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 »
By Jamie Swift In the 1985 Argentinian film, The Official Story, one of the characters, a student, angrily proclaims that his country’s history textbooks had been “written by assassins.” Stories, as we know, vary considerably in the telling. The dominant narrative – to use the now shopworn term – tends to be recounted by the loudest voices. Hardly assassins. But… Read more »
By Colin Coates The world of Canadian Studies, which according to the International Council for Canadian Studies includes some 7,000 scholars in 70 countries, is facing difficult times. Strangely enough, one of its chief opponents seems to be our own government. Since the 1970s successive Liberal and Progressive Conservative federal governments, along with various provincial governments, have supported the principle… Read more »
Since the new year began, just six-and-a-half weeks ago, considerable changes have been made to the direction of the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK. Earlier in the month, the High Commission, which collaborates with this UK charity, added four new members to the board, signalling that problems were afoot. Last week, another four members of the board resigned… Read more »
By Thomas Peace This post is a little late in coming, but hopefully it will be useful for those of us working in pre-twentieth century North American history or with online resources. About a year ago, I discovered that one of the most useful reference resources I use, Statistics Canada’s E-Stat tables of the Censuses of Canada, 1665-1871 had been… Read more »
By Peter Seixas For the Historical Thinking Project, 2013-14 was the best of times and the worst of times. It was the best of times because two of Canada’s largest provinces made the most concrete and comprehensive headway in adapting the ideas of the Project for their curricula. Ontario implemented a new K-12 curriculum that embedded the historical thinking concepts… Read more »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/John-Reid-January-17-2013.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadOn January 17th the students and faculty at Acadia University invited historian John G. Reid to provide historical context to the #IdleNoMore movement. This hour long lecture builds on Reid’s forty-year career as a historian of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century northeastern North America and expert witness in a number of court cases involving Treaty and… Read more »
By Glen Coulthard The post was originally published on Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Much has been said recently in the media about the relationship between the inspiring expression of Indigenous resurgent activity at the core of the #IdleNoMore movement and the heightened decade of Native activism that led Canada to establish the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) in… Read more »
By Andrew Watson and Thomas Peace After reading comment after uninformed comment, both online and in the media, ActiveHistory.ca decided to compile a short list of books written by historians that address the issues being discussed by the Idle No More movement. Click on a link below to read a brief summary of the book. Peggy Blair, Lament for a… Read more »
June 18, 2012, two hundred years to the day since the United States declared war on Great Britain and her colonies, marks the starting point of a period of commemorations, restorations, re-enactments and monument building which will mark the bicentennial of the War of 1812. The Government of Canada, under Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, reiterated its commitment to supporting… Read more »
