By Merle Massie Over the past two years, I lurked in the halls and wandered wide-eyed through the conferences of my social and natural science colleagues. An interdisciplinary institutional postdoctoral fellowship, funded by MISTRA (The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research) and routed through the University of Saskatchewan, ensured my place at the lunch table and at the front of… Read more »
By Ian Mosby History has a distinct taste. Actually, it also has a distinct smell, feel, sound, and look to it but – as a historian of food and nutrition – I always find myself coming back to the taste of history. No, I’m not talking about the musty, acrid taste of dust and mildew as you open up a… Read more »
By Kaitlin Wainwright At December’s public consultations on the new Museum of Canadian History, Sean Kheraj, an assistant professor of history at York University, made a comment that stuck with me: by commemorating moments in history we actually learn as much about our present as our past. In trying to see the past through a contemporary lens, we blur history… Read more »
By Lauren Wheeler I recently took a trip to a Calgary restaurant where the most iconic of Chinese-Canadian dishes originated. The restaurant is on Centre Street at 27th Avenue North and you would likely miss it unless you looked for the sign reading “Silver Inn.” Two colleagues from the Royal Alberta Museum (RAM) also made the trip from Edmonton to… Read more »
By Laura Madokoro Earlier this semester, I flashed a photo of rock icon Jimi Hendrix up on the screen during a class on settler colonialism. It was a bit over the top but I was trying to get my students to think of connections as well as divides, and Hendrix’s part-Cherokee heritage seemed like a good way of driving home… Read more »
By Jay Bailey Early in my career as a French teacher in Manitoba, I took students to the Festival du Voyageur in St. Boniface, Winnipeg. There I was fascinated by the life and times, the strength, stamina and joie-de-vivre of the voyageurs. In addition, I was intrigued by the fact that the fur trade was dependent on the vagaries of… Read more »
By Britt Luby At all levels of classroom instruction, history teachers are faced with the challenge of meeting the needs of tactile learners in an environment that favours auditory learners. Large classes – York University’s Keele Campus averages 57 students per class – mean that lectures remain the most effective means of relaying information. This year, I was assigned to… Read more »
By Kevin Colton We’re a visual species, we humans. History is often learned best when its words are accompanied with charts and maps, diagrams and photos. I love looking at these pictures to get different perspectives about the events they document. I’m a software developer rather than an historian, but I think the simulation software I’ve developed can provide another… Read more »
Although the lingo in modern scholarship may be less offensive than my tour guide a couple of weeks ago, the message in Merrell’s essay is that similar trends continue among professional historians. Despite broader inclusion of Native people as a subject studied by historians, North American history remains a discipline anchored in a European tradition.
By Jeffers Lennox I can trace my interest in the past to a single book: Jack Whyte’s The Skystone, a story set in the time of the legendary King Arthur. First published in 1992, when I was 12, The Skystone had just about everything necessary to hook a young kid: historical imagination, magic, war, heroism, and enough “adult” subject matter… Read more »
