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 »
By Cristina Pietropaolo Passage to Promise Land: Voices of Chinese Immigrant Women to Canada is a thoroughly researched and eloquent documentation of the experiences of twenty-eight women of different ages (the oldest in their nineties and the youngest in their thirties) who emigrated from the southern coastal region of China to Canada between 1950 and 1990. Vivienne Poy, an historian,… Read more »
By Kaitlin Wainwright There are a few adages that go with comments on the Internet. Among them: “if you don’t have the energy to read something, you shouldn’t have the hubris to comment on it” and, simply put, “never read the comments.” It’s rare that comments and forums on the Internet are seen as something positive. Ian Milligan has written… Read more »
Like most of us humans—80% in Canada, more than 50% worldwide—my home is in the city. And like so many urbanites, I take a whole range of day-to-day sensations for granted. The screech of garbage trucks, the overheard conversations on public transit; the smells of street food and exhaust; the sight of thousands of other people going about their lives…. Read more »
By Karen Dubinsky “If you want to learn anything about the history of this country, you have to start listening to Carlos Varela.” This advice, offered by a colleague who was helping me make my way through a Cuban film archive a decade ago, proved remarkably true. I arrived in Havana in 2004 to research child migration conflicts. But what… Read more »
Lachlan MacKinnon In recent months, concerns surrounding pollution at the Northern Pulp mill in Abercrombie, Nova Scotia have prompted extensive local debate and filled the pages of provincial newspapers with columns and op-ed pieces. Controversy erupted in June, after Northern Pulp announced that the mill was shutting down operations to deal with a wastewater leak. Pictou Landing First Nation chief… Read more »
by Tina Adcock On the morning of Tuesday, September 9th, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced some unexpected and astounding news: that the wreckage of one of Sir John Franklin’s ships, either the Erebus or the Terror, had been located via sonar on the bottom of Queen Maud Gulf, which lies southwest of King William Island in Nunavut. In 1845, Franklin,… Read more »
By Sean Kheraj In recent years, several scholars have expressed a desire to ban laptop computers and smartphones from the classroom. This urge to prohibit the use of computing devices, however, may be a reflection of our own shortcomings as educators. It may also be a future liability for higher education. What are the implications of excluding technologies that have… Read more »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/McKay-2014-CHA-Keynote.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadOn May 26th, historian Ian McKay presented the keynote address of the 2014 Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, held in St. Catharines, Ontario. ActiveHistory.ca is pleased to feature a recording of his talk: “A Half-Century of Possessive Individualism: C.B. Macpherson and the Twenty-First Century Prospects of Liberalism”.
