By Timothy J. Stanley Until its 1947 repeal, the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, effectively barred Chinese people from immigrating to Canada and required all Chinese, including the Canadian-born, to register with the government. Failure to register made them liable to fines, imprisonment and deportation. The Chinese are the only group to which… Read more »
By Henry Yu On July 1, the “Paper Trail” exhibit curated by Catherine Clement detailing the impacts of the legal Chinese exclusion of Chinese from Canada in 1923, will open at the new Chinese Canadian Museum located in Vancouver Chinatown. Having spent the last seven years of my life helping in some capacity or another to envision, consult, plan and… Read more »
By David Webster One textbook on Canadian foreign relations sums up the 1930s with the chapter title “Alberta, not Abyssinia.” Canada was more concerned with domestic politics affairs, not overseas crises such as the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (previously called Abyssinia) in 1935. “All these European troubles are not worth the bones of a Toronto grenadier,” in the words of… Read more »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/History-Slam-170.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham In 1984, Participaction ran a television commercial telling viewers that “fat is not where it’s at.” Produced long before the “keep fit and have fun’ messages of Hal Johnson and Joanne McLeod, the ad has been cited as an example of fat shaming in Canadian culture. Instead of ideas of ‘movement… Read more »
Laura Madokoro In this tumultuous year, a number of important historical concepts have been at the forefront of debates and discussions about public health, social justice and racial equality. The language of rights has been critical to discussions of individual and collective responsibility in the context of the pandemic (as evidenced in the positions adopted by anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers). The… Read more »
Daniel R. Meister Given that Canada is a settler colonial society, it is unsurprising that the lasting metaphor used to describe sociological diversity in the country – that of a mosaic – was popularized by a settler and child of empire: John Murray Gibbon (1875-1952). Gibbon was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to parents of Scottish descent. Prior to… Read more »
Sandy Barron Historians of deaf communities and disability can no longer take for granted that our field cuts across those of race, class, and gender in consistent ways. Although in recent years scholarship and activism have begun to redraw and trouble these distinctions, deaf and disability histories in Canada have only begun to wrestle with the nation’s colonial past and… Read more »
Sean Carleton To mark the 30th anniversary of the siege of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawá:ke, commonly known as the 1990 “Oka Crisis,” I have been interviewing a number of non-Indigenous musicians about the music they made in solidarity with the Mohawk land struggle. I’ve spoken with Chris Hannah from the thrash punk band Propagandhi and hip hop artist Maestro Fresh-Wes about… Read more »
Andrew Burtch This year, 2020, marked the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. This conflict, classified at the time in North America as a “police action” for political convenience was of course anything but. Though three years of bitter fighting followed, the Korean War has been rightly classified as a “forgotten war”, unfolding as it did against… Read more »
David Webster Pictures are powerful. They can tell strong stories. This post accompanies a new e-dossier that tells the history of a Canadian campaign for international human rights through images (http://historybeyondborders.ca/?p=220). While the full photo history looks at a range of groups that worked for human rights in Timor-Leste (East Timor) when it was under Indonesian military rule in 1975-99,… Read more »
