Category Archives: CHA-SHC

Recent History PhDs in Canada, by the Numbers

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Word Cloud of History Dissertation Titles in Canada, 2016-17 to 2021-22

By Will Langford The report of the CHA Task Force on the Future of the History PhD in Canada is now available (in English and in French). This is the first in a series of posts by Task Force members, offering their perspectives on selected themes from the report. Activehistory.ca encourages readers to join in the conversation, either in the… Read more »

There is No Solidarity in a Meritocracy: Precarity in the History Profession in Canada

by Steven High “We all love what we do deeply. … This love is taken from us by our institutions, employers, and administrators. It’s used to exploit us every time we do extra work or support the students we teach or mark papers properly even though we’re not paid enough to do it, or get a course outline just right… Read more »

CFP: Pandemic Methodologies Twitter Conference 2021

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS, June 24-25, 2021 @PMTC2021 #PandemicMethodologies Sponsored by the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) In the past year, archives and libraries have closed (either permanently or periodically), non-essential international travel has been heavily discouraged or impossible, and anyone who can has been encouraged to work from home. In these circumstances, historians have had to adapt how they do research, perhaps… Read more »

I Think It’s Time For Us to Give Up Hope

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The comments here were first shared during the Canadian Historical Association’s second of three panels responding to the “Precarious Historical Instructors’ Manifesto” entitled, “Precarious Historians, Trade Unions, and the Neoliberal University.” Along with Godefroy Desrosiers-Lauzon, Peter McInnis, Christine Gauthier, Catherine Larochelle, and Janis Thiessen, Jeremy Milloy discussed his insights on precarious academic work and working-class organizing. What follows is an… Read more »

Lay-offs at the Sulpician Archives – An Open Letter

For researchers, but especially for the broader public, how could we allow “a kilometre of textual documents, 75,000 iconographic items, more than 8,000 geographical maps and technical specifications, as well as sound and film recordings” to be put at risk?

Congress 2020, Interrupted: Racism, Academic Freedom, and the Far Right, 1970s-1990s

Will Langford In 1989, psychology professor Philippe Rushton inflamed debates over discrimination at Western University (then known as the University of Western Ontario (UWO)) by outlining his racist theories at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. For some, Rushton’s academic racism made him unfit to teach at UWO. For others, protecting academic freedom was… Read more »

Congress 2020, Interrupted: A Brief History of University Codes of Conduct

Will Langford Congress 2020 is cancelled. But before the conference is forgotten, let’s ponder the anti-racism Congress that never was. At last year’s gathering, in a brazen act of racial profiling, a participant harassed political scientist Shelby McPhee and falsely accused the Black graduate student of theft. Following an investigation, the perpetrator was issued a ban for violating the Congress… Read more »

Teaching Canadian History After the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)

By Allyson Stevenson[1] When I began this blog on January 29th, I had just returned to my office at the University of Regina after speaking about my research on an inspiring panel of powerful First Nations women leaders in Treaty 4 territory that included Chief Lynn Acoose, Chief Roberta Soo-Oye Waste, Dr. Priscilla Settee, and Dakota Elder Diane McKay. “The… Read more »

The Last Ten Years: Active History & the Teaching of Canadian History since 2008

Editor’s Note: In 2019, Active History celebrated its 10th anniversary by posting some of our most popular pieces from each of the previous ten years. To reflect on ten years of Active History at the start of this new year, we asked Dr. Adele Perry, former president of the Canadian Historical Association (CHA), to share some of her thoughts. The… Read more »

Subjectivity and Objectivity: Photography, Family, and the Historian

Benjamin Bryce I recently submitted an article manuscript to a scholarly journal about my great-great grandfather, Cooper Robinson, and his photography in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a social historian of migration, I have long been interested in family, but I had never done work on my own family. My personal, albeit distant, relationship to… Read more »