Active History

Springtime for Big History: Part One

July 27, 2017 1 Comment

By Owen Griffiths

This is the first part of a four part series, running quarterly, on Big History.

In 1989, on the eve of the Berlin Wall’s collapse, Soviet tanks retreating across the Friendship Bridge, and Chinese tanks facing off against students in Tiananmen Square, I received my first exposure to world history through a seminar course and a conference on the same theme organized by Ralph Crozier at the University of Victoria. With those world historical events prominent in the foreground, the course and conference introduced me to a new approach to history as well as to the many debates surrounding the efficacy of world history as a legitimate research field and pedagogy. “Too big,” its critics cried. “No one is qualified to teach the world.” “World history is like a stone skimming on the surface of the water,” still others opined. Fortunately, these voices, while still extant, have been stilled.

Today, world history programs from undergraduate to Ph.D. are taught at dozens of universities in North America and elsewhere. World history has its own international organization (founded in 1982) and journal (founded in 1990). Feeding all this are dramatic changes in North American high school curricula, which offer world history courses in various forms at most schools. Through these efforts, world history has become a legitimate and respected area of scholarship and teaching.

In that same year of 1989, worlds away from Berlin, Afghanistan, Beijing, and Victoria, David Christian of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia began teaching his first course on big history, collaborating with colleagues from the sciences and the social sciences. Trained in Russian social history, Christian was also interested in origins and so structured his course to begin with the most widely accepted origin story for which we have testable evidence: the big bang 13.8 billion years ago. As far as we know, all human societies have stories about where they came from and how the world came to be. These may be the oldest stories we have and their existence reminds us of what humans share in common at the most fundamental level. Big history follows this tradition, locating all celestial and terrestrial activity in the context of the big bang. Continue reading →

A fond farewell: Thank you Beth Robertson

July 20, 2017 1 Comment

This month Beth Robertson will be leaving the editorial collective in order to focus on her teaching at Carleton University and her work as the digital editor for the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association / Scientia Canadensis. In recognition of all the work she has put into the project over the past three years, we are reposting the introduction to a theme week Beth coordinated with Dorotea Gucciardo in November 2015: Technoscience in Canada. See the bottom for the list of fascinating posts solicited, curated and edited by Beth and Dorotea.

Thank you Beth for all the work you have done to keep ActiveHistory.ca up and running!

Telephone exchange, c.1950

Climate scientist Simon Donner was quoted in Wired, lamenting the politicization of science under the recently felled Conservative government. Individuals like Donner hoped that the change in government would mean “a new beginning for science” in Canada. Important to this discussion is not only a conception of Canada’s future, but also its past. Embedded within such hopeful aspirations is the assumption that science in Canada, as well as the technological infrastructure accompanying it, was once largely unfettered by socio-political or philosophical bias, and therefore could be so once more. Yet, has science or technology ever been free from politics? This week’s theme week dedicated to “Technoscience in Canada” aims to probe just this question.

Continue reading →

The Politics of Reclaiming, Not Renaming

July 18, 2017 1 Comment

By Elliot Worsfold

Debates over “renaming” Canadian buildings, universities, and other institutions have generated significant attention in the media over the past several weeks. On National Indigenous Peoples Day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that the Langevin Block on Parliament Hill would be renamed the more perfunctory Office of the Prime Minister and the Privy Council. Trudeau cited Sir Hector-Louis Langevin’s involvement in the residential schools system as the primary reason for the building’s name change. In early July, the Ryerson Students Union and Indigenous Students Association similarly gained attention for their proposal to change the name of Ryerson University. They also cited Egerton Ryerson’s complicity in the residential schools system as the motivation to change the university’s name. That same week, a hostile confrontation between the right-wing “Proud Boys” and Indigenous activists at Halifax’s Edward Cornwallis statue on Canada Day sparked renewed calls for the statue’s removal. All these events prompted pundits to try to explain just why Canadians seem to be obsessed with the “politics of renaming.”

The critics of renaming generally cite the same list of arguments. Renaming institutions or removing statues effectively erases history. The men (for it is almost always men) commemorated in these places must be understood in the context of their time. By removing their names, you are robbing future generations of learning about their past. Why, they may even be doomed to repeat it.

These criticisms have been addressed elsewhere. My contention is that referring to this process as “renaming” or “removal” indirectly supports the aforementioned criticisms. “Renaming” implies a loss. “Removal” implies that something is being destroyed to make room for something else. Describing this process as renaming, I think, is misleading. Continue reading →

Remember / Resist / Redraw #08: When Canada Opened Fire on My Kokum Marianne with a Gatling Gun

July 14, 2017 No Comments

In January, the Graphic History Collective (GHC) launched Remember | Resist | Redraw: A Radical History Poster Project to intervene in the Canada 150 conversation.

Earlier this week we released Poster #08 by Jesse Thistle and Jerry Thistle. The poster beautifully illustrates the terror of the Battle of Batoche from the perspective of their Métis Kokum, Marianne Morrissette, née Ledoux.

We hope that Remember | Resist | Redraw encourages people to critically examine history in ways that can fuel our radical imaginations and support struggles for radical change in 2017 and beyond. Learn more about how you can support the project on our website, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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When Canada Opened Fire on My Kokum Marianne with a Gatling Gun

Poster by Jerry Thistle

Introduction by Jesse Thistle

Before 1870, the centre of Métis life was the Red River Settlement (RRS), where Winnipeg is today. Continue reading →

A Theory, in Practice: Back to the Bering Land Bridge

July 13, 2017 12 Comments

By Alan MacEachern

You have likely seen the video from Canada Day of a Mi’kmaw ceremony in Halifax disrupted by what appears to be a curling foursome and spare. At one point, one of the young white men (the skip?) asks a young, apparently Indigenous woman, what is clearly a leading question: “Has this always been Mi’kmaw land?” She replies, “Yes, it was. It has always been unceded Mi’kmaw territory.” Like a cheetah, he pounces: “What about the land bridge? Was that after the land bridge?” “The land bridge has been disproven,” she replies calmly. He’s got nothing; the conversation moves on.

I squirmed when watching that part of the video, because the Passive Aggressive Boys could easily have been students in my Canadian history survey class, where I teach about the Bering land bridge, the route by which humans are believed to have first peopled the Americas during the last ice age. Or maybe they read an Active History post I wrote last year defending the continued relevance of the bridge theory. Or maybe they’ve read the latest edition of the Canadian history textbook Origins, in which I again give the theory credence. (Who am I kidding: nobody reads the textbook.)

The trouble is that while the Bering land bridge theory remains by far the most widely-accepted theory among archaeologists and paleogeneticists of when and how Indigenous people first came to the Americas, the suggestion that the migration occurred “only” 14,500 or so years ago has been taken as evidence by the alt-right, the alt-lite, and lots of ordinary folk that Indigenous peoples have no special claim to the hemisphere. As Globe and Mail columnist Tabatha Southey memorably puts it, “To those educated primarily by the Department of Comment Thread at Dubious Site U, the mention of a land bridge is assumed to be geographic-Kryptonite to Indigenous people. One just has to say ‘land bridge’ a few times, and all land claims magically vanish like tears in rain, the theory goes. Because “LOL, everyone moved here, you see.’”

I squirmed, then, because that Proud Boy in Halifax was perverting something I teach.

But I also squirmed because the young woman got it wrong, too: the Bering land bridge theory has not been disproven. Continue reading →

Strong. Proud. Ready to do More

July 12, 2017 3 Comments

By Steve Marti

A memorial for missing and murdered Indigenous women in Halifax made headlines last week, largely because it was interrupted by a group of five men wearing matching shirts and carrying a red ensign. Smart-phone videos of the event show the five identifying themselves as members of the Proud Boys, a far-right men’s organization founded in 2016, and disrupting the memorial by asserting that Canada is a “British Colony.” Further investigation of their social media accounts revealed the group later posed for a picture while giving a white-power salute. Since being identified as members of the Royal Canadian Navy, apologies arrived quickly from the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), including a comment from Chief of Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance that the five could be facing a discharge.

There is much to unpack from this event and subsequent discussions in the media, but the public revelation that five serving sailors are active members of a confrontational far-right organization provides a stark reminder of the CAF’s troubled relationship with racism in the ranks. The Proud Boys’ decision to disrupt a memorial for missing and murdered Indigenous women resonates uncomfortably with reports of sustained discrimination faced by Indigenous personnelin the Forces, and raises questions about the work the CAF can do to mend relations between settlers and Indigenous peoples in Canada.

Members of the Ceremonial Guard, 2010. Douglas Sprott Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

The five Proud Boys’ affinity for Canada’s British heritage certainly found a comfortable home in the recently re-branded CAF. Even without the Harper government’s 2014 decision to revert to British-pattern rank insignia, the CAF remains noticeably British in its traditions and appearance. The Ceremonial Guard that parades on Parliament Hill during the summer, for example, is nearly identical in appearance to the British Guards regiments that keep watch at Buckingham Palace. The CAF undeniably traces its origin to the British Army.

Can the Forces contribute to the process of reconciliation while continuing to celebrate its imperial lineage? A solution may be found in another of Britain’s settler colonies: New Zealand. Continue reading →

(Research) notes from three small islands

July 11, 2017 1 Comment

Alban Bargain-Villéger

Lorient Tourisme – the island of Groix, France.

Geography is nothing other than history in space, and history is geography over time. Élisée Reclus, L’Homme et la terre (1905)[1]

The other day it occurred to me that, in my two and a half years as contributor for Active History, I haven’t once written about my research. The reason for this probably is that the world and the past are both busy places, which is a problem historians want to have. So far, I’ve used Active History as a platform for addressing current events, or as a “workshop” (to paraphrase François Furet[2]) for old, stillborn projects, like “History for Children?” or “Travels With Caroline.” Perhaps the reason it has taken me so long to write about my current research project is that the more one knows a topic, the more challenging it becomes to summarize it. On the other hand, writing clearly and accessibly about one’s work—without using too much jargon and engaging in complex context analyses—is an art that should be compulsive for historians.

Still, putting this post together was a protracted process. The first difficulty I faced stemmed from the nature of my work, which ranges quite a bit across space and time. My project consists of a comparison of the cultural, political, and social changes and continuities that occurred in the three islands of Arran, Borkum, and Groix—located off the coasts of Scotland, Germany, and France, respectively—between 1848 and 1945. In writing about this topic, the main questions have been “where to start?” and, of course, “who cares? Though crudely put, the latter question is legitimate. But before I explain why comparing three small islands matters, I propose to provide more details about my project.

The nineteenth century is often considered the age of nation-building, when several territorial entities (including Canada) developed elaborate narratives based on more or less invented traditions.[3] Continue reading →

History: Contemporary Poland’s Battlefield

July 10, 2017 No Comments

By Marie-Dominique Asselin
Translated from HistoireEngagée.ca by Thomas Peace

Pro-European Union Demonstration in Warsaw, 7 May 2016. Photo by Marie-Dominique Asselin.

Last April, when speaking about the war in Syria, White House Communications Director Sean Spicer made a poorly framed comparison between the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and Adolf Hitler. For Spicer, Assad’s use of chemical weapons was far worse than that conducted by the German leader because – according to the White House Press Secretary – Hitler had not turned these weapons on his own people. Assad’s actions, from Spicer’s perspective, were far worse because of the innocence of the attack’s victims. Implicit in this statement was the suggestion that the Jews murdered by the Nazi regime were not innocent and that Zyklon B – the gas used at Auschwitz-Birkenau was not a chemical weapon.[1]

At the same time, Front National presidential candidate Marine Le Pen refused to admit French responsibility for the July 1942 mass arrest of Jews in Paris, holding them in the Vélodrome d’Hiver before their transfer to German concentration camps. From Le Pen’s perspective, this event occurred while France was under German occupation, and therefore the French could not be held responsible.

Although much of the public found these examples shocking, they are increasingly being expressed within populist discourses. For some years now it has become more common to see politicians trivialize the Holocaust and attempt to reshape its history. Newspapers here and abroad have found great pleasure in calling attention to these gaffes, exposing the prejudices and ignorance of the western political class. Despite all, in North America and Western Europe, their comments rarely have an effect on national politics in the countries concerned.

In Poland, the country where the German Nazis killed most of the six million Jews, the trivialisation of the Holocaust has reached unprecedented proportions. Since its election in October 2015, the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) has adopted specific policies on the history of the Holocaust. Polish institutions, such as the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), which is controlled by the ruling political party, distort historical facts about Polish involvement in Nazi atrocities. These policies seek to influence Polish thought, fashioning a specific vision of the country’s past. PiS wishes to leave behind relatively long standing historical truths, such as Polish Catholic collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust, in favour of a myth where Poles – themselves victims of the Nazis – did all they could to save the Jews.

This essay seeks to reveal the methods the Polish government is currently using to remove Jewish experiences of the Holocaust from national memory. Three principal themes emerge. First, we look at how the legal system is being modified to censure historians and researchers who work on subjects related to the Holocaust. Second, we examine how PiS uses its control over public institutions to reframe this narrative. Finally, we look at how the Polish government displaces narratives that accord Jews a central place in the history of the Holocaust, and instead put the emphasis on the role of Polish Catholic heroes in saving Jews from Nazi atrocities. Though seemingly separate, when taken together, these three themes reflect the political outlook and agenda of the PiS. Continue reading →

Remember / Resist / Redraw #07: John A. Macdonald’s Role in Residential Schooling

July 7, 2017 No Comments

In January, the Graphic History Collective (GHC) launched Remember | Resist | Redraw: A Radical History Poster Project to intervene in the Canada 150 conversation.

Earlier this month we released Poster #07 by Sean Carleton and Crystal Gail Fraser, which was published on Canada Day in conjunction with Idle No More’s Unsettling Canada: a Call to Action. The poster examines John A. Macdonald’s role as the architect of Indian Residential Schools and Indigenous genocide. While the poster was completed months ago, it answers Matthew Hayday’s recent Active History post in which he questions whether Sir Hector-Louis Langevin was really the architect of residential schools.

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Killing the Indian in the Child: John A. Macdonald’s Role in Residential Schooling

Poster by Sean Carleton

Introduction by Crystal Gail Fraser Continue reading →

Why so dull Canada? Deconstructing Children’s Books on Confederation

July 6, 2017 2 Comments

By Samantha Cutrara

The final blog post in the series of deconstructing children’s books representing the historic space of pre- and post-1867 is on Confederation itself: What books are available for children on Confederation? Do these books connect with other events that happened at this time, like the themes addressed earlier in this series: residential schools, the fight for women’s rights, or the importation of labour for the railroad?

What does the history of Confederation as told through books for children tell us about the meta-narratives that many people hold about the “birth” of Canada?

Like my previous research, I began with a library search, and unsurprisingly, Confederation was easy to find. I didn’t have to be creative about my search criteria or word choice. I typed in “Confederation,” specified books for children and youth, and waited to see what came up. This search easily produced 26 results, 20 of which were actually books on Canadian Confederation. Like books I found on the railway, these books were often part of a series of books and had some very creative titles, such as Confederation, Confederation, Confederation, and Confederation. Continue reading →

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