https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Miranda-History-Matters-talk.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadLast Thursday, historian Susana Miranda gave a talk called “Keeping the City Clean: Portuguese Women in Toronto’s Cleaning Industry, 1970-1990” at the Bloor/Gladstone branch of the Toronto Public Library. The lecture is part of the Toronto Public Library’s History Matters series. As you can see in the image to the left, she started… Read more »
Over the past five years I have spent many Friday afternoons with Francis and the Club at L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill. Daybreak is a community that focuses on sharing life with people with different gifts and abilities; at its heart are men and women with intellectual disabilities. On Friday afternoons at the Club, a program for retirees, we often gather around the television screen to look at old community photographs. The members of the Club tell me stories about their past experiences, and I annotate the images in a digital database with the names of the people in the picture and the stories associated with them.
Torontonians go to the polls today to vote in the city’s municipal election. Transportation, and plans for transit in particular, has been a prominent theme during the long election race. Much of the debate has focused on whether the city should stick with Transit City (a plan already started that will criss-cross the metropolis with numerous light rail lines) or… Read more »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Young-History-Matters-talk.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadJay Young, a PhD student in history and ActiveHistory.ca steering committee member, recently gave a talk called “A Public Technology: Building Toronto’s Yonge Street Subway”. The lecture is part of the Toronto Public Library’s History Matters series. The lecture discussed various episodes surrounding the building of Toronto’s original Yonge Street subway line during the… Read more »
Formally launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia — the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” — has become the first (and often only) stop in Internet fact-finding. With well over ten million articles to date, Wikipedia has evaded overt corporate influence through a non-profit structure and currently ranks among the top ten most visited sites on… Read more »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Heron-History-Matters-talk.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadCanadian historian Craig Heron recently presented an entertaining talk at the second event of the History Matters lecture series, sponsored by the Toronto Public Library. Heron discussed a number of aspects in the social history of alcohol in Toronto, from the public importance of nineteenth-century taverns to the imposition of prohibition in the early… Read more »
by Jamie Trepanier Playwright Danny Schur is convinced that the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 has more than enough compelling storylines for a major musical production, and that its message is one that is still relevant today. “The story has all of the elements of high drama: societal unrest, government suppression of rights, aftermath of war, dramatic death in the… Read more »
In honour of both the September crunch and ActiveHistory.ca‘s own expanding book review section — be sure to check out Mitch Primeau’s review of The Second Greatest Disappointment (1999) — I’ll be devoting this month’s post to some of my favourite used book websites. History tends to involve a few more books than other disciplines — okay, a lot more…. Read more »
By Mirella Amato Toronto has a rich brewing history. This is a fact. I got my first glimpse into this history in 2007 in my early days working with beer. At that time, I did some work for Oliver Dawson on the Old Toronto Beer Tour. This daylong tour explores Toronto’s current breweries as well as the remnants of older… Read more »
