Virginie Belony As the situation in Haiti becomes increasingly complex and challenging for many observers to comprehend, delving into Haiti’s past and the experiences of its diaspora here in Canada can offer valuable insights and examples of resilience, resistance, and community mobilization. The election of François Duvalier as President of Haiti in September 1957 marked the onset of a period… Read more »
To launch the exhibit The Human Cost of Food, part of the new Active History on Display initiative, we invited award-winning public historian Gilberto Fernandes, whose public history project City Builders was a major inspiration to the exhibit, to provide commentary. By Gilberto Fernandes Time is of the essence out in the fields. When to seed, water, feed, harvest or… Read more »
To launch the exhibit More Than a Face, part of the new Active History on Display initiative, we invited Fung Ling Feimo, one of the storytellers, to set the stage: More Than A Face opens at activehistory.ca! It is a collection of soundscapes, visuals, written and spoken word, offering stories told through our individual voices. We have storytellers from… Read more »
Active History is delighted to launch our digital history initiative, Active History on Display (en français: Expositions d’Active History). The project features two exhibits. The first, More Than a Face, engages with nine storytellers to challenge dominant narratives of what it means to be Asian Canadian – and indeed to challenge the very idea that such a capacious category can… Read more »
Krenare Recaj In the third year of my undergrad, I was sitting beside my friend Jeremy in a lecture for the class America: Slavery to Civil War. The professor was going into explicit detail – showing photos and drawings – of the torture enslaved people in America were subjected to. The logic was that these details were necessary to properly… Read more »
Paul McGuire This is the sixth entry in a monthly series on Thinking Historically. See the Introduction here. At least twice a year, we take a trip to the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia. One of the most beautiful parts of the valley is Grand Pré and Hortonville. From here, you can see Blomidon and the vast expanse of the… Read more »
Tifanie Valade This is the fifth entry in a monthly series on Thinking Historically. See the Introduction here. While history classes are often viewed as a neutral, apolitical venue for the transmission of “facts” about the past, history education is in fact a value-laden enterprise that seeks to construct and communicate overarching national narratives and national identities. Such narratives often… Read more »
This is the second in a three-part series on the use of content warnings in classrooms, archives, and museums. You can read the first entry here. Erica L. Fraser Looking back, I probably began using content warnings for students after giving myself night terrors from reading the memoir of a Holocaust survivor as class prep. I was on an evening… Read more »
In recent years, teachers and heritage professionals have wrestled with the question of when and how to provide alerts about materials that students or users might find difficult to navigate. This is the first in a three-part Active History series on the subject of content warnings that elaborates the crucial processes and approaches that inform this work. Jo McCutcheon …to… Read more »
Ian Alexander This is the fourth entry in a monthly series on Thinking Historically. See the Introduction here. In the 1990s a confluence of social, economic, and political conditions created a market for international education to expand in a multitude of ways around the globe. For those in communities across Canada, the internationalization of education has been most visible in… Read more »
