Tag Archives: Canadian history

Comics as Active History: The Graphic History Collective

Active History is proud to present a video each week from New Directions in Active History. The conference took place at Huron University College on October 2-4, 2015 and brought together scholars, students, professionals and community members to discuss a wide range of topics pertaining to active history. In this week’s video, we hear from Sean Carleton and Julia Smith,… Read more »

Virtual Histories of Disability and Assistive Devices

Introduction to the Exhibit by Dominique Marshall on behalf of Carleton University’s Disabilities Research Group Machines of the past hold many of the secrets for designers of future technologies. This is why in the 1960s, a mechanic from Gatineau with 2% vision, personally collected precious old Braille printing machines.  Roland Galarneau laboured in his basement for over a decade, in… Read more »

History Slam Episode Seventy-Six: Continental Cup of Curling

https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Continental-Cup.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham This past weekend at the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, curlers from around the world competed in the Continental Cup. Four Canadian teams and two American teams made up Team North America while Team World consisted of teams representing Norway, Sweden, China, Japan, Switzerland, and Scotland. In one of the… Read more »

The Problematic Spectrum: Historical Trajectories of Gender, Sexuality and Health in a Not-So-Progressive Age

By Beth A. Robertson This past December, Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) announced that it was closing its Child, Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic. The announcement came after two independent reviews were released, deeming the approach of psychologist Dr. Kenneth Zucker, founder and then head of the clinic, as out of step with current medical approaches… Read more »

ActiveHistory.ca repost – Why Should We Care About the Erebus (or Terror)?

ActiveHistory.ca is on a three-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in mid-August. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our most popular and favourite posts from the past year.  We will also be highlighting some of the special series and papers we’ve run this year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers. The following post was… Read more »

History Slam Episode Sixty-Five: Canadian Mysteries

https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Canadian-Mysteries.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham Embedded in the seemingly endless hand-wringing about why people are no longer interested in history or, at least, how historians can better disseminate the past in an increasingly digital world, is how history is taught to students in the 21st century. I once had a professor tell me that the most… Read more »

Kenneth Dewar, Frank Underhill and the Politics of Ideas

By Ann Walton This April, historian and professor Kenneth C. Dewar arrived at Carleton University’s History Department to launch his new book, Frank Underhill and the Politics of Ideas. The room was bustling with students and professors all chatting as we waited for the talk to begin. The subject of Dewar’s book was of particular interest here. Not only did… Read more »

Research is Getting a Bit More Open: Good News for Historical Research in Canada

By Ian Milligan When we started up ActiveHistory.ca way back in 2009 (!), we did it with a pretty simple vision in mind: historians were producing good scholarship, but it was inaccessible. It was inaccessible for a few reasons: sometimes we don’t exactly write for a general audience (we’ve been guilty of dropping jargon around this site too, I know,… Read more »

Five Things You Might Not Have Known About Canadian Environmental History

By  Sean Kheraj Canadian environmental history is a burgeoning sub-field of Canadian history, but it is not very well known outside of academia. This is my own research speciality. On many occasions, I have had to answer the question: what is environmental history? Periodically, this is a question that environmental historians ask themselves. There have been several reflective articles about… Read more »

A Patchwork of Care: Midwifery in Canada

      2 Comments on A Patchwork of Care: Midwifery in Canada

By Krista McCracken The rise and fall of midwifery as an accepted profession is directly linked to the medicalization of birth, feminism, and social conditions.  The history of midwifery in Canada is similar to the rise and fall of midwifery in the United States and Europe.  For years women gave birth at home surrounded by female relatives and neighbours, with… Read more »