An Ode: A History of Lilacs in Canada

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This week marks the 10th anniversary of Unwritten Histories, a project created by Andrea Eidinger that has shaped how many of us think about the past—how it’s written, shared, and understood.

In the coming weeks, the site will be taken offline. The material won’t be lost: Andrea is in the process of building a Pressbook to house the content, and the website itself has been archived.

To mark the occasion, we’ll be revisiting some of the most memorable posts from Unwritten Histories—the ones that challenged assumptions, opened up new conversations, and continue to resonate.

May 2, 2017

The History of Lilacs in Canada

Spring is a very special time of year for me. For the most part, this has to do with lilacs, my favourite flowers. When I was a little girl, my elderly neighbour, Mr. Sullivan, had the most amazing lilac bush. He had planted several seedlings together when he first bought the house in the 1950s, so that by the 1980s, they had grown together into this massive tree. Every May, since this was Montreal, the tree would explode into bloom. This was my favourite time of the year, and one I looked forward to for months. The tree was next to my second-story bedroom window, so whenever my window was open, the scent of lilacs permeated my room. Mr. Sullivan would also bring over armfuls of lilac flowers for my family, and I always begged to be allowed to put a bouquet of them in my room. Over the years, lilacs have come to represent spring, joy, and wonder for me.

So, when I spotted a blooming lilac bush during a run the other day, I got to wondering about the history of lilacs, particularly in Canada. My husband was dubious; after all, who really cares about the history of a particular flower, even if it is really pretty? But, as I’ve discovered with my research, there is more to this flower than meets the eye.

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Remembering Through the Body: Why We Turned to Research-Creation

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By Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown

231 Mutual St., Toronto, former site of Club Toronto and the Pussy Palace bathhouse events. Illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba. LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI, Elspeth Brown), 2023.

When we began the Pussy Palace Oral History Project, we faced a familiar problem in queer oral history. Conventional interviews privilege chronology and plot. They ask what happened, who was there, what came next. In the case of the Pussy Palace, that gravitational pull led almost inevitably toward the 2000 police raid.

But, as we have hinted in earlier posts, the Palace was more than the raid. It was a bathhouse party: a humid, crowded, erotic world that unfolded across four floors of Club Toronto. And yet there are no public photographs of it, no ambient recordings, no architectural blueprints marked with memory.

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10 Years: Unwritten Histories – The Blog

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This week marks the 10th anniversary of Unwritten Histories, a project created by Andrea Eidinger that has shaped how many of us think about the past—how it’s written, shared, and understood.

In the coming weeks, the site will be taken offline. The material won’t be lost: Andrea is in the process of building a Pressbook to house the content, and the website itself has been archived.

To mark the occasion, we’ll be revisiting some of the most memorable posts from Unwritten Histories—the ones that challenged assumptions, opened up new conversations, and continue to resonate.

March 29, 2016

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Welcome! This blog will focus on the unwritten rules to history, as both a discipline, a field of study, and as a career. The information that appears in this blog is the result of thirteen years of doing history at the undergraduate and graduate level as well as six years working as a sessional instructor.

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“Entre Amis in an Era of Polarization”

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By Stephanie Bangarth and Sara Beth Keough

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).

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Tenants’ Collective Responses to Housing Crises across Canada from 1900 until Present

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2022 Banner drop by tenants organised with le Syndicat des locataires autonomes de Montréal, Montreal Autonomous Tenants’ Union, (SLAM)1

This series looks at the different housing crises tenants have experienced across Canada from the 1900s until the present and details how they responded, successfully and unsuccessfully, through tactics of community and/or class-based direct action and structures based in grassroots direct democracy. We hope that by putting forward these examples, we can better inform the actions of activists in the present. Each blog post in this series centres on a single community and/or organisation, contextualises their existence within the conditions of their time, and recounts important moments or struggles, drawing lessons for or parallels to the present.

Fred Burrill, Tenant Resistance to the Myth of “Supply and Demand”

Series editors Zakary Hartley-Dawson and Sofia O’Reilly.

  1. “Devenir Membre,” Syndicat Des Locataires Autonomes de Montréal (SLAM), accessed 24 March 2026, https://www.slam-matu.org/en/devenir-membre/. ↩︎

Tenant Resistance to the Myth of “Supply and Demand”

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By Fred Burrill

This post is part of the Tenants’ Collective Responses to Housing Crises across Canada series.

Anti-gentrification demonstration in Saint-Henri, Montreal, QC, 2011. Photo by Fred Burrill.

One of capitalism’s most powerful myths is that of supply and demand. Take housing, for instance. We’re told by policymakers that the current desperate situation facing tenants in major Canadian cities is due to increased immigration: in the words of outgoing Quebec Premier François Legault, “In Montreal, we have exceeded our welcoming capacity.”

In a majority-tenant city experiencing the financial crunch of skyrocketing rents, framing the issue this way has obvious repercussions for the well-being and safety of migrants and other people of colour in Montreal. It also conveniently hides the fact that housing costs are the manifestation of structural power relations and not naturally occurring phenomena. In other words, housing is a terrain of struggle between those who own property and those who are forced to pay for the privilege of a roof over their heads. In the zero-sum game of capitalist urban planning, the space for working-class life shrinks as the space for profit-making is enlarged.

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Fascism and the Crises of Capitalism: A Tale of Two Crises

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By Roberta Lexier

For early twentieth-century Marxists, fascism was, explains Alberto Toscano in his 2023 book, Late Fascism, “intimately linked to the prerequisites of capitalist domination.” 

“The instrument of the big bourgeoisie,” Robert O. Paxton suggests in The Anatomy of Fascism, its purpose: “for fighting the proletariat when the legal means available to the state proved insufficient to subdue them.”

“At times of economic or political crisis,” David Renton outlines in 2020’s Fascism: History and Theory, “hegemony alone is not enough. When millions of people start to question the ruling class, then something more than persuasive argument is needed.” Fascism, then, “seeks to maintain capitalist means of production… to sustain them without social conflict and it refuses to allow any opportunity for workers to organise against their employers.”

Hungarian economist, Karl Polanyi, concluded that it was “that revolutionary solution which keeps Capitalism untouched,” while Italian socialist, Antonio Gramsci, described it as “the attempt to resolve the problems of production and exchange with machine-guns and pistol-shots.” 

Nearly a hundred years later, it is clear that additional factors contributed to the rise of fascist politics, movements, and regimes preceding the Second World War, particularly in Germany: entrenched anti-Semitism, weak liberal democracy, unrestrained nationalist and imperialist ambitions, and the widespread normalization of violence, to name a few. But, as Richard J. Evans insists in The Coming of the Third Reich, “[e]ven the most diehard reactionary might eventually have learned to tolerate the [Weimar] Republic if it had provided a reasonable level of economic stability and a decent, solid income for its citizens.” “[P]eople,” he says, “began to grasp at political straws: anything, however extreme, seemed better than the hopeless mess they appeared to be in.”

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Care Under Raid: Policing, Privacy, and Queer Resistance

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Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown

Leanne Powers, digital illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba for The Pussy Palace Oral History Project, LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. 2025.

“Suddenly, I heard nothing outside, and that was when the police were walking through that area. I heard a knock at the door, and I put myself in front of the person who was in the temple with me and stood up to just [maintain] as much control of the situation as I could.”

—Leanne Powers, Temple Priestess

Around 12:45 a.m. on September 15, 2000, five plainclothes male police officers entered the Pussy Palace under the pretense of a liquor licence inspection. They walked through the pool and sauna. They knocked on closed doors. They recorded names and addresses.

For many patrons, the violation was immediate and visceral. But to understand why the raid felt so profound, we have to understand what the police were interrupting.

The Pussy Palace was not simply a party. It was a space deliberately structured around consent, orientation, and collective care. Volunteers greeted newcomers and explained etiquette. Security circulated not to police pleasure but to support it.

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The Extraordinary Meaning of Everyday Life: Joy Parr’s Pioneering Vision in the History of Technology

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By Jessica van Horssen

Historians aren’t really made to be on film. Or at least not beyond a 15-second “talking head” clip in a documentary, and even then, we can be woefully thrown off-course. As a fan of Diane Morgan’s Philomena Cunk, I’m well-versed in the risks of historians on the screen. This is why I was both excited and terrified when I was asked to create a film about Joy Parr’s scholarly life and impact following her passing in 2024.

Joy Parr was one of Canada’s leading historians, and she forged new epistemological frameworks and fields through her work in the history of childhood, gender, technology, and environment. She also didn’t like her photo being taken, and there is no film footage of her that I could have used to craft a visual tribute around. To solve these issues, I focused on Parr herself, being led by the work, and so too is the film I made with the help of a fantastic undergraduate student, Sedona Micale.

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Listening to Youth: Historicising & Challenging Parental Rights Discourse

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Derek Cameron, Karissa Patton, and Kristine Alexander


A repeating pattern of multicolored prohibition symbols crossing out the words “Parental Rights.”  Created by Karissa Patton.

In early February 2026, the United Conservative Party announced a change to MyHealth Records, a website that provides Albertans with online access to medical records. Previously limited to children under the age of twelve, parental access to medical records now extends to adolescents up to the age eighteen. 

In response to this change, Dr. Sam Wong, president of the pediatrics section of the Alberta Medical Association, told a CBC reporter that allowing parents to access their teenage children’s medical records would “jeopardize…the health care of certain adolescents.” This is the latest in a series of efforts by the UCP to remove young people’s rights to quality sex education and healthcare in Alberta. By privileging parental rights over adolescent autonomy, the UCP have expanded parental surveillance of young people’s healthcare decisions, including contraception, abortion, gender-affirming care, and vaccination.

This type of parental rights discourse, which poses particular risks for queer and trans youth, is not limited to Alberta. The idea that the rights of individual parents and guardians should come before the rights of young people as well is a transnational phenomenon. It is also historically specific. We suggest it should be understood as one outcome of the post-1970s coming together of neoliberalism and neoconservatism that Melinda Cooper has studied in the context of the United States. Over the past few decades, Canadian politics and public discourse have also been shaped by calls to return to what Cooper dubs the English “poor law tradition of family responsibility.”[1] This framework shifts authority away from the state by redefining healthcare and education as private family obligations and reinforcing hierarchies of gender and sexuality. It also undergirds claims that parents and caregivers have a unique right to surveil and control many aspects of their teenage children’s lives.

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