https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/History-Slam-132.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a day that is incredibly significant both in the military history of the Second World War and the collective memory of that conflict. The latter has been greatly influenced by the many depictions in film of the landings on the 6th of June 1944… Read more »
This is the first of several posts marking the 75th anniversary of D-Day and the end of the Second World War as part of a partnership between Active History and the Juno Beach Centre. If you would like to contribute, contact series coordinator Alex Fitzgerald-Black at alex@junobeach.org. By Anne Gafiuk Flight Lieutenant Harry Hardy, 440 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force,… Read more »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/History-Slam-128.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham Late last year, the story of 2014 Olympic Gold Medal curler Ryan Fry being ejected from an event in Red Deer made headlines around the world. The conversation ranged from disappointment to jokes about how drinking beer is a central part of the sport. And while looking at photos of curlers… Read more »
Michael Akladios Census Canada estimated earlier this year that the proportion of Arabic speakers in Canada is projected to increase 200 per cent by 2036. Yet, the study of immigration and ethnicity in North America tends to ignore Middle Eastern immigrants. The region remains in the Western imaginary as an ahistorical and hermeneutically sealed zone.[1] However, one would be hard-pressed… Read more »
By Lachlan MacKinnon The tail-end of Hurricane Matthew battered Nova Scotia and Newfoundland on Monday afternoon and through the evening. Although the damage does not approach the devastation wrought by the system in the Caribbean and other points south, for many in Cape Breton it will be remembered as the storm of a generation. As I drove around the streets… Read more »
By Stacey Zembrzycki Much of the industrial ruins resulting from nearly 130 years of nickel mining in Sudbury, Ontario, are now hidden from plain sight, camouflaged under a successful re-greening program that has led to the planting of over nine million trees, and the clean-up of many area lakes and thousands of hectares of soil. And yet, despite this invisibility,… Read more »
By Kaleigh Bradley “Where does the body end and ‘non-human nature’ begin? When we recognize that human bodies are directly affected by their environments, we are forced to acknowledge that humans are not simply agents of environmental change, but objects of that change” – Linda Nash, Inescpable Ecologies Last week I was surprised to hear about the toxic leak of… Read more »
By Teresa Iacobelli In 1964, fifty years following the start of the First World War, the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) aired the seventeen-part radio series In Flanders’ Fields. Now, at the centenary of the Great War, the CBC has again leaned upon this series as one of its programming highlights to commemorate the anniversary. In Flanders’ Fields recently re-aired as… Read more »
By Cristina Pietropaolo Passage to Promise Land: Voices of Chinese Immigrant Women to Canada is a thoroughly researched and eloquent documentation of the experiences of twenty-eight women of different ages (the oldest in their nineties and the youngest in their thirties) who emigrated from the southern coastal region of China to Canada between 1950 and 1990. Vivienne Poy, an historian,… Read more »
Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki Oral historians often state that, at its core, interviewing is about relationships. This generally refers to the relationships that interviewers and interviewees build and nurture over the course of their encounters, so as to create open, safe, and respectful spaces where one side can share intimate stories, and the other can listen deeply and meaningfully… Read more »