By Dorotea Gucciardo “Capture the vitality of sunny summer!” So read the headline of a 1931 General Electric (GE) ad, which encouraged Canadians to bring into their homes “the health-giving rays of the sun any hour of the day […] every day of the year.” Appearing in the November edition of Chatelaine, the advertisement enticed readers facing the start… Read more »
By Robert MacDougall It may be the networks I belong to and the feeds I follow, but—as a guy whose main interests are 19th-century pseudoscience, the history of the telephone, and WKRP in Cincinnati—I am often surprised by how much of the social media in my streams is devoted to tech industry news and speculation. Will consumers embrace the… Read more »
By Blair Stein Upon his retirement, former Air Canada President Gordon McGregor wrote that “certainly no 20 years in the history of aviation, and probably no 20 years in the future, will show such a succession of basic changes…as did the period of 1948-1968.”[1] He was not exaggerating. During this time period, airlines moved from propeller-powered aircraft to jets,… Read more »
By Laura Madokoro The postwar era is often celebrated as a great time of liberalization in Canada, as far as immigration rules are concerned. What is often ignored is how hard people, including Chinese Canadians, fought to obtain equality of treatment, and how the federal government was incredibly reluctant to proceed with large-scale change until the 1960s. Indeed, under the… Read more »
By Matthew S. Wiseman The bombings in Paris and Beirut this past week are a powerful illustration of how civilians are too often caught in the violent crossfire unleashed by global unrest. How does one prepare a civilian populace for such potential devastation? Is it even possible? Between 1948 and 1954, officials in Ottawa attempted to design and implement a… Read more »
Edited by Beth A. Robertson with Dorotea Gucciardo Climate scientist Simon Donner was quoted in Wired, lamenting the politicization of science under the recently felled Conservative government. Individuals like Donner hoped that the change in government would mean “a new beginning for science” in Canada. Important to this discussion is not only a conception of Canada’s future, but also its… Read more »
By Laura Madokoro Amidst the evolving coverage about the refugees from Syria, there has been a lot of discussion about what term best describes the people who are leaving their homes, taking to boats, and attempting to make their way to Europe. Editors at Al Jazeera sparked the discussion on 20 August 2015, when they announced that they would no… Read more »
By Benjamin Hoy Refugees create complicated political and social climates. Federal decisions to admit or reject individuals, families, and communities fleeing from hardships intertwine humanitarian concerns, political profiteering, immigration policy, domestic security, and racial perceptions into an often-ugly mess. Refugees force countries to consider their moral obligations to those less fortunate and to examine the possibility of their own complicity… Read more »
As part of our summer hiatus, ActiveHistory.ca is featuring summaries of the papers and series we’ve run over the past year. Today, we provide a list of the series we’ve published since September 2014: The Home Archivist (by Jess Dunkin) – Ongoing Introduction (September) The Grand Seduction (October) Getting my Hands Dirty (November) Dust, Mold and Adhesives – Part I… Read more »
[Editors note: This is a second follow up post from our Infectious Disease, Contagion and the History of Vaccines theme week] By Deborah Neill In 1883, Bedford Brown read a paper before the Virginia State Medical Society, which was published two years later as Reminiscences of Personal Experience in the History of Diphtheria. It opened with a heart-breaking account of a… Read more »
