By Ian Mosby Walking out of the subway into Yonge Station in Toronto recently, I was confronted with poster after poster bearing some strange, slightly off-putting questions about McDonald’s. These included, in big bold letters, messages like: “Is the meat fake?” “Are there eyeballs put in your meat?” Or, “Are McNuggets made from processed pink sludge?” In the end, it… Read more »
By Jay Young Change to Old Age Security emerged as a controversial element of the Harper Conservatives’ last federal budget. Much speculation had been brewing in the months leading up to the budget’s introduction in March of this year, when federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced its details in the House of Commons as part of C-38, his government’s omnibus… Read more »
By Pam Sugiman This is the third in a series of posts originally presented as part of a roundtable entitled “What’s the Use of History? Citizenship and History in Canada’s Past and Present,” held in Toronto on October 16th 2012. The event was organized by the People’s Citizenship Guide Project. Personal memory and history As a contributor to this series… Read more »
Last week the Globe and Mail published an editorial about the video game Assassins Creed III . According to the Globe’s editors, the video game distorts the history of the American War of Independence by suggesting that native people (the protagonist, Ratonhnhaké:ton, is Mohawk) fought alongside the rebelling colonies. Both gamers and historians quickly and resoundingly condemned the Globe‘s opinion… Read more »
By Donald W. McLeod Next year will be the fortieth anniversary of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA), which began as a single filing cabinet in the Toronto office of the newsmagazine Body Politic, and has grown into a dynamic organization. We presently have a volunteer board of nine members, a paid general manager, seventy volunteers (forty of whom… Read more »
By Tim O’Grady In 1993 Verne Harris, a records management archivist at the South Africa State Archives Service, discovered some junior officials in the transitional Apartheid government had been told by the state’s security secretariat to destroy certain classified records in contravention of the nation’s Archives Act. After official efforts proved fruitless, Verne told a journalist, as well as the… Read more »
By Jim Clifford It is very strange to celebrate the start of a war. Nonetheless, this is exactly what we have done here in Canada over the past year. The War of 1812 spanned from June of 1812 through to February of 1815, but this did not stop our government from starting their celebrations of the “Fight for Canada” during… Read more »
By Steven Maynard This is the first in a series of posts originally presented as part of a roundtable entitled “What’s the Use of History? Citizenship and History in Canada’s Past and Present,” held in Toronto on October 16th 2012. The event was organized by the People’s Citizenship Guide Project. In Canada, “we let our gay people swim.” So quipped… Read more »
By Angela Rooke Responding to an audience member question about assault rifles falling into the hands of criminals, Governor Mitt Romney pivoted and connected crime to families: “gosh, to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone — that’s a great idea because if there’s a two-parent family, the prospect of… Read more »
By Tina Loo When Eric Hobsbawm died earlier this month, his passing was the occasion for a lot of thoughtful reflection about the practice of history and its connection to a larger politics. Hobsbawm, his comrade E.P. Thompson, and Natalie Davis were partly responsible for me doing what I now do. As a science undergrad, my program was fairly structured,… Read more »
