Kristine Alexander and Mary Jane Logan McCallum As we documented in our previous post, looking more closely at the history of Scouting and Guiding reveals that the divide between colonialist violence, fascist discipline, and peaceful pedagogy was not quite as stark as Baden-Powell and his supporters would have us believe. Instead of insisting on the ideological opposition between Scouting and… Read more »
Kristine Alexander and Mary Jane Logan McCallum 2020 has been intense. Living in lockdown, uncertain about the future, watching the body count from Covid-19 and police violence continue to rise. Time, shaped by anger, grief, and fear, moves differently, as the pandemic – like other disease outbreaks before it – exposes and deepens socio-economic divisions and inequalities. Despite the best… 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 »
By Thomas Blampied For those following the Canadian railway industry, 2020 was supposed to be a year of celebration. Canadian National Railway (CN), was continuing with its CN100 celebrations to commemorate the 100th anniversary of being bailed out and nationalized by the Canadian government in 1919 (it wasn’t privatized until 1995). The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was to mark the… Read more »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/History-Slam-165.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham In 1967, the federal government placed a moratorium on the death penalty in Canada. Nine years later, Bill C-64 officially abolished capital punishment. Over the previous century, 710 people were executed in Canada, but the public reaction to each of these varied. Some generated plenty of media attention, while others fell… Read more »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/History-Slam-163.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham Between 1928 and 1971, around 1 million immigrants arrived in Canada at Halifax’s Pier 21. In the years since its closure as a reception centre for immigration, the site has taken on a symbolic role in representing mid-century Canadian immigration, embodying the policies, procedures, and attitudes of the immigration system. The… Read more »
Donald Wright Archive stories are stories about, well, archives, the things that we find in them, and the things that we know we will never find. They are also invitations to reflect on how and why archival evidence – from a routinely-generated source to a single photograph – was created and what it can and can’t tell us about the… Read more »
By Allison Lynn Bennett Sexual control is inherent to empire. Colonial authorities and doctors understood sexuality as key to maintaining white superiority. Reproduction and health were the focus of eugenic measures that played on gender, sexual, and racial stereotypes. As a settler colony, Canada imagined itself as “British”, or “white”, and therefore regulated the sexual lives and behaviour of both… 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 »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/History-Slam-157.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham Full disclosure: I love the Prairies. I used to live in Regina and always found the Prairies an extremely powerful space. As Saskatchewan license plates say, it is the “Land of the Living Skies” and, for as much as people love the vistas offered by mountains, I’ll take a day on… Read more »
