https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/History-Slam-211.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham *The Art of Silence is debuting as part of Hot Docs in Toronto, showing at 2:45 on Monday May 2 and 8:30 on Sunday May 8. The film can also be streamed in Canada for five days starting May 3. In 2022, mime is probably not what you think of when… Read more »
By Thomas Hodd Mary Melville, The Psychic (1900) is an extraordinary Canadian cultural artifact. Written by first-wave feminist, psychical researcher, and suffrage leader Flora MacDonald (Merrill) Denison (1867-1921), this significant yet hitherto-undervalued text bears witness to a transformative and vibrant period in Canada’s social, literary and religious history. Based on the life of Denison’s older sister, Mary Merrill, Mary Melville is… Read more »
by Anne Marie Lane Jonah This essay has been jointly posted with the Acadiensis Blog Mid-summer 2016 Nova Scotia visitor numbers at Historic Sites are anecdotally reported to be up from last year. Once again tourists and locals wander in rebuilt towns and fortifications, watch, try their hand at demonstrations, and meet people in costume who share information about “their… Read more »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Paul-Kahanx2.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham One of the things that I often joke about when talking about finding new historical material to study is that you can always revisit an old topic – after all, there’s a new book about the American Civil War published every hour. Of course that isn’t literally true, but there does… Read more »
By Don Wright In Montreal’s Place des Arts to accept the 1985 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, Ramsay Cook said that he was honoured to be recognized alongside poets, playwrights, and novelists, “which is where a historian should be.” Indeed, it was one of his firmest convictions that history was also an art and that historians had an obligation… Read more »
By Jesse Thistle Author’s Preface “Vicarious Trauma: Collecting the Herd” is written in a first-person narrative style in line with Indigenous ways of knowing and disseminating knowledge, as seen in the works of Campbell (1974), Koebel (2007), and Devine (2010), among other Métis scholars, writers, and activists. This piece opens with oral testimony from a Cree-Métis Elder Rose (pseudonym) recording during… Read more »
Andrew Nurse, Mount Allison University I never knew Harold Geddes, although I saw him now and then fifteen years ago when I first starting working at Mount Allison. Geddes died in 2004 after a long life that is now marked — literally — on the town of Sackville, New Brunswick. He was one of those characters that people in small… Read more »
By Christine Moreland “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. Can we then ever really understand who ‘they’ were and how they lived? In Testimonies and Secrets: the Story of a Nova Scotia Family 1844-1977, Robert M. Mennel invites the reader to explore the themes of family, work and community life in a very foreign place: Crousetown,… Read more »