Category Archives: Canadian history

The Year of the Flood: Hurricane Matthew, Oral Narratives, and Climate History

By Lachlan MacKinnon The tail-end of Hurricane Matthew battered Nova Scotia and Newfoundland on Monday afternoon and through the evening. Although the damage does not approach the devastation wrought by the system in the Caribbean and other points south, for many in Cape Breton it will be remembered as the storm of a generation. As I drove around the streets… Read more »

Hippie Historiography: A Much Belated Historical Review of Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace

By Andrew Nurse I don’t think anyone is going to claim that Neil Young is a philosopher. If he himself is to be believed, his turn to prose as a medium of expression is the result of dope. Or, more exactly, his decision to quit smoking dope which has, he says, had an effect on his ability to write music…. Read more »

Tariffs and Taxes and Boredom, Oh My! Using a role playing game to teach about the debates over the tariff in Canadian history

By Mark Leier If there is anything more boring than the history of Canadian tariffs, I would chew my own leg off in an attempt to escape from it. Yet from Confederation to the National Policy to Prairie populism to the Maritimes Rights movement to the Auto Pact to NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, fights over tariffs have been at… Read more »

The Morality of Mergers

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By Jonathan McQuarrie Recently, Monsanto received a $66 billion purchase offer from the even mightier German pharmaceutical company Bayer. It would be hard to find a more disliked firm than Monsanto, and the fact that a major pharmaceutical company is the potential buyer has created even more alarm. But should we disentangle our moral concerns from our economic understanding? The… Read more »

Religion and Auteurism in The Revenant

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What are the problems and possibilities of Hollywood history? ActiveHistory is pleased to feature a four-essay forum on The Revenant, a 2015 Hollywood historical epic set against the backdrop of the early 1800s North American fur trade. As a primer, we recommend reading Stacy Nation-Knapper’s excellent review from earlier this year. Benjamin Bryce and Anna Casas Aguilar The Revenant is loosely… Read more »

The True Revenants of a Buried Past

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What are the problems and possibilities of Hollywood history? ActiveHistory is pleased to feature a four-essay forum on The Revenant, a 2015 Hollywood historical epic set against the backdrop of the early 1800s North American fur trade. As a primer, we recommend reading Stacy Nation-Knapper’s excellent review from earlier this year. Michel Bouchard The Revenant is the latest of ghostly resurrections… Read more »

Hugh Glass: The Evolution of a Legend

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What are the problems and possibilities of Hollywood history? ActiveHistory is pleased to feature a four-essay forum on The Revenant, a 2015 Hollywood historical epic set against the backdrop of the early 1800s North American fur trade. As a primer, we recommend reading Stacy Nation-Knapper’s excellent review from earlier this year. Claire Kaufman The fur trader and mountain man Hugh Glass… Read more »

“Inspired by True Events”: The Fur Trade, The Revenant, and Humanity

What are the problems and possibilities of Hollywood history? ActiveHistory is pleased to feature a four-essay forum on The Revenant, a 2015 Hollywood historical epic set against the backdrop of the early 1800s North American fur trade. As a primer, we recommend reading Stacy Nation-Knapper’s excellent review from earlier this year. Ted Binnema The Revenant’s trailer indicates that the movie is… Read more »

Karl Marx reflects on the Subject of Confederation

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By Mark Leier Deep in the archives of the Society for the History of Anarchism and Marxism, (SHAM) I discovered a hitherto unknown letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels. Dated 21 July 1867, the bulk of the letter is a reaction to the confederation of Canada, which had been proclaimed twenty days earlier. It is particularly interesting for two… Read more »

Was Laurier Canada’s Obama?

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Laurier, were he alive today, would probably point to the parallels between his situation and that in the United States in 2016. The election of both Obama and Laurier signaled a new political era, where the old “race” hostilities could be turned into something more consensual and progressive. But in both countries, something different happened.