By Don Wright The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. – Antonio Gramsci What will future historians – say in 2150 – call this historical moment? The 100-Year Terror, perhaps, a century marked by wars, migrations, and civil breakdowns,… Read more »
Andrew Watson Proposal Deadline: 18 February 2026 Extended to 25 February 2026 As a social and political idea, as much a material and socioeconomic reality, Canada is a child of the Anthropocene. If the Earth has shifted from the Holocene into a new epoch of planetary history, then Canada has served as an incubator for its defining concepts, a laboratory for the… Read more »
The wiping out of wolves had a spiritual mission to resist evil, as well as political, economic, and national intentions.
Jim Clifford and Stéphane Castonguay will lead a walking tour on Sunday June 16 at 7pm starting at Victoria Square in Montreal. Towers of Grain: Feeding Edwardian Britain Silo number 1, built in 1902 in the Port of Montreal, linked the burgeoning wheat farms on the Prairies with the urban markets in the United Kingdom. New industrial-scale flour mills were… Read more »
By Jim Clifford Paul Crutzen, who proposed the Anthropocene epoch in 2002, wasn’t a geologist. He was an atmospheric chemist. This fact might explain the decision to reject his proposed new epoch. He wasn’t thinking like a geologist when he suggested the Anthropocene. I’m not a geologist either and have no opinion on whether they got this decision right… Read more »
[Editor’s note: We have slightly altered the original text because our website does not yet support Dene orthographies. For a .pdf version of this post in which Dene words and place names are displayed correctly, click here.] Petroleum Histories Project Team Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories is the site of the first oil and gas operation in the Canadian… Read more »
Jim Clifford In the lead-up to my take-home exam last April, I was trying to think of questions ChatGPT could not answer. I hoped that by focusing on details from my lectures that are not available on Wikipedia and other similar online sources, the large language model would fail to provide a strong answer. I was dead wrong:
Jim Handy As summer winds down I have been slowly catching up on reading avoided while happily engaged elsewhere. This includes back copies of The Economist. As always reading The Economist prompts an appreciation for their insightful reporting on some issues and their tone-deaf, ahistorical and simply wrong accounts on others. The July 1st, 2023 edition had a briefing entitled… Read more »
ActiveHistory.ca is slowing down our publication schedule this summer, but we’ll be back with more new posts in September. In the meantime, we’re featuring posts from our archive. Thanks as always to our writers and readers! The following post was originally featured on February 22, 2018. Since then, Drew Hayden Taylor has released Cottagers and Indians in print and directed… Read more »
by Anna Bettini A Changing Energy Landscape Driving along Highway 529, two hours south of Calgary, giant wind turbines tower over the fields of canola. Along the road, several signs indicate the local community opposition to wind energy projects [Picture 1]. As I approach the entrance of village of Carmangay, I notice a large wind turbine blade lying near it… Read more »
