Active History

The Ironies of the Wired Society: The Internet and Contemporary History

April 12, 2018 2 Comments

By Andrew Nurse

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. ~Antonio Gramsci

Over the last generation, a series of “post” and “neo” ideologies prophesied fundamental change already evolving around us: a new era was being born.

This has not really happened and the diverse manifestos that foretold historic change stand as testimony to unrealized aspirations. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more evident than with regard to new communications technologies (NCTs), social media broadly construed, or the internet. At their most extreme, the internet’s advocates promised a revolution in communications, subjectivity, and politics. As Heather Brooks noted in The Revolution Will be Digitized:

“Technology is breaking down traditional social barriers of status, class, power, wealth and geography, replacing them with an ethos of collaboration and transparency”

On an international level, the Arab Spring was its key manifestation. Closer to home, the Maple Spring, student protests, culture jamming, and Occupy were taken as illustrations of NCT’s political potential. Yet, as Andrea Nagle’s Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars form 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right argues to persuasive effect, NCT’s dark side lies in their connection to the alt-right and the most reactionary social movements in contemporary history.

What happened? Continue reading →

Manitoba: Student-centric history curriculum?

April 11, 2018 No Comments

This month in our history education series, I’ll be looking at Manitoba’s social studies curriculum. A review of their website and recent news articles suggests that Manitoba strives to be student-centric and responsive in their curriculum. Last year, Manitoba established a new Indigenous-focused school system with a new curriculum, and while most of the provinces heard the call to action from the TRC over the last two years, Manitoba was one of the first provinces to add residential schools as a mandatory part of their curriculum in 2010 and expanded these requirements post-TRC. Recent editorials (fall 2017 and winter 2017) lambasting a skills- or inquiry-based curricula have made little impact on Manitoba curriculum, with their social studies curriculum recently updated with an inquiry focus.

If you’ve been following this series, the skills- and/or inquiry-based focus of Manitoba’s curriculum shouldn’t surprise you. Similar to other provinces, any curricular revisions post-2011 explicitly are tied to Peter Seixas’ Historical Thinking concepts. The Manitoba 2014 revision of the grade 11 Canadian history curriculum includes Historical Thinking as a way to organize history teaching, but the current elementary curriculum updated in 2003 also includes skill-based concepts to organize the curriculum, only without the Historical Thinking language. Continue reading →

Immersed in the Past: Room-Scale Virtual Reality for Public History

April 10, 2018 1 Comment

Sean Kheraj

Last year, I wrote about my early impressions of the possible uses of virtual reality technology for public history and history education. I also led a session in my fourth-year digital history class on virtual reality and its potential for generating a sense of historical presence, an ability to simulate the sensation of standing in past places. I have been somewhat enthusiastic about what this technology can add to museums, classrooms, and other settings for public history and history education.

My focus last year was on smartphone-based VR with stereoscopic viewers (Google Cardboard, Daydream View, Gear VR). This type of VR technology can generate a powerful sense of presence, but the user is limited to rotational movement along three perpendicular axes (pitch, roll, yaw). This is like being a camera fixed in space that can spin around, but cannot move within that space. Tethered VR headsets that use PCs and spatial tracking systems add translational movement (heave, sway, surge) to VR experiences creating six degrees of freedom of movement. These headsets also include tracked motion controllers that can reveal the user’s hand movements in VR environments and enable interaction with 3D objects. Altogether, this is sometimes called “room-scale VR.” The experience is incredibly immersive.

Six degrees of freedom. Source: Wikipedia.

Recently, I put this kind of immersive VR experience to the test by reviewing three examples of public history VR projects that use room-scale technologies. I used an Acer Mixed Reality Headset, part of Microsoft’s line of virtual reality headsets that use “inside-out tracking” in order to achieve room-scale experiences. Two cameras on the front of the headset map and track the environment around me and the motion controllers generate allow me to interact with objects in a 3D space.

What did this add to VR experiences for public history and history education? How best could it be used? What are its limitations? Let’s find out: Continue reading →

Podcast: Our Country is No Longer Able to Support Us

April 7, 2018 No Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

On April 22, 2017, Bill Waiser delivered his talk “Our Country is No Longer Able to Support Us.” The talk was part of “The Other 60s: A Decade that Shaped Canada and the World,” a symposium hosted by the Department of History at the University of Toronto as part of its Canada 150 events.

This talk is part of our History Chats podcast series. You can subscribe to the History Chats feed wherever you get your podcasts.

Dystopia? It’s a World Without History

April 6, 2018 1 Comment

Poster for François Truffaut’s 1966 film version of Fahrenheit 451.

Patrick Lacroix

“I’ve got to catch up with the remembrance of the past!”

– Montag, Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

In the last two years, the rise of “fake news” and “alternative facts” as categories of public discourse has prompted fears of a drift towards authoritarianism in the United States and beyond. A casual disregard for truth and campaigns to discredit rigorous reporting are, unquestionably, cause for concern—especially when perpetuated at the highest echelons of power.

An epistemological battle is now engaged, we are told, with the fate of democratic principles hanging in the balance.

Analyses on this website (here and here, for instance) and elsewhere suggest that “fake news” is not a recent invention. But the most instructive cases of public deception may be found in fiction, paradoxical as it may seem.

The essence of current debates was indeed captured decades ago by novelists. Twentieth-century dystopian works hold important lessons about the relationship between truth and history. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 are especially revelatory in their treatment of the past. With them, we find that our own public trustees’ approach to the past is indicative of their commitments to an open, deliberative, and democratic society.

Literary dystopias also invite an assiduous study of the past and assign historians an important political mission. In our present circumstances, as cuts to the humanities in the United States foreshadow similar developments north of the border, historical skills may be as valuable as they are rare.

* * *

François Truffaut had it right in his film adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. Guy Montag’s line about remembrance, quoted above, does not appear in the novel, but it captures Bradbury’s message. It also does justice to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. In all three, the erasure of the past enables the construction of authoritarian regimes. The corruption of history as both a body of knowledge and a field of inquiry facilitates the emergence of the dystopian world. Continue reading →

Populism Isn’t a Four Letter Word: Reasserting a Progressive Populism in 2018

April 5, 2018 No Comments

by Christo Aivalis

In the era of Donald Trump and Doug Ford, populism’s reputation has taken quite the tumble, associated now more than at any time in the recent past with the alt-right movement, predicated in large part on xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and a reflexive aversion to anything that may be connected, however tenuously, to the ‘Social Justice Warrior’ caricature. In this context, populism is little more than a regressive rabble roused by wealthy men with a dubious reputation as ‘regular guys just like you and me.’

Bernie Sanders, photo by Gage Skidmore

Given this perspective, much handwringing has come from the centre of the political spectrum, as establishment politicians of a multi-partisan bent pine for the political consensus before the Tea Party movement, Trump, and Ford, where it was accepted that a narrow window of political discourse—all cordoned within a general neoliberal consensus built upon a wide-ranging distrust of the common man and woman—reigned supreme.

This is in part why, both during and after the 2016 American Presidential election, Hilary Clinton obtained so much support from those deemed to be moderate republican intellectuals and stalwarts, ranging from George H. W. Bush to David Frum. Such men were mortal enemies of the American centre-left before Trump’s rise, and yet are now welcomed with open arms into #TheResistance because they share a similar overall vision about how society should be run, and most importantly in this context, who should run it.

While a good chunk of this is a genuine reaction to the rhetoric of Trump, it was and is more cynically an attempt to equate Trump to the left wing populism of figures like Jeremy Corbyn and Senator Bernie Sanders. In this narrative—a rift on the questionable horseshoe theory of politics—Trump and Sanders are both demagogues who irresponsibly stoke the fears of the masses to destroy the liberal political tradition for their own benefit. From my point of view as a historian and observer of contemporary politics, however, the two men could not be more different. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode 113: Studying and Interpreting the Bible

April 4, 2018 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

In the world of history, so much of the work we do is based on interpretation. Whenever we walk into a museum, read a book, and visit a historic monument, we are consuming, at least a little, somebody else’s interpretation of what happened. This isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing, but rather something that should always be kept in mind when studying the past.

The same is true of religion. Various individuals have read the same religious texts and come to incredibly different interpretations. All one has to do is look at the Crusades as an example of how this can negatively influence a society. But at the same time, interpretation has led to positive developments for some religious organizations. Just like with any other historical study, therefore, it is essential to understand the context in which the texts were written and how that can shape our interpretation.

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Rev. Canon Rob Park from St. George’s Anglican Church in Georgetown, Ontario. With Passover and Easter over the weekend, it seemed like the perfect time to talk about the way in which Priests are taught the Bible, the way in which personal experience shapes interpretation, and the differences between the gospels.

Continue reading →

“Ditch the Highlighter”: What the Research Suggests about Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

April 2, 2018 2 Comments

Andrew Nurse

This is the second post in a two-part series on STLHE by Andrew Nurse. Read part one here.

Lego storm trooper holding a paintbrush next to an easel.

Photo by Daniel Cheung on Unsplash

How can we — how should we — teach history at the university level? This question has been the subject of a great deal of discussion. The perspective that I’m trying to introduce here is influenced by the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education (STLHE). If the STLHE is about evidence-based changes that can make for more effective university-based teaching, what are changes that historians can make? James Lang’s Small Teaching is an easy and accessible guide. His blog and periodic column in The Chronicle of Higher Education provide a set of nicely-organized suggestions that can point university instructors toward STLHE-informed educational strategies. These suggestions are not a series of tips per se, or even best practices, but what Lang calls “classroom practices,” or ways in which we can reorganize classroom time and pedagogy guided by research into teaching and learning. Following some of Lang’s work, let me suggest three small changes to classroom practice that seem to make a difference in learning. You might already have implemented these changes, or some variant of them. If this is the case … good! I hope I can provide some positive reinforcement.

First, the according to Lang, the STLHE suggests that we should make better use of the first few minutes of a class. I’ve tried a whole series of different ways of starting class, from what I had hoped were stirring — nay, arresting — opening words, to due date reminders, announcements about co-curricular activities, admonitions or congratulations about test or paper scores, to explanations of assignments. Lang thinks we don’t make good use of the beginning of class time, particularly in the age of social media, when students come to class already distracted by the gadgets in their hands. I’m not certain any of my ways of starting class are bad, but the research we have suggests that a more effective way to begin class is to get students thinking right away. Begin with what a colleague of mine calls “orienting questions” and don’t just use those questions as an outline. Have students take a few minutes to work in, say, pairs or small groups to answer them. Continue reading →

Podcast: The 1860s and the Origins of Canada’s Transitions to Fossil Fuels

March 31, 2018 No Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

On April 22, 2017, Ruth Sandwell delivered her talk “The 1860s and the Origins of Canada’s Transition to Fossil Fuels.” The talk was part of ‘The Other 60s: A Decade that Shaped Canada and the World,” a symposium hosted by the Department of History at the University of Toronto as part of its Canada 150 events.

This talk is part of our History Chats podcast series. You can subscribe to the History Chats feed wherever you get your podcasts.

Fake News Canada 1922: Designed to Diminish and Deceive

March 29, 2018 1 Comment

By Veronica Strong-Boag

Canada’s official and popular histories supply their share of well-told lies. Think of the representation of the Northwest Rebellions as proof positive of Métis and Indian barbarism or the story of the Canadian sergeant crucified by blood-thirsty Huns during World War One.

Nellie L. McClung was not immune to those deceptions but she understood the assault on truth when it came to suffragists. Her classic volume In Times Likes These (1915) skewered “hardy perennials,” her term for fake news, those “prejudices regarding women that have been exploded and blown to pieces many, many times and yet walk among us today in the fullness of life and vigor.”

Enfranchisement during and after World War One and the appearance of the first female legislators did not halt anti-suffrage propaganda. Even as misogyny genuflected before women’s patriotic sacrifices, its Conservative, Liberal, and left-wing champions maintained their defense of men’s right to rule.

Like Donald Trump’s 21^st century resort to the distraction of a female press secretary (in effect making women complicit in their own victimization), early Canadian reactionaries enjoyed pitting women against one another. In the process, they celebrated their preferred version of ‘real women,’ a type less flatteringly summed up by McClung as “selfish women who have no more thought for the underprivileged women than a pussy cat in a sunny window for the starving kitten in the street.”[1]

Such was the case in June 1922, when MacLean’s, self-titled ‘Canada’s National Magazine’ and would-be arbiter of mainstream Anglo-Canadian culture, published “The Confessions of a She-Politician.” Continue reading →

Last »