Expanding our Sources, Expanding our Stories: An Active History / Source Story Series

In collaboration with Histoire Source | Source Story, a video series for history educators, Active History is recruiting writers to write complementary posts on themes related to one of seven Histoire Source | Source Story conversational videos.

While the videos were designed for a K-12 teaching audience, they are rich in content for a broader audience. Thus, we envision these Active History posts as an academic complement to the conversations – What are more layered ways an undergraduate student, for example, may listen to, and beyond, these conversations?

Below is a list of the seven videos, along with proposed question prompts, which may highlight how a writer may want to approach complementing these topics. Note that the questions are illustrative, not definitive. Also note that the questions cover both the content of the videos along with the method(s) discussed in the video. We are open to either, or both, approaches. 

We are expecting blog posts to be 800-1,200 words and we will post them throughout the fall. We are asking for proposals by June 30 with a finished draft for submission no later than September 1. Writers will receive an honorarium of $150 upon publication.

For June 30, please submit a 200 word proposal that identifies the topic of your proposed post, which video the post will complement, and the driving question and themes that the post will centre on. Please also include your CV and a public history writing sample, if you have not written for Active History before. 

To learn more about Active History and/or Source Story click the aligned links. 

For questions and submissions for this series, please email Thomas Peace at tpeace@uwo.ca.

For more information about Source Story, please email HistoireSourceStory@gmail.com.

VIDEOS AND PROPOSED QUESTIONS

School’s in Session! Teaching Canadian history at the Buxton Schoolhouse

• What did segregated schooling look like in Canada? What are history(ies) related to Buxton’s settlers and how can we understand broader North American history through these experiences?
• What are other Black history sites that tell deeper stories of community in Canada? How does site-based learning bring greater complexity to history?

Written in the Margins: A conversation about 1980s Trans & Queer activism and politics

• What are some examples of trans/queer organizing in the past? What are some examples of contention and collaboration in queer community(ies) in the past?
• How have you approached annotations in archival documents? Have you elicited different histories from these annotations than the source itself?

Running into the Record: Using runaway slave ads to unsettle the great white north

• What are other stories of enslaved people who self-liberated that we should be talking about in our history classes? What are ways we can better understand enslavement and empire by focusing on historical geography and translational movement?
• How can we use our historical imagination to give voice to those without traditional records? What role will Unsettling the Great White North play in larger Canadian historiography?

An Eggcellent Idea: Object-based history assignments for understanding self and society

• What are ways for us to historicise Canada’s Food Guide? How does Canada’s food history(ies) intersect with histories related to (de)colonization, racism, capitalism, and/or sexism?
• Do you teach about bodies, or the history of the body(ies), in your history courses? Where does the body come in in your histories?

A Love Letter to Community: Photography and oral histories to bring the past present

• How can we understand Black settlement as core to the Canadian experience? What are stories of Africville that are eclipsed by its razing? 
• How have contemporary engagements in the past – such as through oral histories, art projects, Elder invitations to classrooms – brought new dimensions to historical events not found in traditional sources alone?

Introduced to Ogimaa: Women, leadership and flipping the perspective on colonial sources

• How can ogimaa, and other non-colonial/non-patriarchal interpretations of power and leadership, be situated more centrally in North American history? How can we understand the genre of captive narratives in a longer historiography of colonial writings?
• What are ways for us to approach colonial sources with an aim to decolonize our understanding of the past? What are ways you have flipped perspectives to bring out more complex stories from a (seemingly) straightforward source?

An Inuk in Korea: Eddy Weetaltuk’s 20th century life

• What were war and post-war experiences like for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples? What are some experiences with residential schools for Inuit?
• What place does autobiography and/or illustration have in the historical imagination? What role does editorial collaboration have in the ways we understand certain histories?

For more on on the videos in the Historire Source | Source Story series, subscribe here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf547ZmWtT6lUTGAs2zO6Fg