was extended for American dignitaries. Pierre Trudeau and Lorraine Monk personally gave President Ford his copy in a Washington ceremony. The entire project cost about $1 million (in 1976).
Since coming into office only weeks ago, Donald Trump’s on-and-off again threat of taking a sledgehammer to free trade has kept Canadians on edge.
Canadians are angry and frustrated, especially at Trump’s continued assertion that our country is not viable and that we should become the 51st state.
I am not all that convinced that Trump’s end goal is to annex Canada, but if for some reason that is the objective, he need only look to Canada’s long history to understand how unlikely he is to succeed.
Our countries seem alike, but are not the same. We have had many opportunities to join our neighbours to the south and have repeatedly decided to chart a different path, each step shaping distinctive Canadian political structures and traditions.
It Won’t Be Long Now! A Scene at the Bathing Beach at Port Dalhousie, Ontario,” May 2, 1930, photo by Canadian National Railways, published by the Toronto Star (Toronto Star Archives, Toronto Public Library).
ActiveHistory.ca is on a hiatus for our annual summer break, with a return to daily posts in mid-august.
Thank you to all our contributors, guest writers, guest editors, and readers for making 2026 a very successful year. In the meantime, we will be periodically reposting some excellent posts.
Wishing you all a great summer we look forward to continuing our work soon!
Nazi Germany 1933-05 Aktion wider den undeutschen Geist Public burning of unwanted books and publications deemed dissenting SA Sturmabteilung Studetns etc retouched photo Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe. May 10, 1933. Unidentified (unknown, uncredited or anonymous) photographer, Keystone View Company Berlin SW 68 Zimmerstrasse 29. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Generations of social historians have scoured archives and invented new ways of doing history through their collaboration with other fields. A new “vintage AI” model, talkie, is an example of what happens when knowledge extraction replaces collaboration.
Parsing the various communications around the model, the team behind talkie has framed their new LLM in two ways. In their blog post introducing this new model, and in an interview with the podcast Hard Fork, the team behind this project describe its predictive potential. They aim to test whether language models can predict events beyond the period of the training data, and do so by training it with pre-1931 documents. The team presupposes that if this “vintage” model can predict its future, then modern models trained on the current web can predict our future.
talkie chatbot interface, however, does not engage with the model as a predictive tool. There is no proof of its efficacy. In our testing, their local model is not shipped with any predictive capabilities, nor do they provide sufficient documentation to achieve any prediction. Instead, it acts more like a toy to interact with a particular version of history. Their tagline advertises the model as “an LM from 1930,” as if the user is talking with an entity from the past. The framing between prediction and history disguises a tool whose use is unclear and whose underpinnings are flawed.
These flaws begin with the data on which talkie was trained. Its training corpus was a subset of the published English-language record before 1930. Like most western archives, this is a corpus likely dominated by white, male, and elite writers. Other voices are outweighed in the records and further filtered by digitization. The result is a model that speaks confidently for the past in the voice of its narrowest slice.
Earlier this year, over forty people logged in to Zoom to attend a CHA webinar titled “Generative AI and the Practice of History.” Introduced as a “show and tell” for AI tools and strategies, the webinar included a panel of three expert historians who each presented on a distinct topic related to agentic AI, the tech that’s been dominating headlines since the release of Chat GPT to the general public in November 2022.
While I was hoping for a lively conversation about AI and creative thinking, writing, labour, and capitalism, much of the discussion centred around “best practices,” revealing what I felt was a relatively uncritical acceptance of these dynamic platforms. During the Q&A, most discussants sought answers on how to apply AI tech “responsibly” in their pedagogical and scholarly work. I, on the other hand, was left wondering about a much more essential, epistemic question, one that gets to the root of our role as scholars, teachers, and citizens of the world: how will the process of cognitive “offloading” shape, and potentially harm, the creative potential of our scholarship? Will there be any space left in our praxis for curiosity? Wonder? Possibility?
I suddenly felt I had missed something in recent months. How and when had we reached the consensus that offloading and outsourcing our more arduous tasks was decidedly “good,” for history as practice, for the university, and for our engagement with the world more broadly?
Woman with wax tablets and stylus, 55 -79 AD, public domain
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)
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:
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.
