Samira Saramo On March 2, 2023, Finlandia University in Hancock, Michigan, announced that it was closing. Since its establishment in 1896 by Finnish migrant-settlers as Suomi College, Finlandia University has been a center of Finnish history and heritage in North America. It has been home to an active Finnish & Nordic Studies undergraduate program and unparalleled archival collections, programming, and… Read more »
Patrick Lacroix On March 11, author and former vice-regal consort John Ralston Saul called attention to the 175th anniversary of the formation of the LaFontaine-Baldwin government, which cemented in practice the principle of responsible government. Saul has expressed hope of a national commemoration of this moment—a hope unlikely to be met. Ours is not, in 2023, a country in search… Read more »
By Andrew Nurse On May 16, a Montpelier Descendants Committee (MDC) press release announced that “The Montpelier Foundation’s board of directors voted to welcome eleven new members from a list […] advanced by the […] MDC.” The release described the decision as “momentous.” This decision reversed a short-lived but important controversy in American public history. The Montpelier Foundation (TMF) administers… Read more »
By Erin Isaac I remember being intrigued and a bit confused after my first reading of Richard White’s classic work The Middle Ground, which had been assigned for a fourth-year history seminar on French colonial history. My peers, likewise, found the ideas proposed interesting but a bit idealistic. Coming back to this text as a PhD student, the questions that… Read more »
Max Mishler’s interview with with Samuel Stein, author of the book Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (Verso, 2019), is part of the “(In)Security in the Time of COVID-19” series. Read the rest of the series, including a post contextualizing this interview, here. Max Mishler: Hi Sam. Thanks so much for taking the time to think with us… Read more »
This post by Lauren Catterson is part of the “(In)Security in the Time of COVID-19” series. Read the rest of the series here. It’s been more than a year since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic. In March and April 2020 many countries imposed strict border controls or closed their borders to non-essential travel and non-citizens in… Read more »
This post introduces “(In)Security in the Time of COVID-19,” a ten-part blog series that will be featured on ActiveHistory.ca over the next six weeks. Visit the series page here. We are the (In)Security Working Group, a collective of historians based at the University of Toronto committed to developing a rigorous and critical analysis of the ways in which security regimes… Read more »
J.M. Opal Anniversaries make you feel old and young at the same time. An important date marks the time, reminding you of how many years you’ve already trod during your sojourn on Earth. Then again, these dates also promise renewal, a chance to clean slates and start fresh. Today’s inauguration of Joseph Biden will be the 58th anniversary of this… Read more »
Daniel Macfarlane In 2013, Canada was bestowed the satirical “Lifetime Unachievement” Fossil award by Climate Action Network International in recognition of the country’s record of obstructing global climate change talks. This dubious distinction was well-earned by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. But its Liberal predecessors and successors didn’t do much better when it came to actually reducing the country’s greenhouse gas… Read more »
By Andrew Sopko America’s political history has been leading to the events at Capitol Hill on 6 January 2021 for a quite some time. The Cold War’s stifling impact on American politics directly shaped today’s troubling reality by slowly pushing progressive left voices from mainstream discourse. As a result, far-right critiques of the American nation-state which simultaneously avoid criticizing the… Read more »
