Active History

“The Time of Monsters”: History in Challenging Times

February 2, 2026 No Comments

By Andrew Nurse and Roberta Lexier

A crisis, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote in response to the rise of fascism in the 1930s, occurs when: “The old order is dying and the new one is struggling to be born.” His point was that the crises societies experience have specific – if far from simple – historical causes. They also have serious implications: “Now,” he continued, “is the time of monsters.”

Those monsters are all around us: the resurgence of fascism, an intensification of hard power in international politics, the collapse of the rules-based order, deceit on a level that is, in fact, so common that some have suggested we live in a “post-truth” culture, a dramatic effort to recast the meaning and implications of the past in ways that erase the work of a generation of scholars. The monsters, Gramsci reminds us, are grounded in our particular historical conjuncture.

We live in difficult times, characterized by extreme economic inequality, overlapping global health pandemics, a climate crisis, and the breakdown of liberal-democratic politics, however incomplete they have been in practice. Systems and structures and ideas developed over centuries – the nation-state, constitutional democracies, the ideal of universal human rights and the rule of law, free-market capitalism, and indeed our very ability to live on this planet – face concerted attack.

For historians, this has significant implications: the suppression and destruction of critical sources; the outright rejection of evidence (broadly defined); book bans; threats to tenure and academic freedom; censorship; and the weaponization of the past by divisive forces.

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Looking Beyond the Indian Act

January 30, 2026 No Comments

By Bob Joseph

This post is part of the Indian Act 150 series.

*Bob Joseph’s new book, 21 Things™ You Need to Know About Indigenous* *Self-Government.*

This year, 2026, marks 150 years of the Consolidated Indian Act of 1876. This serves as a timely opportunity to discuss the dismantling of this destructive and restrictive piece of legislation. The Indian Act has constrained and controlled the lives of Status Indians for generations, and reconciliation will be hampered until the Indian Act is no longer intact.

My recent book, 21 Things™ You Need to Know About Indigenous Self-Government, invites Canadians to join the conversation about dismantling the Indian Act and has offered me the opportunity to have these important discussions with readers across the country. During these conversations, a question I have frequently been asked was: “So what comes next? What is your vision of Canada without the Indian Act?”

My answer is that a return to Indigenous self-government is vital and necessary. I say “return” because Indigenous Peoples have been self-governing since time immemorial. In fact, Indigenous self-governance is already happening and is a way for Indigenous Nations to regain their agency from the historical injustices of the Indian Act.

In order to best understand the lasting effects of the Indian Act and the necessity of the move towards self-government, I think it’s important to first have a quick historical overview.

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The power of oral history in piecing together archival fragments documenting 2SLGBTQ+ community histories

January 21, 2026 No Comments

Meredith J. Batt

*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.

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“The Testing Place of our Canadian Citizenship is Going to be Our Cities”: J.S. Woodsworth and the Settlement Movement in Britain and Canada.”

January 16, 2026 No Comments

Katherine Wilson-Smith

“A View From the Roof of the Residence.” Twenty One Years at Mansfield House, 1890-1911. Plaistow: W. S. Caines, 1911. 1.

“From the roof of the Settlement one looks over a vast, monotonous, dingy sea of houses, acre upon acre, mile upon mile, in long rigid rows – like frozen waves of the grey sea – broken only by gaunt chimneys and tapering masts to show the limit of the docks.”¹

On 11 December 1899, this bleak scene greeted J.S. Woodsworth upon his arrival at Mansfield House, in London’s East End, where he spent two weeks over the Christmas break. Woodsworth resided at Mansfield House for a short time, but his daughter credited this brief sojourn with putting her father on the path to becoming the eventual leader of the CCF: the poverty he witnessed during his short time in the East End was both personally shocking and a jolt towards practical action.² Less than a decade later, Woodsworth became the superintendent of the All People’s Mission in Winnipeg. There, his leadership would be inspired by the principles and practices he had observed in London and in particular, the use of Christian socialist values to foster a non-denominational environment in which the whole community was welcome. This somewhat overlooked period of Woodsworth’s life and his ties with the settlement movement are essential to understanding his political and ideological development, which is reflective of the broader climate of transnational socialism at the turn of the century.

Mansfield House was in Canning Town, an extremely poor neighbourhood that was reliant on the docks for work and home to large pockets of immigrants, east of the Metropolitan area of London and just before the Essex marshes. The settlement, which took up residence in a row of former shops, brought the charm and middle-class respectability of Mansfield College, Oxford to the notorious slum. Residents living at Mansfield were Oxford students and professors, “slumming” in the East End, simultaneously investigating the lives of locals and living among them.³ The public-facing rooms in the settlement were intended to be aspirational, as the house opened its doors to the community every day. Pre-arranged activities were held during the day for boys and girls clubs and in the evening for working adults. If sporadic visits occurred, there was also staff always on call to assist people on the doorstep.⁴

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Indian Act 150: An Introduction

January 16, 2026 No Comments

By Katie Carson, Sarah Kittilsen, and Sean Carleton

Canada 150—the sesquicentennial celebration of the country’s confederation—was marked with pomp and circumstance, as the Federal Government encouraged Canadians across the country to commemorate what it called “one of Canada’s proudest moments.” April 12, 2026 will mark another sesquicentennial: 150 years since the Canadian government passed the Indian Act, the cornerstone of the legislative apparatus that continues to govern Indigenous-settler relations in the country today. While the Act does not hold the same pride of place within Canada’s historical narrative, it too has played, and continues to play, a fundamental role in the trajectory of this settler-colonial state. Its 150th year can also provide an impetus for consideration and reflection.

Indian Act 150 is a year-long series that calls attention to the anniversary of a piece of formative legislation, one that today’s liberal state would rather ignore. It invites scholars, public intellectuals, graduate students, and community members to consider the 150-year-long history of the Indian Act, the histories that have been produced about it, and the future of Indigenous-settler relations in Canada.

Bob Joseph—authour of 21 Things™ You May Not Know About the Indian Act and most recently, 21 Things™ You Need to Know About Indigenous Self Governance—will kick off the series at the end of January. Today, Sean Carleton, a contributing editor with Active History, will offer some introductory comments on the history and historiography of the Indian Act in Canada.

Katie Carson & Sarah Kittilsen, series editors.

*Stan Williams, Bridge at Garden River First Nation in Ontario.*

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Canada’s National Debt – What’s Old is News

January 15, 2026 No Comments

By Sean Graham

This week, I talk with Angela Tozer, author of The Debt of a Nation: Land and the Financing of the Canadian Settler State, 1820-73. We discuss how governments take on debt, the purpose of debt, and how colonialism fuelled land speculation. We also chat about how resource extraction was critical to servicing debt, the changes brought on by Confederation, and the on-going legacy of 19th century national debt.

Historical Headline of the Week

“Debt Management Strategy for 2020-21,” Department of Finance Canada.

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Spying and Lying: The Abortion Scandal that Helped Sink the Socreds

January 13, 2026 No Comments

By Lilia Scudamore

Few Canadian governments — federal or provincial — have been so embroiled in scandal as William “Bill” Vander Zalm’s Social Credit Party (known colloquially as the ‘Socreds’). The government was routinely caught performing an array of improprieties, ranging from back-door deals to openly disobeying the Supreme Court of Canada to fighting with journalists on air.^[1] The contemporary reader may find comfort in knowing that the administration met its demise after four years in power and ultimately delivered a death knell to the provincial Socreds, who had dominated the province for nearly fifty years. However, the party got away with a tremendous amount before then. In one oft-forgotten incident, the Vander Zalm government spied on BC’s largest pro-choice advocacy group for more than six months. No charges were ever laid. The BC New Democratic Party (NDP) seized the opportunity to make promises to the public about reproductive freedoms, which it fulfilled when it assumed power in 1991.

*Postcard from the CCCA, reprinted in BC NDP Women’s Rights Committee publication, Priorities, Spring 1987.*

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Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism (book review)

January 7, 2026 No Comments

By Samir Shaheen-Hussain

The “thrifty gene” has a decades-long history that can be traced back to James V. Neel, an American physician-scientist, considered by many in his field as the “father of modern human genetics” [90]. Neel expounded his hypothesis in 1962 by proposing that such a gene would have emerged in hunter-gatherer societies as an adaptive response to a feast-and-famine lifestyle [2], but that it would have detrimental effects if food scarcity was eliminated. His idea was based on the assumption that “Indigenous bodies were genetically predisposed to diabetes, obesity, and other metabolic syndromes because of the foodways of their ancestors” [1-2], and relied on the now widely discredited “myth of forager food insecurity” [14-15, 146]. Neel’s own quest to discover the thrifty gene led him to conduct questionable studies on Indigenous populations in Brazil and Venezuela throughout the 1960s [2, 86-97]. In 1989, Neel sought to bury his own idea, writing that “the data on which that (rather soft) hypothesis was based has now largely collapsed” [100].

Yet, in 1999, Canadian scientists working with the Sandy Lake First Nation to address increasing rates of diabetes-related complications in the northern Ontario community announced to great fanfare that they had identified a genetic variant that “certainly had all the earmarks of what a thrifty gene would be” [136, 141]. Critics, including Indigenous scholars [144-5], questioned the layers of flawed premises upon which their conclusions rested and highlighted how they diverted attention away from the impacts of decades of colonial policies on Indigenous food sovereignty and mobility. Several years later, the lead authors of the study backtracked on their findings: there was no thrifty gene to be found [145-6].

This is the history that Travis Hay compellingly develops in Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism. The persistence of the thrifty gene hypothesis to this day is itself reflective of the enduring consequences of the science of settler colonialism [19, 137, 149, 152].

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Rediscovering Private Hasan Amat: Canada’s First Muslim Soldier Killed in the First World War

December 29, 2025 1 Comment

Warrant Officer Daniyal Elahi, 337 Queen’s York Rangers Royal Canadian Army Cadets

Growing up, I often felt as though Muslim Canadians were a recent part of this country — as if our connection began only in 1965, when my grandfather immigrated from Pakistan. In school, the Canadian soldiers we learned about seemed to share the same background and the same story. Nothing suggested that someone like me, a young Muslim Army Cadet, had any place in that history.

That changed when I discovered Private Hasan Amat.

His name first appeared to me not in my history textbooks, but in a passing online reference. A Malay Muslim seaman born in Singapore in 1894, he enlisted twice in Canada, trained in England, and ultimately died fighting with the 1st Canadian Infantry Battalion at Hill 70 in 1917. The more I read, the more incredible his story became — and the more confused I felt that I had never heard it before.

My family and I, through our public history project Our Shared Sacrifice, obtained his full service file from Library and Archives Canada (LAC). Thirty-seven pages, filled with fragments of a life: his attestation papers, his medical records, his pay sheets, the two wills he signed, and the short, devastating entry confirming his death on that fateful day of August 20, 1917. These were not abstract facts. They were the pieces of a young man’s journey, recorded in his own hand.

Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force attestation paper from 1916. The form shows handwritten responses to questions. Multiple signatures and official stamps appear throughout the document.

Private Hasan Amat’s first attestation paper, completed in Halifax in January 1916. Library and Archives Canada, Personnel File of Private Hasan Amat (Reg. Nos. 478860 & 1075269).

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Crossing the Line: Women’s Opposition to the Winnipeg General Strike

December 22, 2025 No Comments

Ella Prisco

This essay is part of a 2-part series. See the other entry here.

Two women strikebreakers working at a gas station, posing beside a gas pump. — *Women Volunteers at Gas Pumps.* May 1919. University of Manitoba Digital Collections. http://hdl.handle.net/10719/2694587.

“They have borne the lonely hours with fortitude,” stated the Winnipeg Citizen in its coverage of scabbing women during the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.^[1] Indeed they had, taking up positions as telephone switchboard operators and waitresses in response to the nearly thirty thousand workers who walked off the job in Canada’s largest general strike to date.^[2] The strike had put the middle and upper classes on edge. They understood the strike as moving beyond a demand for collective bargaining and signaling a desire for socialist revolution.^[3] This anxiety only increased as the strike expanded beyond the purview of the public sphere and encroached on the private sphere of the home, resulting in middle- and upper-class women being unable to fulfill their traditional domestic duties. As a result, these women were motivated to intervene, becoming scabs and engaging in anti-strike activity to prevent the strike’s immoral force from further impacting the domestic sphere and ‘tainting’ society at large. In doing so, these women extended their accepted social roles as nurturers, caregivers and guardians of the domestic sphere into the public sphere, justifying their entrance into the workforce as a form of socially acceptable political activism rooted in traditional femininity.

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