Our historical memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X most often sets them in opposition — racial integrationism vs. separatism, pacifism vs. violence, “good” vs. “bad” black leader (or vice versa). But what happens if we move beyond this dualism and examine these African American icons together? What if we consider how and why their respective struggles for… Read more »
In the lead up to Opening the Academy: New Strategies for Exploring & Sharing African Nova Scotian History on 28 February 2014 and at the start of Black History Month, ActiveHistory.ca is republishing Karolyn Smardz Frost‘s “The Birth of Black History Month.” This short essay originally appeared in the Ontario Heritage Trust’s magazine Heritage Matters in 2006. For more information about… Read more »
By Carolyn Podruchny Is teaching Indigenous history any different than teaching other histories? This question was posed to organizers of a day-long Teaching History Symposium on history, heritage, and education for Toronto area public school teachers, heritage experts, graduate students, and faculty members in the History Department at York University.[1] Rather than providing an answer, I suggest more questions to… Read more »
By Kathryn Magee Labelle Reuben Gold Thwaites died in 1913, the same year of the final publication of his seventy-two volume The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791. One hundred years later they are still a valuable and widely circulated edited collection. These transcribed reports and letters from French Jesuit… Read more »
By Jon Weier When I learned that Marshall Berman, the great American theorist of modernity, died last month, it seemed appropriate to go back and reread his masterpiece, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. First published in 1982 and then reissued with a new introduction in 1988, this book represented Berman’s attempt to reinvigorate discussions… Read more »
ActiveHistory.ca is on a two-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in early September. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our favourite and most popular blog posts from this site over the past year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers! The following post was originally featured on April 10 2013. By Mike Commito Baseball season… Read more »
By Daniel Macfarlane Lake Huron and Lake Michigan recently reached record lows. The other Great Lakes are also below average levels. Headlines such as “Two Great Lakes hit lowest water levels in history” or “Low water levels in Great Lakes cause concern” have been splashed across browsers and newspapers. Docks barely reach water, boats can’t get out of marinas, and… Read more »
By Jonathan McQuarrie Recently, I spent some time with Daniel Sidorick’s fantastic monograph Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century (Ithica, 2009). Among the timely observations made by the work is the vital point that a managerial effort to enforce efficiency through the threat of outsourcing is hardly new. At the turn of… Read more »
By Colin Coates and Daniel Ross “The rise and fall of America’s largest socialist utopian experiment” -Program blurb from the 2013 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival This post, inspired by the documentary film American Commune (2013) by Rena Mundo Croshere and Nadine Mundo, takes two different looks at the history of a 1970s countercultural commune located in the southern… Read more »
By Lachlan MacKinnon This Sunday, cities across Canada will hold ceremonies in honour of the National Day of Mourning. This day is intended for Canadians to remember and reflect upon workers who have been killed on the job. Members of the Canadian Labour Congress started the Day of Mourning in the 1980s, and the federal government adopted it in 1991…. Read more »
