By Erin Isaac and Dr. Benjamin Hoy For many, board games conjure up memories of time spent with family and friends around the dinner table. I remember, when I was young, drinking cream soda while watching my sister eviscerate my hopes of owning Park Place and my mom bend the rules to keep me out of bankruptcy. Years later, I… Read more »
Erin O’Toole, the newly minted leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, has some positive things to say about residential schools. At least he did, when he thought he was speaking to a closed shop of otherwise conservative leaning students. O’Toole – or, someone in his office – very quickly tried to walk his comments back … sort of.[1] What… Read more »
By Erin Isaac Jamestown looms large in North American collective historical imagination, in pop culture as well as in the classroom. As North America’s first permanent English settlement, the site is celebrated as the “birthplace” of modern Anglo-American society but (as is true of all historical sites) the history of Jamestown is complicated; there are aspects to its story to… Read more »
By James Cullingham One Arrow First Nation Chief Tricia Sutherland says this “the right time for the story to be told.” The story concerns Almighty Voice (Kitchi-Manito-Waya) the young Cree man from One Arrow, a community near Batoche who became subject of one of the longest manhunts in Canadian history. Almost exactly 125 years ago, Almighty Voice slaughtered a settler’s… Read more »
By James Cullingham It was a psychotropic June evening half a century ago. The superb British band Traffic led by Stevie Winwood played Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling Good.’ The sound of Chris Wood’s flute mingled with a marijuana haze as thousands sat or danced entranced on what was usually the Toronto Argonauts’s home field at CNE Stadium in Toronto. The Festival… Read more »
By James Cullingham We lost a towering, deeply rooted presence recently. His name was Gary Potts. He gave much to his Teme-Agama Anishinaabe – Temagami First Nation community, the Temagami region, this country called Canada and anyone whose path he crossed. Temagami is located about 100 kilometers north of North Bay. It’s a storied region chronicled by newcomers such as… Read more »
Benjamin Bryce I recently submitted an article manuscript to a scholarly journal about my great-great grandfather, Cooper Robinson, and his photography in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a social historian of migration, I have long been interested in family, but I had never done work on my own family. My personal, albeit distant, relationship to… Read more »
By James Cullingham I first saw The Band at Massey Hall in January 1970 when I was a Toronto high school student. It was a highly anticipated comeback show just around the corner from the bars and strip clubs they had played when they were known as The Hawks. The Band’s sound drew on Appalachian music, Country & Western, Delta… Read more »
By David Calverley As a secondary school history teacher in Ontario, I enjoyed the ActiveHistory.ca posts published in March by Samantha Cutrara and Rose Fine-Meyer. I agree that women’s history and gender issues are not well-represented in Ontario’s Grade 7 and 8 History curriculums. Lack of representation is also an issue in the Grade 10 History Curriculum. It is the… Read more »
By Sophie Hicks This is the fourth post in a summer series exploring societal, community, and familial connections to food and food history. See the series introduction post here. An earlier version of this post appeared on The Canadian Cooking Chronicles, as part of a final project for an Archives Practicum class. As an unapologetic fan of Ian Mosby’s work… Read more »
