By Andrew Watson A presentation delivered at American Society for Environmental History annual conference, April 2013 Zombies have come to occupy a very prominent spot in North American popular culture. This popularity has spilled over into other aspects of everyday life, making zombies a reoccurring metaphor in politics and economics, as well as the natural sciences and mathematics. As a… Read more »
By Jim Clifford Four ActiveHistory.ca editors and a larger number of past and present contributors attended a major public history conference in Ottawa last week. It was a great opportunity to share our website with the North American public history community and to learn about new projects here in Canada and in the United States. Many of the presentations focused on the… Read more »
By Pete Anderson Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environment, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 Joy Parr University of British Columbia Press Paperback, 304 pages, $32.95 Just as all politics can be viewed as local, so, too, can history. Joy Parr’s Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953–2003 (UBC Press, 2010) explores local reactions to a series of “megaprojects,” with a focus on… Read more »
By Mark McLaughlin [Originally published on the Historians of the Environment of the Atlantic Region blog] Maritime Union, or one united Maritime province, is an idea that predates Canada. The original rationale for the 1864 Charlottetown Conference, which eventually led to Canadian Confederation (1867), was a meeting of Maritime leaders to discuss some form of union between their respective colonies. The idea… Read more »
By Alexander Hall Last week marked the 60th anniversary of the most catastrophic flood that struck the UK in the twentieth century. The North Sea Flood and the associated storm system, which occurred on 31st January – 1st February, 1953, was responsible for over 400 deaths in the UK and nearly 2000 in the Netherlands. The scale of the devastation… Read more »
By Merle Massie Water wells up and flows across the landscape of my memory as a cataclysmic force, ebbing and flowing through my earliest life story. Those encounters shift the flotsam of my perceptions as an environmental historian, shaping the way I think about water. And, these stories require sharing, as they differ radically from that of colleagues raised in… Read more »
By Jeffers Lennox Having spent four years living in Halifax, I’ve experienced my share of Nor’easters. During my MA year, a huge snowstorm forced the university to close on the day scheduled for my first comprehensive exam. The entire class considered this a divine gift. Having now returned to the east coast after two years in Montreal and two years… Read more »
When did the modern environmental movement begin? Did one event mark its beginning? Earlier this year we commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which is often identified as bringing about the environmental movement. While this book’s importance is without question, focusing on it as the birth of environmentalism ignores the importance of urban environmental problems, from unsafe drinking water to severe air… Read more »
It’s a chapter of history mostly forgotten, not just across Canada but even in the Maritime provinces themselves. Shipbuilding – like fishing – is an obvious fact of life on the Atlantic coast, but few people today know just how extensive the industry once was. There was a time not that long ago when men built ships in sheltered harbours,… Read more »
By Daniel Macfarlane A picture might be worth a thousand words; but great photos combined with a hundred thousand words can be even more powerful. And that’s what this post is about: the power of photography and art, doing history, and the benefits of collaboration. The subject of my doctoral dissertation, finished almost two years, was the creation of the… Read more »
