By Jay Young This rain will never stop, I thought, as water cascaded from my apartment window and fell from the sky at record pace. On July 8th, Toronto experienced the greatest amount of rainfall in a single day ever recorded in that city. A torrent of 126 millimetres of rain hit the ground, more than a whole month’s average… Read more »
By Christine McLaughlin and Councillor Amy England We’ve come a long way from the days when women were denied the vote and barred from public office. Because of the efforts of a few willing to challenge the status quo, women won the right to vote and serve as political representatives in twentieth-century Canada. But many barriers remain for women in… Read more »
by Mike Commito Ontario had its last spring black bear hunt fifteen years ago. Dating back to 1937, the province’s spring hunt was primarily for non-resident hunters. But spring hunting picked up in 1961 after the Department of Lands and Forests declared the black bear a game animal. By the mid-1990s, spring bear hunting had been well established as a… Read more »
By Tina Loo So the government paid us for movin’ away, And leaving our birthplace for a better day’s pay; They said that our poor lives would ne’er be the same, Once we took part in the government game…. -Al Pittman, “The Government Game” (1983) Ninety per cent. That was the number on the minds of the eighty-seven residents of… Read more »
By Daniel Macfarlane Lake Huron and Lake Michigan recently reached record lows. The other Great Lakes are also below average levels. Headlines such as “Two Great Lakes hit lowest water levels in history” or “Low water levels in Great Lakes cause concern” have been splashed across browsers and newspapers. Docks barely reach water, boats can’t get out of marinas, and… Read more »
ActiveHistory.ca is pleased to announce the publication of Veronica Strong-Boag and Tiffany Johnstone’s “Taking History to the People: Women Suffrage and Beyond” History as both “facts” and “meaning” has regularly generated debate and disagreement among citizens, policymakers, and scholars. The nature and prospects of democracy and justice supply a special source of contention. Today’s ubiquitous “history wars,” sometimes termed “culture… Read more »
On April 19, the Canadian Historical Association organized a panel as part of the Annual Meeting of the National Council on Public History in Ottawa entitled “After the Cuts: The Future of History in Canada.” The panel was designed to analyze the changes to historical work in Canada stemming from recent federal budget cuts, revised mandates, and institutional reorganizations. Chaired… Read more »
By Suzanne Morton “Cape Breton Lobster Fishers on Strike” ran the headline. On 8 May the lobster fishermen of Gabarus, Cape Breton struck demanding a price of $3.25 per hundred lobsters instead of the $2.35 offered by the buyers. The processors said there were too many lobsters being caught and they were losing money. The Gabarus men were joined by… Read more »
By Christine McLaughlin While it is too soon for the historian to comment on the long-term effects of recent changes on the Canadian political landscape, the larger rightward shift is perhaps best evidenced by the federal New Democratic Party’s decision to “modernize” its constitution at its recent convention by “toning down” references to socialism. Pointing to “pragmatic” economic policies that… Read more »
The new history wars are not battles over the meaning of Canadian history. They are battles over public financing of historical research and historical preservation.
