Tag Archives: History

History and the Atrocity of Silence

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Owen Griffiths “Dear brothers and sisters! I have been waiting to come here and be with you!” With these words, Pope Francis began his long-awaited apology for the Catholic Church’s role in more than a century of abuse and marginalization of Indigenous Canadians, what the Truth and Reconciliation Report called “cultural genocide.” Reactions to the Pope’s July 2022 visit and… Read more »

In Conversation III: Touring the Battlefields of Canada’s First World War

By Sarah Glassford and Ady King   Preamble This post is the product of a Q&A email exchange between Ady King, a Grade 11 student from Fredericton, New Brunswick, and Sarah Glassford, a Master of Library and Information Science student at Western University with a background in History. We met in the summer of 2017 when Ady gave a presentation… Read more »

Africa’s War: Anti-colonial Movements and Repression in First World War French West Africa

Thomas Vennes Early on the morning of the 4th of May 1916, a military column in French West Africa set out to quell a rebellion. Their mission was one small part of World War I in Africa, about which little is said in Canada. This post helps illuminate the under-appreciated global and colonial ramifications of the First World War. The… Read more »

The Alderville War Memorial: A Bizarre Monument or A Community’s Search for Meaning?

By Jackson Pind If you drive north from Highway 401 in southern Ontario along county road 45, you will come across the reserve of Alderville First Nation, nestled on the shore of Rice Lake. If you travel in this direction, which summer cottagers and scenic adventurers often do, you will notice a striking monument in the middle of the endless… Read more »

History Slam Episode Ninety-Six: Fake History

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https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/History-Slam-Episode-96-Fake-History.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham Back in the fall of 2014, we had an idea for a podcast episode. The premise was that you were at a party, somebody finds out that you study history and asks a question to which you don’t know the answer. Normally, you might say that you weren’t sure, but in… Read more »

Canada’s History and the First World War Centennial: A Conversation

ActiveHistory.ca has an announcement!  With contributors’ approval, Canada’s History will be selecting posts from the “Canada’s First World War” series on ActiveHistory.ca for inclusion in Canada’s Great War Album.   The album is Canada’s History’s online tribute to people and stories from the war, and carries on from their book project that recognized the centennial of the war’s outbreak. The arrangement… Read more »

Golgotha?: D. Y. Cameron’s Flanders from Kemmel

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By Laura Brandon One of the aspects of war art that continues to surprise me is how personal it ultimately is. Any painting, however objectively representative of events it may purport to be, in it carries some measure of the artist’s subjective response to the incident, place, or person depicted. Furthermore, it is influenced by the artist’s personal circumstances and… Read more »

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 »

Citizenship: Nothing Yet Everything

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By Pam Sugiman This is the third in a series of posts originally presented as part of a roundtable entitled “What’s the Use of History? Citizenship and History in Canada’s Past and Present,” held in Toronto on October 16th 2012.  The event was organized by the People’s Citizenship Guide Project. Personal memory and history As a contributor to this series… Read more »

Lost Villages, Collaboration, and Capturing History

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By Daniel Macfarlane A picture might be worth a thousand words; but great photos combined with a hundred thousand words can be even more powerful. And that’s what this post is about: the power of photography and art, doing history, and the benefits of collaboration. The subject of my doctoral dissertation, finished almost two years, was the creation of the… Read more »