Category Archives: American History

Time for a Change: Historical Perspective on the Washington Redskins Name and Logo Controversy

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 »

Ripple Effects: Great Lakes Water Levels

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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 »

Active(ist)? History on Wikipedia

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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 »

“American Commune”: two views of a documentary about the 1970s counterculture

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 »

Echoes of Westray: Canada’s National Day of Mourning and the West Fertilizer Company Explosion

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 »

Zombies, Environmental Declensionism, and the Fate of Humanity: Symbolism in the Zombie Metaphor, 1968-2013

By Andrew Watson A presentation delivered at American Society for Environmental History annual conference, April 2013 Zombies have come to occupy a very prominent spot in North American popular culture. This popularity has spilled over into other aspects of everyday life, making zombies a reoccurring metaphor in politics and economics, as well as the natural sciences  and mathematics. As a… Read more »

History Slam Episode Seventeen: The Rise of American Restaurants, and Northern History Week

https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Kelly-Erby-and-Heather-Moore.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham “Remember when you first went out to eat with your parents? Remember, it was such a treat to go and they serve you this different food that you never saw before, and they put it in front of you, and it was such a delicious and exciting adventure?” Despite the negativity… Read more »

Time for a Change: Historical Perspective on the Washington Redskins Name and Logo Controversy

By Mike Commito Baseball season has just begun and NHL hockey is entering its final push before the playoffs begin at the end of the month. However, in recent months the attention has remained on the NFL’s Washington Redskins. Not because of their valiant post-season effort that ended with a horrific knee injury to their talented and budding young quarterback,… Read more »

Strangely ahistoric sensibilities at the American Museum of Natural History

By Jon Weier When you visit New York City in late January you find yourself avoiding some of the activities that would characterize a spring or summer visit.  Strolls in Central Park, though beautiful, lose some of their allure on a windy and cold afternoon.  Walking from Midtown to the Lower East Side for dinner is no longer worth the… Read more »

Gun Control: Filling-in the Missing History in Canada

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By Paul W. Bennett A Review of Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada R. Blake Brown The Osgoode Society/ University of Toronto Press Hard Cover, 349 pages, $70.00 Guns in and around children in schools are frightening.  That is why gun culture and firearms control totally dominated the news media in the wake of the horrific… Read more »