By Jim Clifford View Larger Map The 2012 Summer Olympic park is located in the Lower Lea River Valley in the east of London. The games were sold to the British public from the beginning as an opportunity to transform one of London’s most economically disadvantaged regions. Early promotional material on the London 2012 website in 2006 put the goal… Read more »
by Mike Commito This past May I attended the annual general meeting of the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) at the University of Waterloo and the EH+ 2.0 Graduate Writing Workshop at McMaster. At the CHA I attended a roundtable titled “Macro-Theories of Canadian History: A Round Table on the Staples, Metropolitan and Laurentian Theses.” The discussion during the panel largely… Read more »
By Nathan Smith Here in East York Canada Day celebrations began in the morning with a parade. I pulled my daughter in her wagon to the starting point a few blocks from our house. As we hurried to meet neighbours I reflected on the nature of the event organizing itself just beyond a set of traffic lights ahead. Historians of… Read more »
by Merle Massie A few weeks ago, I was privileged to visit with Solomon and Renée Carriere at their home: Big Eddy Camp, northern Saskatchewan. If that seems like a vague description, it is. Few people would be able to find Big Eddy on any map, unless you are a canoe racer, dogsled racer, or know the Saskatchewan River Delta…. Read more »
By Mathieu Brûlé While there have been a number of labour-related subjects in the news recently, from the Elliot Lake tragedy to the Ontario Progressive Conservatives’ White Paper on unions, one article in particular caught my interest. It was about the recent efforts of the Canadian Auto Workers union (CAW) to organize a number of demonstrations in support of continued access to safe,… Read more »
By Andrew Watson Stories bring places to life, and places attach special meaning to stories. Every story takes place somewhere, and every place has a story to tell. Historians, especially ‘Active’ historians have a responsibility to tie the stories we tell to the places where they unfolded. The evidence historians uncover and the insight historians apply to that evidence combine… Read more »
By Andrew Nurse More often then not, Christianity does not enjoy a positive public image. Canadians may be willing to select Tommy Douglas as the “Greatest Canadian,” but one suspects that this had more to do with medicare than his evangelical background. Interestingly, Christianity’s PR problems have a lot to do with history.
By Dan Horner The face that glares down from the cover of the June 4th issue of Maclean’s is meant to be unsettling: A protestor scowls at us, his menace heightened by some digital tweaks that bathe the whole scene in a blood red glow. The accompanying headline plays to the dystopian gloom of the image, suggesting that the mob… Read more »
By Christine McLaughlin Sometimes ordinary people can do extraordinary things. I had the pleasure of witnessing an example of this recently when I attended a tribute luncheon in honour of the 23rd annual Agnes Macphail Award winner, Beverly McCloskey. Agnes Macphail was the first woman in Canada elected to the House of Commons and first woman sworn into the Legislative… Read more »
By Jay Young Like many people, I anticipated the return of Mad Men (AMC, Sundays, 10 pm EST), one of television’s most acclaimed series of the past decade. Now in its fifth season, the show looks at the life of Don Draper and other workers in the New York advertising industry during the 1960s. At the same time that I… Read more »
