By Sarah Kittilsen As a tour guide, I answer a lot of questions. Some are related to the tour itself, but many are not. Guests ask about my life just as much as, if not more than, they ask about the history of Montreal. I wasn’t surprised, then, when a woman turned toward me one summer morning and asked, “So,… Read more »
By Annabelle Penney I did not expect to cry on the way home from the Calgary airport. It had been over a year since my last homecoming, and recently I’d wondered if ‘home’ still fit Alberta. I’d forged newfound allegiances to Quebec, a province embroiled in its own separatist debates. While working on my thesis for some of the flight,… Read more »
Cynthia Wright and Franca Iacovetta In November 1926, Emma Goldman, then 57 and beginning a first period of exile in Toronto, enthused over a “radiant” young Italian woman seated at a welcoming dinner for Goldman organized by the city’s Jewish anarchist comrades.[1] Just over six months later, Goldman dubbed Marie Tiboldo “a terrible prude” who did “not feel anything deep… Read more »
James Cullingham Canada and Mexico approach an historic juncture in their relations with the United States. Both countries face a July 1 deadline over the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 2020 under the auspices of Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump and Andrés Manuel López Obrador. CUSMA is due to be formally extended… Read more »
Peter L. Twohig On 16 April 2026, five thousand long-term care (LTC) workers in 56 facilities throughout Nova Scotia began a strike. A tentative agreement ended the labour action after eight weeks, another example of a lengthy labour dispute in a nursing home. Indeed, some of the longest strikes in recent Canadian history have been in LTC.[i] Striking long-term care… Read more »
Stéphane Castonguay and Colin Coates This is the ninth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posed with NiCHE The relationship between agriculture and the Anthropocene unfolds across a temporal and conceptual spectrum punctuated by the various proposals for a “Golden Spike.”1 At one end… Read more »
Jim Clifford When did the Great Acceleration start? Saskatchewan might hold the answer. Between the 1890s and the 1930s, the settler population exploded, and these newcomers broke 20 million acres of prairie grassland into wheat farms. The transformation released vast quantities of CO2 held in the soil and was inseparable from the genocidal dislocation of Indigenous people from their land.1… Read more »
Walter T. Cassidy The Windsor Star reported an incident on May 28th, 1954—as did papers all over North America—about a Port Colborne, Ontario woman being arrested in Buffalo, New York, for trying to enter the United States “illegally” after being in an accident in the neighbouring American town. It was her second time trying to cross the border, the first… Read more »
Amy Swiffen, Keith Cherry, Hannah Wyile and Kris Millett This post is part of the Indian Act 150 series There is a harmful provision of the Indian Act that, until recently, has never been the object of sustained scholarly scrutiny: Section 141. In force from 1927 to 1951, this provision made it an offence for Indigenous peoples to raise funds or retain… Read more »
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 »
