By Pete Anderson Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environment, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 Joy Parr University of British Columbia Press Paperback, 304 pages, $32.95 Just as all politics can be viewed as local, so, too, can history. Joy Parr’s Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953–2003 (UBC Press, 2010) explores local reactions to a series of “megaprojects,” with a focus on… Read more »
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 »
By Ryan O’Connor One of the defining countercultural phenomena of the 1970s was the back-to-the-land movement. During this period, tens – maybe hundreds – of thousands of North Americans abandoned their urban dwellings for a rural lifestyle. This movement, which eschewed the postwar consumer culture, brought thousands of people “from away” to Prince Edward Island. Some stayed a few weeks;… Read more »
Popular culture serves as an easy way to capitalize on students’ everyday experience. Music can teach about the past in at least seven overlapping ways.
Listening to Our Past explores the rich cultural heritage of the people of Nunavut. The website was created by Nunavut Arctic College and l’Association des francophones du Nunavut. The site aims to present history recorded though oral traditions and oral histories told by Nunavut elders. The site is tri-lingual and material is available in English, French, and Inuktitut. When first… Read more »
Professor Matthew Hayday of the University of Guelph has written an evocative piece on some of the joys and potential pitfalls of engaging living activists in historical research. His piece, “The History of the Recent: Reflections on Social Movement History, Research Methods and the Rapid Passage of Time,” is a useful read for anybody interested in the connections between oral history, professional historians, social movements, and activists.
What if the study of the Canadian past was understood as an interdisciplinary field? Steven High’s new paper offers oral history as an example of an interdisciplinary craft that has made such a transition. High, Canada Research Chair in Public History and Associate Professor of History at Concordia University, examines this and other issues surrounding oral history. ActiveHistory.ca is always… Read more »
An invitation to a free oral history workshop sponsored by the Montreal Life Stories Project and Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling.