The Government of Canada has declared 2010 to be the Year of the British Home Child. Earlier this month, Canada Post released a commemorative stamp to honour this recognition. The stamp, designed by Debbie Adams of Adams+Associates Design Consultants, contains three images: the SS Sardinian, on which home children migrated from Britain to Canada; a photograph of a home child… Read more »
by Laura Madokoro Last week, the first event by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools was held in Winnipeg. In the same week, British Prime Minister David Cameron issued an apology on behalf of the British government for the “unjustified and unjustifiable” killings of thirteen people in Londonderry, Northern Ireland in 1972 – an event now famously known… Read more »
The use of new digital media in conjunction with conventional print publication is one of the many important contributions that Joy Parr’s recent Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 (2010, UBC Press) makes to our understanding of the past. The book examines how Canadians living in environments affected by megaprojects built after the Second World War responded to… Read more »
68 cities recently took part in Jane’s Walk, an annual weekend of free walking tours honouring the vision of urbanist Jane Jacobs. Ordinary people, Jacobs argued, can learn about and improve their surroundings by observing their daily environments at street level. These walks also bring out the histories of place through members of the local community – walk leaders and… Read more »
Today, Earth Day celebrates its 40th anniversary. Earth Day originated as a call to arms by US Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, who hoped to draw on the grassroots movement for greater environmental consciousness in order to bring about positive policy changes in Washington. Earth Day drew much of its early enthusiasm from university campuses. Fittingly, then, NiCHE (Network in… Read more »
April marks the one-year anniversary of this website. The steering committee of ActiveHistory.ca recently discussed the challenges and successes we have faced in our attempt over the past year to bridge the work of historians with a wider audience at Activism and the Academy: Struggles Against Hegemony, a two-day conference organized by the Graduate Women’s Studies Student Association at York… Read more »
by Jeremy Nathan Marks Historical writing has long suffered from the problem of auto-referentiality. Auto-referentiality, as I define it, simply means historians are writing only in reference to human subjects and human problems. I don’t mean to say that historiography is populated only by human beings but we do not currently possess an extensive literature where humans are not the… Read more »
A controversy has erupted over the past week surrounding how Canadians should remember Louis Riel, a 19th century Métis who not only led the 1869 Red River and 1885 Northwest Rebellions, but also negotiated the terms for Manitoba’s entry into Confederation in 1870 before his execution in 1885 for high treason. In a pamphlet posted online last December, Edmonton East… Read more »
by David Webster Canadians care about global poverty and development. Four out of five people surveyed in 1987 agreed that one of the best things about Canada was its global generosity. A recent poll of Alberta residents carried out by Angus Reid found no less than 89% ranking global poverty as priority. Working against this is what Richard Nimijean has… Read more »
Recent articles in Toronto newspapers on burst watermains suggest that we seek connections between infrastructure and the past when such infrastructures fail.
