Category Archives: Doing History

Expanding our Sources, Expanding our Stories: An Active History / Source Story Series

In collaboration with Histoire Source | Source Story, a video series for history educators, Active History is recruiting writers to write complementary posts on themes related to one of seven Histoire Source | Source Story conversational videos. While the videos were designed for a K-12 teaching audience, they are rich in content for a broader audience. Thus, we envision these… Read more »

Learning About Residential Schools At The Shingwauk Site 

Gallery space in an exhibition with red text and image panels on left and right walls. Door at far end of hallway.

Krista McCracken  The Shingwauk Residential School operated in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario from 1874 to 1970. In 1971, Algoma University College – today known as Algoma University – moved onto the Shingwauk Site. Since 2010, I’ve been part of the staff at the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre (SRSC) that seeks to promote sharing, healing, and learning in relation to the… Read more »

What’s the Point of the Historiographical Dissertation Chapter?

Elizabeth Mancke Academic press editors are notorious for advising future and recent PhDs to remove the historiographical chapter as a first step in revising their dissertation for publication.  This begs the question: If press editors do not consider historiographical chapters publishable material, why do so many dissertation committees require them? Why are they deemed a necessary part of the doctoral… Read more »

Digital History Tools: Making Timelines

      1 Comment on Digital History Tools: Making Timelines

Krista McCracken My work at the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centrecurrently includes a Canada History Fund funded project to create education modules connected to Residential Schools and colonialism. These modules are geared toward high school aged students and will be used as part of ongoing educational programming. When I wrote the grant proposal I included the idea that the modules would… Read more »

A Chain of Events: Creating an Archive of Winnipeg Cycling History

Jon Benson  From its early embrace as a recreational activity upon its arrival in the 1800s to hosting a world champion at a race downtown in the 1990s to a community of folks working diligently to build up and maintain an infrastructure making commuting here safe and enjoyable for everyone year-round, Winnipeg has a long history with the bicycle. But… Read more »

As Long As The Rivers Flow 30 years on : An epic collaboration in documentary filmmaking

By James Cullingham This autumn marks a significant milestone in the history of filmmaking about Indigenous – settler relations in Canada. As Long As The Rivers Flow, the documentary series about Indigenous resilience that launched Tamarack Productions, was released in September 1991. As Long As The Rivers Flow was among the first national collaborations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous documentarians in… Read more »

It is Time to End the History Wars

      6 Comments on It is Time to End the History Wars

By Ian Milligan and Thomas Peace We’ve been fighting about the same things for a quarter century. It’s time to call it quits. Earlier this week, The Dorchester Review published an open letter under an inflammatory (and arguably misleading, as it did not appear on the version signatories signed) headline of “Historians Rally v. ‘Genocide Myth;” it also apparently appeared… Read more »

Who Counts? The Data We Use to Prove the Points We Make

by Carly Ciufo Although I doubt the book will make it into my dissertation, the comps text that’s unexpectedly stayed with me is Bruce Curtis’ The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840-1875. With my last post, I talked about the local positionality of national museums. I cited some studies of surveyed data around museums… Read more »

Death was the Point: Interrupting our shock at colonial practices. Thoughts on the Kamloops discovery.

      Comments Off on Death was the Point: Interrupting our shock at colonial practices. Thoughts on the Kamloops discovery.

By Samantha Cutrara Trigger Warning: This article discusses the residential school system. The National Residential School Crisis Line is 1-866-925-4419. When the news came out about the mass grave at Kamloops Indian Residential School located on the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation – or the news from this past weekend which identified 104 ‘potential graves’ as part of the Brandon… Read more »

The Perils of Digital Humanities for Academics

Dominique Clément Why does historical training at universities place so little emphasis on research methods? The rise of digital humanities presents a fundamental challenge to how we train historians. But for anyone pondering a career in academia, it’s a perilous journey where the risks might not be worth the rewards. We are in the digital age yet historical research remains… Read more »