Daniyal Elahi and Harris Elahi In December 2025, ActiveHistory.ca published our first piece on Private Hasan Amat, a soldier of the 1st Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force, killed at the Battle of Hill 70 on August 20, 1917. To our knowledge, he is the first identified Muslim soldier killed in action serving with the CEF. He is also one of twenty-two… Read more »
Alicia Carefoote This is the fifth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE. When environmental historians describe the “Great Acceleration,” they usually point to dramatic post-Second World War transformations in human activity.1 Carbon emissions surged. Industrial production expanded. Highways, suburbs, pipelines, and hydroelectric megaprojects reshaped… Read more »
Josh Sandlos This is the fourth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE. Each year in my “Canadian History Since Confederation” survey class, I take my students on a deep dive into something that has high potential to be boring: Statistics Canada tables on historical… Read more »
John W. Bessai This is the third post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE. Lake Diefenbaker concentrates the Great Acceleration within one prairie watershed. It shows how postwar Canada joined environmental transformation, settler state authority, hydraulic control, agricultural expansion, and the reordering of Indigenous… Read more »
Daniel Macfarlane This is the second post in a series exploring the potential of the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE. If the Great Acceleration – the dramatic increase in human activity and the resulting impact on the Earth’s natural systems since the mid-20th century – is a… Read more »
Andrew Watson This is the first post in a series exploring the potential of the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE. In 2016, J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke made the bold prediction that “the Great Acceleration will not last long. It need not and cannot.”1 A decade later,… Read more »
Shannon Stettner As a child, on Friday nights just before 9:00 pm, I’d tuck myself under a living room end table. If I was quiet and hidden, I could usually get away with watching at least part of Dallas. I was equal parts enthralled and scandalized. The epic “Who shot JR?” storyline was my first memorable introduction to crime and,… Read more »
By Daniel R. Meister When it comes to periodizing the history of federal policy of multiculturalism in Canada, existing models have loosely associated changes in policy with the changing of the governments.[1] But a closer examination of the earliest decades of the policy’s existence suggests that the Cabinet ministers responsible for the policy were more responsible for its evolution than the… Read more »
By Alisha Stranges and Elspeth H. Brown 231 Mutual St., Toronto, former site of Club Toronto and the Pussy Palace bathhouse events. Illustration by Ayo Tsalithaba. LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI, Elspeth Brown), 2023. When we began the Pussy Palace Oral History Project, we faced a familiar problem in queer oral history. Conventional interviews privilege chronology and plot. They… Read more »
By Stephanie Bangarth and Sara Beth Keough In March 2026, a Canadian historian and an American Geographer met in Cambridge, ON to begin a collaborative project, literally “between friends,” inspired by Canada’s 1976 bicentennial gift to the United States, the coffee table book Between Friends/Entre Amis.[i] The year 2026 marks the 50th anniversary of this gift. And we are those… Read more »
