By Pete Anderson Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environment, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 Joy Parr University of British Columbia Press Paperback, 304 pages, $32.95 Just as all politics can be viewed as local, so, too, can history. Joy Parr’s Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953–2003 (UBC Press, 2010) explores local reactions to a series of “megaprojects,” with a focus on… Read more »
By Dan Gallacher, PhD FCMA Ancient Troy withstood pressures at its walls for a decade. Ultimately the Greek attackers, applying an extraordinary ruse, swept in looting or destroying everything. Located on a major trade route with acquisitive Hittite hordes to its east and an aggressive Mycenaean host west across the Aegean, Troy was a highly tempting target. In the past… Read more »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Tim-Stanley-Edit.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham B.C Premier Christy Clark has spent the better part of the last week apologizing for the provincial Liberals’ classified plan to win the “ethnic vote.” While the scheme had clear ethical issues by using provincial staffers for political purposes, what has garnered the most attention is the disingenuous manner in which… Read more »
By Mark McLaughlin [Originally published on the Historians of the Environment of the Atlantic Region blog] Maritime Union, or one united Maritime province, is an idea that predates Canada. The original rationale for the 1864 Charlottetown Conference, which eventually led to Canadian Confederation (1867), was a meeting of Maritime leaders to discuss some form of union between their respective colonies. The idea… Read more »
By Sean Kheraj “Canada’s history is worth emphasizing,” according to a recent pathetically inoffensive editorial headline in the Globe and Mail. Such an argument is so bland and broad as to be almost entirely pointless. What drove the editorial team at the Globe to boldly stick its neck out with such a feeble statement? The temerity of the Leader of… Read more »
By Stephen Duane Dean Junior In 1487, Godfrey O’Donnell killed a Breifre O’Rourke with what was most likely a primitive cast iron hand cannon. Detailed in the Annals of the Four Masters, the text differs on the wording regarding what to call the new weapon. What was less uncertain was that the new weapon could only be trusted in the… Read more »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/John-Reid-January-17-2013.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadOn January 17th the students and faculty at Acadia University invited historian John G. Reid to provide historical context to the #IdleNoMore movement. This hour long lecture builds on Reid’s forty-year career as a historian of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century northeastern North America and expert witness in a number of court cases involving Treaty and… Read more »
By Paul W. Bennett A Review of Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada R. Blake Brown The Osgoode Society/ University of Toronto Press Hard Cover, 349 pages, $70.00 Guns in and around children in schools are frightening. That is why gun culture and firearms control totally dominated the news media in the wake of the horrific… Read more »
By Christine McLaughlin The Hudak Conservatives have unveiled plans to bring so-called “Right to Work” legislation to Ontario. Following in the footsteps of American Republicans, Ontario’s Conservatives are seeking to unravel an agreement that has maintained relative labour peace in the province for over half a century. This has been painted as a ‘progressive’ measure that will ‘modernize’ what have… Read more »
By Christopher Moore This post was originally published on Christopher Moore’s History News Late in 2011, before Attawapiskat and Idle No More were as newsy as they are now, CBC Radio’s Ideas presented my radio documentary “George MacMartin’s Big Canoe Trip,” an exploration of how the James Bay Treaty was made in 1905. The radio-doc draws on the diary of… Read more »
