By Andrew Nurse Celebrate: to observe (a day) or commemorate (an event) with ceremonies or festivities ~Dictionary.com Celebrations don’t have a particularly good reputation among professional historians … and, for good reason. As a series of studies of national, regionalized, local and provincial commemorative events demonstrate, celebrations are politically fraught. Canada Day might stand — at this point in our… Read more »
By Jonathan McQuarrie Why do newspapers support the public-opinion polls?…Not only do the modern polls, based on a small, carefully selected cross section, provide more accurate measurements; they can be applied to give continuous and rapid measurements of public opinion at all times. -George Gallup and Saul Forbes Rae, The Pulse of Democracy, 1940, 119. So called ‘pollsters’ should hang… Read more »
By Nathan Smith In a recent post here Jonathan Weier compared official plans in the UK and Australia to commemorate the First World War centennial with the Canadian government’s disengagement with the one-hundredth anniversary of the First World War. Given the interest the federal Conservatives have shown in warrior nationalism and war commemoration, this is surprising. From the government’s memorialization… Read more »
By Adele Perry Later this month the University of Toronto’s downtown campus will host the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. This is a big deal for a number of reasons. It is the first time that this venerable and highly visible conference has met outside of the United States. And there is also the sheer scale of the… Read more »
By Krista McCracken Museums, galleries, parks and other heritage sites play a significant role in commemoration. Exhibitions present specific ways of looking at history and attribute significance to particular historical events. Commemoration at heritage sites might take place in the form of a dedicated memorial site such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or the September 11th Memorial and… Read more »
By Jay Young With optimistic thoughts of warm summer days soon approaching, I recently decided to tackle the backyard. We moved into a home in Toronto last year and we had anticipated some outdoor projects ahead. This included the widening of a backyard walkway and the erection of a few vegetable planter beds there too. Much of the hard work… Read more »
By Laura Larsen Few Canadians missed the news stories of grain piling up on the prairies and denunciations of the system’s failures. The Federal government’s recent announcement of financial penalties for the railways is the latest act in a long running problem facing western Canadian grain farmers: how to economically get their grain to market when long stretches of prairie and… Read more »
By Tim O’Grady When you think of important events in your life, chances are you associate them with physical places. Whether it is your childhood home, a former school, or a family cottage or favourite vacation spot, the connection between memory and place is intangible, though very real. People are connected to the buildings in their city. They have lived… Read more »
By David Zylberberg Historians place a disproportionate emphasis on the 1930s when teaching European History. The decade looms large in our courses with discussions of economic depressions, the rise of far-right political parties and the onset of the Second World War. We generally try to instill greater complexity to our lectures but a fairly straight-forward narrative emerges: Economic collapse and… Read more »
By Jocelyn Létourneau Translated by Thomas Peace On peut lire la version française ici Who was the first Premier of Quebec? In what year did the asbestos strike take place? What was the pivotal moment in the Quiet Revolution? Very few young people in Quebec can answer these three questions correctly. In trying to address this problem, scholars and pundits have… Read more »
