By Alban Bargain-Villéger In the wake of the January 7-9 attacks in France, millions of tweets, millions of demonstrators, thousands of heads of state, intellectuals, and celebrities of all kinds not only condemned the murders of seventeen people (including four as a result of an anti-Semitic hostage taking linked to the other shootings), but also praised Charlie Hebdo’s courage in… Read more »
Or, the perils of teaching the history of disease amid global health crises Casey Hurrell This semester, I’ve had the pleasure of teaching a senior undergrad seminar, focusing on the history of disease from the time of Hippocrates to the present. Every week, in front of twenty-two energetic and curious undergrads, I wholeheartedly attempt to steer conversations away from the ongoing… Read more »
By Krista McCracken The rise and fall of midwifery as an accepted profession is directly linked to the medicalization of birth, feminism, and social conditions. The history of midwifery in Canada is similar to the rise and fall of midwifery in the United States and Europe. For years women gave birth at home surrounded by female relatives and neighbours, with… Read more »
ActiveHistory.ca is on a hiatus for the winter break, with a return to daily posts in early January. We’d like to leave you with an oldie but a goodie by Jay Young, Toronto’s subway historian and one of the founding members of the site. This winter Jay left ActiveHistory.ca for a new job doing public outreach with the Archives of Ontario. Those… Read more »
By Sean Carleton and Julia Smith By mid-December, the holiday shopping season is usually in full swing for Canadian retailers. Thirty years ago, however, several Eaton’s department stores in southern Ontario were experiencing a different type of holiday hustle and bustle: Eaton’s workers were on strike. Hoping that unionization would improve their wages and working conditions, many of the department… Read more »
By Andrew Nurse I admit it. The first time I saw the Evangeline “memorial” (if imaginary people can have memories) at Grand-Pré, I was impressed. It was beautiful. Located in the Nova Scotia Annapolis Valley near New Minas where my son’s soccer team was playing in a tournament, it made for what seemed like a natural stop for what had… Read more »
Karen Dubinsky I live in downtown Kingston, Ontario. Two doors away from me are two sweet old white ladies. They live in John A. Macdonald’s boyhood home where, according to one of the two plaques outside, he spent his “character forming” years. When I first moved to this street I noticed that during relevant occasions (Macdonald’s birthday and Canada Day),… Read more »
By Angela Duffett A rather curious promoted tweet from the Bank of Montreal appeared recently on my Twitter feed: “Join Canadians for a #DayofSocialSilence to honour those in service.” Not really grasping the connection between BMO, Remembrance Day, and staying off of social media for the day, I clicked the tweet to see what kind of response it was attracting…. Read more »
By Jonathan McQuarrie #gamergate inflicted a well-deserved black eye for video game culture. Whatever the movement may have been (and there are many facets to it), one of the core consequences became a rash of threats against prominent critic Anita Sarkeesian, who rightly pointed to the many harmful and tiresome ways in which video games portrayed women in her series… Read more »
By Beth A. Robertson On the evening of October 26th, I found myself staring at a computer screen, dumbfounded and confused. What I had unwittingly come across was Jian Ghomeshi’s bizarre facebook post that told a story of him being fired from the CBC because of his private sex life. He argued that he was let go when the CBC… Read more »
