Remembering and Commemorating a Complicated Past
In this post, I look at controversies surrounding a statue of Nellie McClung, due to her early-20th century support of eugenics.
Category Archives: History in the News
Volcanoes in European history: Exploring Environmental History Podcast
http://www.eh-resources.org/podcast/eh_podcast34.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadDr Jan Oosthoek has produced a podcast on the history of volcanoes in European history. The podcast can be found here or you can subscribe on iTunes here. This podcast and its supporting website are under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, so we have republished his text introducing the volcanoes podcast and… Read more »
Active History, Hunt and Stoke
By David Zylberberg, PhD Candidate, York University The United Kingdom is in the midst of an election campaign with a May 6 poll. Despite numerous suggestions that this is the ‘most important election in a generation’, the limited media coverage on this side of the Atlantic has tended to focus on which opposition leader invoked recent Canadian developments as a… Read more »
Popular Publishing Writer’s Guild Expands Westward
By Adam Crymble Thanks to a successful workshop held in Vancouver last month, the Popular Publishing Writer’s Guild has added a new Western Canadian chapter. The guild is a support network of new scholars who are trying to engage a wider public with their research and ideas through newspapers, magazines or online. Every five months, the group holds an internal… Read more »
A Century of Neglect: Epidemic Tuberculosis in Native Communities
by Jane Whalen The 2010 Quality of Life Index boasted that Canada’s “health care and living standards are among the highest in the world.” Ask your average Canadian and they would probably agree. Ask an Aboriginal person and you would be in for quite a shock. Third world conditions exist in Canada – what an outrageous claim to make about… Read more »
Colborne Street Breakdown: Public Protest, a University, and Academic Activism
This is a story about heritage buildings, those trying to save them, a city council, a university, and academics caught in the middle. It’s a story that raises questions about academics’ responsibilities in the community, academic freedom and activism, and the universities they work for.
Activating Foucault for Canadian History
by Steven Maynard “What does a queer, sadomasochistic philosopher have to do with the study of Canada’s past?” This is the question I ask students at the beginning of my first-year survey course on Canadian history. Over the years, colleagues have suggested that first-year undergrads aren’t ready for Foucault. But experience tells me that not only are many of Foucault’s… Read more »
Canadian Historians in the Newspaper
What if my supervisor disagrees with what I write? What if someone in the community sends me a nasty email? What if the editor ignores my article? There are plenty of excuses young historians turn to when they convince themselves not to write opinion pieces for the newspaper. But, there are even more good reasons why they should: what if… Read more »
Active History and learning from the early-Canadian past
As the university of Sussex restricts its history curriculum to post-1700 English history and post-1900 European history. How important is early-Canadian history to current issues facing Canadian society? And how does research on early-Canadian history compare with the study of later periods?
The Historical Memory of Louis Riel: A Long-Standing Canadian Debate
A controversy has erupted over the past week surrounding how Canadians should remember Louis Riel, a 19th century Métis who not only led the 1869 Red River and 1885 Northwest Rebellions, but also negotiated the terms for Manitoba’s entry into Confederation in 1870 before his execution in 1885 for high treason. In a pamphlet posted online last December, Edmonton East… Read more »