Active History

Brexit Ambiguities

March 22, 2018 1 Comment

By Stephen Brooke

On Friday, 23 June 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union, with 51.89% in favour of leaving and 48.11% in favour of remaining. And thus Britain embarked on what was certainly the most important political decision of the past forty years (going back to the 1975 referendum which approved membership in what was then called the European Economic Community by 67.2% to 32.7%) and just as certainly the most complicated political, economic and legal course taken by the nation since the Second World War.

There is a certain weary tone to British political commentators that one can discern with each passing week: “do we have to talk about Brexit this week?” And, of course, they do, as they will be doing from now until 29 March 2019 (when the negotiation period formally ends) and well beyond. The period of political and legal adjustment for Brexit is estimated to stretch into the next decade, and the economic cost will measure out even longer.

The European Union Flag, missing one star for the UK

Before thinking about the relationship between history and Brexit, it’s worth remembering why the referendum even happened. Given the scale of the decision, the immediate justification for the referendum seems criminally capricious at best. In 2013, facing a Conservative Party that had long tortured itself with membership of the EU, often to the indifference of the general public, and with a threat from the right emerging from the United Kingdom Independence Party (a party led by a someone who was, coincidentally, a member of the European Parliament), the hapless Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron committed to an ‘in-out’ referendum on EU membership. To be clear: it is likely in 2013 that no one outside the Conservative Party particularly cared about a referendum. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode 112: Use and Abuse of Patriotism in Sports

March 21, 2018 1 Comment

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By Sean Graham

The 2018 Paralympic Games came to a close on Sunday, thus completing another Olympic cycle. The next major international sporting event comes this summer when Russia hosts the FIFA World Cup. And right now, March Madness, one of the most bet-upon sporting events on the calendar, has the NCAA in the spotlight.

What’s interesting about these events is that, during the competitions, the athletes are at the forefront of the media attention. The stories that emerged from Pyeongchang over the past month have been remarkable. From Scott Moir and Tessa VIrtue’s triumph to the gut-wrenching semi-final loss of the Canadian wheelchair curling team, these sporting events are wrought with emotion. From the elation of winning to the pain of losing, people from around the world wave their countries’ flags in support of their athletes – and in the NCAA case, people root for their alma mater.

All the while, companies capitalize on the emotional attachment to the events to try to sell us stuff. The Olympics, World Cup, and March Madness all feature targeted ads based off our patriotism (most professional and collegiate teams refer to themselves as ‘nations’) while at the same time highlighting the amazing performances of the athletes.

What gets left out, however, is the backdrop against which these events take place. The International Olympic Committee has been known to have executives made outlandish demands of host committees while at the same time demonstrating a remarkable level of disinterest in the host cities’ financial state, so much so that they are having difficulty finding places that want to host the Games. FIFA has had plenty of examples of corruption and bribery, particularly when it comes to the next two World Cups. As for the NCAA, the highest paid employee in 39 of the 50 states is a men’s basketball or football coach. The players, however, don’t get paid and, in a lot of cases, are subject to tougher restrictions on movement and outside financial opportunities than the adults who are, allegedly, teaching them about responsibility.

But these things don’t get the same attention or scrutiny as the games and results. I’ve often wondered if that’s because these sports so effectively capitalize on patriotism to draw us in. By doing so, we are not watching somebody else. Instead, we are included in the action, which is why so many people talk about how many medals ‘we’ won when referring to their home country. By creating an environment in which the audience has a vested interest, it becomes much easier, if not a necessity, to ignore the seedy underside of these events.

Continue reading →

Moscow Then and Now: A Virtual Tour In Search of Depression-Era Canadian Visitors to the Soviet Union

March 20, 2018 1 Comment

All accounts of returned travellers from strange lands and foreign shores are essentially self-disclosures and unwittingly autobiographical. – Norman Bethune

By Kirk Niergarth

I invite you on a virtual tour of the Depression-era Soviet Union, in part through the eyes of Canadians who traveled there and, in part, through my eyes as I attempted to retrace some of their steps during a trip to Russia in 2014. In a series of posts over coming months, I’ll try to point out some of the sights they saw, look at what remains of them today, and what they might signify now a generation after the fall of communism.

I’m sure that Bethune’s observation above, made at a speaking engagement after his return from the Soviet Union in 1935, applies to me. I have not spent sufficient time in self-reflection – or, as a Canadian Communist studying at the International Lenin School in the 1930s would have had it, engaged in an exercise of self-criticism – to discern exactly what my travels in search of Canadian interwar visitors to the Soviet Union unwittingly discloses about myself. Certainly, this ongoing journey has been a more complicated one than I imagined at its outset.

Studying Canadians who visited the USSR in the 1930s leads an historian across a broad sweep of Canadian society. Canadian visitors to the Soviet Union, who were far more numerous than I had anticipated, came from across the country, from farm and city. Some were rich and others poor. In age they ranged from high school students to retirees. They were men and women, reverends, rabbis, and atheists, and members of every political party. These diverse travellers visited the USSR for similarly diverse reasons, creating sharp difference in their field of vision. This virtual tour will bring us in contact with a fair number of them, from well-known figures such as Bethune, Agnes Macphail, Frederick Banting, and Hugh Maclennan to those whose lives are now more obscure in the historical record.

What did they hope to find in the Soviet Union and what did they find when they arrived there? The travelogues discussed in these posts – describing to Canadians the sites we will see on our virtual tour – were part of a public debate about the Soviet Union that was hotly contested in Canada over the course of the 1930s. Continue reading →

“Classroom Practices”: Historians and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

March 19, 2018 8 Comments

Andrew Nurse

Last fall I had the good fortune to attend a regional workshop and conference on post-secondary teaching and learning, or as it now increasingly called: the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education (STLHE). For me, the highlight of my weekend was watching a fawn walk in front of my car — seemingly without a care in the world – as I left Mount Saint Vincent University for lunch and some reflection. However, James Lang, the keynote speaker, was a close second. His talk was organized around a series of suggestions that were intended to make for more effective university-level teaching. His thinking was empirically grounded and focused on steps that could be taken with a minimum of fuss. It was also mercifully free of the buzzwords (like “learning styles”) that, to my mind, have done more to muddy the waters in discussions about university-level teaching than anything else. The rest of the conference was good too. It was lively, participants were enthusiastic and generous, and the sense of common mission – taking steps to improve university-level teaching – was palpable. I left wanting more. Perhaps, the fawn was a good omen.

The good omen fawn. Photograph by author.

Later, as I drove home, I began to think about who had attended the conference. A broad range of disciplines were represented: literary critics, biologists, mathematicians, chemists, business professionals, kinesiologists, and a long list of others. Cognitive scientists and teaching centre staff were over represented, but as I thought about, that made sense. This was their gig. What struck me, as I thought about it, was that there were few historians in the room, at least in the sessions I attended. Why was this? Continue reading →

Podcast: Evangelicalism, Liberalism, and the Origins of the Lord’s Dominion in Mid-Nineteenth Century Canada

March 17, 2018 No Comments

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On April 22, 2017, Todd Webb delivered his talk “Evangelicalism, Liberalism, and the Origins of the Lord’s Dominion in Mid-Nineteenth Century Canada.” 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.

Continue reading →

Edward Cornwallis, Public Memory, and Canadian Nationalism

March 13, 2018 2 Comments

By Tom Fraser

Cornwallis statue covered in a tarp.

On January 30^th 2018, Halifax Regional Council voted 12-4 in favour of the immediate removal of the statue of Edward Cornwallis which has stood upon a plinth in the city’s south end since 1931. Despite the oft-repeated lamentations from colleagues and constituents about the “rewriting of history,” 12 councillors finally found the courage to listen to both prominent Mi’kmaq activists and the wider population, bringing an end to a drawn-out controversial process marked by racism and vitriol. Within 24 hours of the vote, Edward Cornwallis was removed from his pedestal and sent off to a warehouse to await Council’s next step, whether that be relocating the statue to a museum or leaving it to gather dust in a storage facility.

The removal of the statue caps a process which began 25 years ago with the publication of We Were Not the Savages by Mi’kmaq Elder Daniel N. Paul. Paul’s book revealed the unsavory history of Edward Cornwallis to a wide audience, laying bare the brutality with which the first Governor of Halifax transformed Mi’kma’ki into the British space of Nova Scotia. As revealed by Paul, Cornwallis issued a bounty for the scalps of “the savages commonly known as Mickmacks [sic]” to wipe them from Nova Scotia entirely. Paul’s work and activism launched a public discussion about Cornwallis which has ebbed and flowed periodically since 1993. In 2011, Edward Cornwallis Junior High School was renamed to the uncontroversial (if admittedly boring) Halifax Central Junior High, largely due to Paul’s work.

In May 2016, however, a Halifax Regional Council motion to discuss removing the statue (not to remove the statue, but to discuss it) was voted down 8-7 after a tense debate. 11 months later, the words of Halifax’s poet laureate Rebecca Thomas inspired the reintroduction of Cornwallis to municipal debate, and council shortly thereafter agreed, 15-1, to form a panel to discuss the statue (again, discuss. No commitment on removal). 9 months later, and the statue has been removed. After years of baby steps, political action on Cornwallis has rapidly accelerated in the past year, pushed along by a surge in activism.

Much of the conversation has focused around the nitty-gritty details of Nova Scotian history – Paul’s work, along with Jon Tattrie’s biography Cornwallis: The Violent Birth of Halifax, expertly laid out the historical case to stop our public commemoration of Edward Cornwallis. In my view, however, what is more compelling than the study of Cornwallis (who Saint Mary’s University historian John G. Reid refers to as “not a particularly significant historical figure”) is the study of the statue itself – how Cornwallis came to be commemorated in Halifax. Continue reading →

What’s really killing Canadian History?

March 12, 2018 2 Comments

By Thomas Peace

Last week marked the twentieth anniversary of Jack Granatstein’s provocative polemic Who Killed Canadian History, a book that laments the perceived steep decline in Canadians’ knowledge of our past.

It is rare for any book to have such staying power. Earlier this month, for example, the book was drawn upon extensively in an op-ed column for my local paper, The London Free Press. In the column, history teacher Michael Zwaagstra warns about the dangers of historical thinking and how the growing influence of this inquiry-based pedagogy has eroded the teaching of historical content.

Granatstein’s book and Zwaagstra’s op-ed column are polarizing. They force people to take sides in a debate that has mostly been unproductive. Either you are in favour of a strong chronological narrative about Canada or you focus on so-called marginal topics and – according to Zwaagstra – the development of historical thinking skills.

The binary is false. Continue reading →

Podcast: The Civilization of the Canadas in the 1860s

March 10, 2018 No Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

On April 22, 2017, Professor Elsbeth Heaman of McGill University delivered the annual Donald Creighton Lecture at the University of Toronto. Entitled ‘The Civilization of the Canadas in the 1860s,” the lecture was part of ‘The Other 60s: A Decade that Shaped Canada and the World,” a symposium hosted by the Department of History as part of its Canada 150 events.

Introducing the History Chats Podcast Feed

March 9, 2018 1 Comment

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Here at Activehistory.ca, we have a terrific collection of recordings featuring world class historians. While a lot of people have found them on the site or through our YouTube channel (which has over 1,500 hours of watch time), there are so many that we decided we needed to highlight the offerings. That’s why we are excited to announce the launch of History Chats, a podcast feed that will feature new episodes weekly. Where the History Slam is conversational, History Chats will feature recordings of public talks, conference sessions, and roundtables. These recordings are unique and a such valuable resource that we thought they deserved their own feed.

To get things started, we will feature a series of new podcasts recorded at the University of Toronto as part of its conference on Canada 150. Following those, we will feature an episode from our catalogue each week, while including new episodes as they are recorded. Episodes will be released every Saturday, with the first one dropping tomorrow.

The feed is already live on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn, or wherever you get your podcasts. Once you’re subscribed, you can sit back, relax, and get your weekends started on a high note with new History Chats.

Snapshots of Canada: The Living Archive of the Sisters of Service Photograph Collection

March 8, 2018 1 Comment

By Claire L. Halstead

Sister Josephine Dulaska with newly-arrived immigrants at Pier 21 in Halifax, 1935. (SOSA 9-06.17.3-22-6, The Field at Home-April 1937)

At first glance, these first three photos seem unrelated. The first shows a woman standing with newly-arrived immigrants at Pier 21 in Halifax in 1935. The second captures two women collecting water by chopping ice in Sinnett, rural Saskatchewan in 1942. The third, from Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland in 1979, shows a woman and two children in front of a clothesline full of drying squid. They depict different people, times, contexts, and places in Canada. Yet, the commonality of these photos is its depiction of Sisters, women religious belonging to the Canadian Catholic community of the Institute of the Sisters of Service (SOS). While these photos are just a glimpse into the hearty work of the SOS, they are a lens through which we can explore the idea of a Living Archive exemplified by the Sisters of Service photograph collection.

Sisters Mary Roberts and Viola Mossey chop for water outside the school, Sinnett, 1942. (SOSA 9-06.43-0B44)

The SOS was founded in 1922 in Toronto in response to an influx of immigration. As an experienced professional teacher, the foundress Catherine Donnelly was inspired to go West to teach in rural and isolated settlements of Alberta. While significantly more can be said about the complexities of the SOS (my Postdoctoral Fellowship aims to do just this), the SOS charism (mission) was to help “the most abandoned” wherever there was a need and to help all people, not just those of Catholic faith. This approach and their motto of “I have come to serve” led the Sisters into the most remote areas of Canada to work as teachers, nurses, and later as social workers and other federally-employed professionals. In urban centres, they welcomed immigrants at ports of entry and established residences providing accommodation for immigrant women. The impact of their service and legacy is hugely disproportional to their small number of just 125 Sisters (fourteen of whom are still living). Continue reading →

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