By Erin Isaac and Dr. Benjamin Hoy For many, board games conjure up memories of time spent with family and friends around the dinner table. I remember, when I was young, drinking cream soda while watching my sister eviscerate my hopes of owning Park Place and my mom bend the rules to keep me out of bankruptcy. Years later, I… Read more »
By Erin Isaac Jamestown looms large in North American collective historical imagination, in pop culture as well as in the classroom. As North America’s first permanent English settlement, the site is celebrated as the “birthplace” of modern Anglo-American society but (as is true of all historical sites) the history of Jamestown is complicated; there are aspects to its story to… Read more »
In late-October, Active History editor Thomas Peace met with Marie Battiste, Alan Corbiere, and Sarah Nickel to discuss decolonization and Indigenization in the teaching of North American history. Over the course of an hour, the conversation explored the meaning of decolonization, Indigenizing the academy, Indigenous resurgence in the Indigenizing of history, assessed specific anticolonial strategies for affecting change in the discipline, and provided… Read more »
By Samantha Cutrara We all breathed a sigh of relief on Saturday afternoon when the news came out that Biden/Harris won the American election. But up until that point, many of us sat on our phones or in front of our laptops or TVs in anticipation of the election results. On Tuesday night specifically, many of us kept refreshing the… Read more »
Patrick Lacroix Didn’t you guys burn down the White House? – Donald J. Trump From television news programming to social media, a politically unaware visitor to Canada would easily believe that we are in the midst of a heated national election. We aren’t, of course, but we have had front-row seats—the mediatic splash zone—to unending American electioneering. Early reports suggest… Read more »
By Samantha Cutrara I like a good theme, and what better theme is there than Halloween? With Halloween falling on a Saturday this year, I wanted to use it to have “spooky” conversations for my Source Saturday video series on YouTube (also available as a podcast). Source Saturday is a new video & podcast series where I talk with historians,… Read more »
The letter below was sent to Premier Doug Ford’s office earlier this week by Natasha Henry, President of the Ontario Black History Society, on behalf of the OBHS board. Dear Premier Ford, The Ontario Black History Society is writing to demand the Ministry of Education of Ontario take immediate action to improve and update the current Ontario Social Studies, History,… Read more »
Reportedly, the “add and mix” approach with which Indigenous histories have been incorporated into Canadian history is an inadequate method to facilitate transformative change. According to two respondents, the add and mix approach fails to encourage historians and students to push beyond merely acknowledging settler colonialism, to move to what it means to be engaging with Indigenous histories and teachings
By Samantha Cutrara How to you teach racism in your Canadian history classroom? Do you teach racism in your Canadian history classroom? Do you mention racist actions or events and then move on to the next part of the chronology? Do you acknowledge that there were ethnically and culturally diverse peoples in the Canadian past but fail to introduce any… Read more »
By Lindsay Gibson and Catherine Duquette Historical significance raises one of the most fundamental and unavoidable questions for understanding history; which events, people, and developments from the past should be studied and remembered?[i] The past is everything that ever happened to everyone everywhere, but it is impossible to study or remember everything that occurred. History is comprised of narratives about… Read more »
