To launch the exhibit The Human Cost of Food, part of the new Active History on Display initiative, we invited award-winning public historian Gilberto Fernandes, whose public history project City Builders was a major inspiration to the exhibit, to provide commentary. By Gilberto Fernandes Time is of the essence out in the fields. When to seed, water, feed, harvest or… Read more »
To launch the exhibit More Than a Face, part of the new Active History on Display initiative, we invited Fung Ling Feimo, one of the storytellers, to set the stage: More Than A Face opens at activehistory.ca! It is a collection of soundscapes, visuals, written and spoken word, offering stories told through our individual voices. We have storytellers from… Read more »
Greer positions the absence of context, connections between collections, and supports that reflect the nuance of archival research as LAC being “determined to hide the results of their past efforts from the eyes of researchers”. In actuality, what is unfolding is a predictable outcome of an impossible situation and the absence of an adequate number of trained professionals to provide anything better.
Krenare Recaj In the third year of my undergrad, I was sitting beside my friend Jeremy in a lecture for the class America: Slavery to Civil War. The professor was going into explicit detail – showing photos and drawings – of the torture enslaved people in America were subjected to. The logic was that these details were necessary to properly… Read more »
Paul McGuire This is the sixth entry in a monthly series on Thinking Historically. See the Introduction here. At least twice a year, we take a trip to the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia. One of the most beautiful parts of the valley is Grand Pré and Hortonville. From here, you can see Blomidon and the vast expanse of the… Read more »
In fairness to LAC, I recognize that their problems are rooted in chronic underfunding. That and a succession of governments measuring their success with inappropriate metrics. While wishing that management had made different choices under the pressure of inadequate financing, I also wish they were not forced to choose between outreach and basic archival services.
What is interesting is that community members seem to have responded to the friendlier, more open-ended construction of Stanley in kind. I see the statue as I stroll across town to pick up mail or groceries and started to wonder what this was all about. What did the clothing of the Stanley sculpting say about how at least some community members related to the past? The sculpting is prominently positioned. The hats and masks added anonymously to it are meant to be seen.
It is as if LAC had shoveled its digitized material out into a virtual dumpster and invited researchers to dive in. There are indeed treasures to be found here, but systematic research is out of the question.
Daniel R. Meister In a recent op-ed, Stephen Marche claims “the foundation of Canadian multiculturalism rests on a basic piece of common sense: Leave your shoes at the door.” Picking up on this thread, Jack Granatstein countered that multiculturalism as a policy actually consists of encouraging immigrants to leave those shoes on—and march right into a polling booth. Multiculturalism is… Read more »
This is the final instalment in a three-part series on the use of content warnings in classrooms, archives, and museums. You can read the first instalment here and the second instalment here. Melissa J. Nelson & Natasha Henry-Dixon Melissa J. Nelson : Making Description Remediation Visible The Archives of Ontario is the largest provincial archive in Canada. However, many… Read more »
