Category Archives: History and Everyday Life

Living History at New York’s Tenement Museum

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By Jay Young I recently spent an extended weekend in New York City.  Along with the well-known sights, sounds and tastes of the Big Apple, I was excited to visit the Tenement Museum, a restored five-storey building at 97 Orchard Street that educates visitors about life in the Lower East Side during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The… Read more »

Outreach and Collections. Encouraging Community Members to Play a Role in Saving History

This post discusses the need for professionals in cultural heritage fields to reach out to non-professionals so that we may gather and support the proper keeping of historical collections.

Parliament Can Offer History More Than Just Legislation

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“It’s a difficult thing to live in a country that has erased your past.” – Teju Cole, Open City Amnesty International is concerned about a new French law that would “…[make] it a criminal offense to publicly question events labeled ‘genocide’…”. The bill cleared the upper house of the French Parliament on 23 January 2012 and could be signed into… Read more »

Public History at the Department of National Defence

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By Dr. John Maker I was recently involved in a major project for the Department of National Defence (DND), that epitomized some of the challenges and excitement of doing public history. It included important questions of public policy, public safety, and environmental contamination. The findings were put to use in practical and immediate ways to address areas of emergent need…. Read more »

The Changing Place of Foxes on Prince Edward Island

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by Ryan O’Connor I grew up on Prince Edward Island. As a youth I heard stories of the once-booming silver fox industry, which brought considerable wealth to the province in the early 1900s. While fox ranching has long since ceased, one need look no further than the provincial armorial bearings, adopted in 2002, for a reminder of its former significance.

OYSTERS, PISTACHIOS, AND AVOCADOES: A CURSORY GLANCE AT EATING FOR LOVE

Lubricating relationships with an eye to the past, historian Britt Luby looks at eating for love.

Eating it up: historical perspectives, popular media, and food culture

Jamie Oliver has made a name for himself as a celebrity chef who has sought to improve the way we eat.  Whether it be his instructional cooking or his fight to reform school cafeterias, Oliver has spent over a decade teaching us how to make food, and urging us to think more about it. Some of his series have explored… Read more »

Sad, Empty Places? Marketing ‘Ghost Towns’ in Saskatchewan

by Merle Massie A new and fashionable trend in tourism is invading rural regions of western Canada. SUV crossovers, front windows obscured by maps and cameras, are driving down gravel backroads, sweeping around correction line curves and screeching to a stop when a wide-eyed fox creeps across to its den in the culvert. Are lazy Sunday drives, once the mainstay… Read more »

Consuming Environmental History: Rethinking Wild Game Meat

by Mike Commito On December 21st 2011, the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters tweeted a link to a National Post article, “Wild Game Meat not Welcome at Ontario Food Banks,” which reported that a Lanark, Ontario food bank had decided to reject donations of wild game meat. The post piqued my interest for several reasons. First, while the economy… Read more »

Active History on the Grand: Heritage Trees in Ontario

I think that I shall never see, A poem as lovely as a tree. – Sergeant Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) While many of us may be familiar with the designation of built heritage properties under the Ontario Heritage Act, recently municipalities have been using the Ontario Heritage Act to designate individual trees as heritage trees.  Municipalities like Burlington, Pelham, Thorold, Cambridge,… Read more »