Active History

“Manna From Heaven” – A YMCA Physical Director at Valcartier and Salisbury Plain

July 19, 2016 Comments Off

By Robert Alldritt

Before he was a prisoner of war in Germany (a story explored in an earlier article), Sergeant William A. Alldritt served as a machine gunner with the 8th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF). However, as documented in many of the letters he sent home and in letters written by his colleagues and fellow soldiers, he also used his experience as a pre-war YMCA Physical Director to contribute to the formation and training of his fellow soldiers at training camps in Valcartier and Salisbury Plain.

The symbol of the Young Men’s Christian Association, as it looked in the early 20th century. (This image is public domain. All other images in the post are from material in the author’s possession, unless otherwise credited.)

Since it was introduced to Canada in 1851, the goal of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) was to provide boys and young men with healthy activities and sport, intended to improve their spiritual and moral condition. This philosophy was represented by the three sides of its triangle logo, signifying spirit, mind and body.

In 1906, the YMCA began to establish offices in Western Canada in partnership with the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) to support the growing network of railway workers stationed in remote locations across the country. By 1909, Alldritt was employed in one of the first of these offices in Revelstoke, B.C. The partnership with the CPR was considered to be a success when a visiting railway official declared “the YMCA made lambs out of the wild men of Revelstoke.”[i]

Alldritt 9 - Wheeler_Selkirk Mountains_orig_p38

Notice of Alldritt’s ascent on the South Albert Peak.

While in Revelstoke, Alldritt joined the Alpine Club of Canada, an amateur athletic association focused on mountaineering. On September 7, 1909, he completed one of the first ascents of South Albert Peak, as documented by club President, Arthur O. Wheeler,[ii] one of the highest peaks in British Columbia.

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Acknowledging the Land and the People: A Practice for all Canadian Historians

July 18, 2016 1 Comment

By Thomas Peace

Pour assurer notre existence, il faut nous cramponner à la terre, et léguer à nos enfants la langue de nos ancetres et la propriété du sol [1]

Statue of George-Etienne Cartier in Parc Montmorency (Quebec City)

These words captivated my attention a few months ago as I walked across Parc Montmorency, the site of the old parliament buildings in Quebec City. They are found on the footing of a statue of George-Etienne Cartier, one of the better known politicians involved in crafting the British North America Act. What a succinct summary of Confederation, I thought: “In order to assure our existence, we must grasp onto the Land and leave for our children the language of our ancestors and ownership of the soil.”

The words struck a chord, I think, because I was in the park to eat my lunch and read a bit of Thomas King’s The Truth about Stories, the book Huron has chosen for this year’s first year common reading program. Repeatedly, in returning to the phrase: “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are,” King challenges his audience to think about how we situate ourselves in the world and the stories we use to construct it. The story invoked by this inscription is one of a national beginning. It can be read in at least two ways that both help us understand our present moment as well as point us towards areas where our practice as historians may need to change. Continue reading →

Vimy Ridge and Canadian Nationalism

July 15, 2016 1 Comment

By Walter Klaassen

Several weeks ago the CBC National News offered a film clip of the President of France, Francois Hollande, and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel standing together at the site commemorating the 1916 Battle of Verdun. It has been called the biggest battle in history. It lasted for 300 days and resulted in 300,000 French and German dead. It was called a French victory because the Germans did not achieve the breakthrough they had intended to make. The commemoration was not a celebration of victory. As the modern representatives of the belligerents of a century ago met, Chancellor Merkel said that President Hollande’s invitation to the event was a great honour. In his address the President said that now Verdun is a capital of peace, but also that “Verdun is a city that represents – at the same time – the worst, where Europe got lost.” A French soldier wrote at the time: “People will read that the front line was Hell. How can people begin to know what that one word – Hell – means? Hell cannot be so terrible as this [battle]. Humanity is mad: it must be mad to do what it is doing.” After a century the battle zone is still forbidden territory for housing and farming because of unexploded shells. Available on the web are moving photographs of the two national leaders of those enemies of a century ago stretching their hands over a memorial wreath in sorrow and regret. The visitors’ centre focuses on educating French and German youth about the horrors and consequences of war.

For several years now, in April, the media have been reminding us of the Battle of Vimy Ridge which, Prime Minister Trudeau said, “was the moment that defined our nation.” In April of this year (2016) there was a commemoration event at Canada’s War Museum at which Canadian and French flags were flown. There will be many more like it, culminating in a huge commemoration next April at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France, on the site of the battle. The gathering is expected to be the largest since the monument was erected in 1936. A recent poll suggested that the anniversary of the battle will be one of the most important celebrations during Canada’s 150^th anniversary. We are also promised a 20$ bill with a Vimy Ridge theme. Continue reading →

The Distance We Have Traveled: Practicing History in the Twenty-First Century

July 14, 2016 1 Comment

By Andrew Nurse

Practicing History in the 21st Century. (Image designed by Tom Peace)

To argue that there have been improvements in the practice of history is almost a-historical, at least heuristically. After all, claims of progress are a sign of Whig historiography and something we are supposed to avoid. And, yet, after leaving the Practicing History in the 21st Century Symposium, the idea that progress had actually been made was hard – for me at least – to shake.

There are several reasons I felt this way, but I should begin by saying that Practicing History in the Twenty-First Century was a symposium organized to honour John Reid, the noted Saint Mary’s University historians. I should also say “mea culpa” because I was one of the organizers, along with Tom Peace, Peter Twohig, Elizabeth Mancke, Jeffers Lennox, and Jerry Bannister. As organizers we wanted to do more than honour John. We wanted to craft an event that took up the ideas with which he had worked and looked forward, building on ideas that have emerged in regional, colonialism, and Canadian history over the last generation.

The symposium featured panels that looked at public history, the shifting (or, not shifting) spatial organization of Atlantic regional history, relationships between historians and other communities, historical collaboration, and the audiences to which historians speak. Continue reading →

Visualizing the Past: Mapping, GIS, and Teaching Historical Consciousness

July 13, 2016 1 Comment

By Sasha Mullally and Siobhan Hanratty

In defining the new field of spatial history, Richard White makes the case that mapping can be more than a corollary to a historical narrative, it “is a means of doing research; it generates questions that might otherwise go unasked, it reveals historical relations that might otherwise go unnoticed, and it undermines, or substantiates, stories upon which we build our own versions of the past.” Over the winter and spring of 2014, we taught a digital history course to honours and graduate history students at the University of New Brunswick that built upon these ideas. Designed from a theoretical perspective, the course traced the evolving relationship between digital history, mapping and map-making. In so doing, the course asked students to reconsider their own research in light of the “spatial turn,” and explore/evaluate the tools of historical geographic information systems (H-GIS). Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Eighty-Eight: Translation and Canadian Theatre

July 13, 2016 2 Comments

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By Sean Graham

Nicole Nolette Remember Bon Cop, Bad Cop? It was that movie set between Ontario and Quebec where the characters spoke French half the time and English half the time. During the French sequences, English subtitles would adorn the bottom of the screen and vice versa. The movie has earned a bit of a cult following and is held up as this beautiful example of the complexity of Canada’s linguistic history. Whenever I have taught courses on the history of popular culture, invariably the movie comes up.

One of the more interesting issues the film raises is the nature of the translation. Anyone who has ever used Google Translate knows how much meaning gets lost when things are translated literally word for word (like this). Because of this, the way in which we translate between languages is very important, particularly when the meaning can be easily misconstrued.

In this episode of the History Slam I talk with Nicole Nolette, author of Jouer la traduction: Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canada francophone, winner of the 2016 Ann Saddlemyer Award for as the best book on Canadian theatre. We talk about translating for theatre, the challenge of overcoming regional dialects, and the nature of bilingualism in Canada.

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Join the Confederation Debate Today!

July 12, 2016 2 Comments

This is the second of two posts responding to “Debating the Confederation Debates of 1865” a two-week series we ran in partnership with Canada Watch.

By Daniel Heidt

As the countdown to our country’s 150^th anniversary begins, Canadians are hungry for information about their country’s past and contemplating its future. The Confederation Debates – an online and largely crowd sourced initiative – will bring the records of the Numbered Treaties (1871-1921) as well as the colonial and federal legislative debates that preceded each province’s entry into Confederation between 1865 and 1949, into the public discussion while also making them accessible to future generations. Since it is a largely crowd sourced project, anyone can contribute to the work and discussion!

The Confederation Debates posted its first “Quote of the Day” to social media on 1 July 2016. We will continue posting content from all stakeholders in both official languages for the next year. Anyone can log onto our website (click the image to visit the site), transcribe a page, and flag some text for these posts.

As the past two weeks of Confederation-focused essays demonstrate, Canadians will bring diverse backgrounds and conflicting perspectives to what promises to be important, and at time heated, public and private discussions. Popular imagination, and Robert Harris’ group portrait of Canada’s ‘founders,’ limits Confederation to the1860s. Even if we expand the so-called ‘Confederation years’ to encompass the entry of BC, Manitoba, and PEI by 1873, we still ignore Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and the territories. This latter date also misses nearly all of the Numbered Treaties between Indigenous Peoples and the Canadian state between 1871 and 1921. The records for a few of the provinces’ Confederation discussions are online, but they are often difficult to find, buried in thousands of pages of unrelated debates, or require a subscription to access. Other colonial debates are only accessible in archives. The Numbered Treaty records suffer from the same access issues. Continue reading →

Looking at 1867 from 1967 and 2017

July 11, 2016 6 Comments

This is the first of two posts responding to “Debating the Confederation Debates of 1865” a two-week series we ran in partnership with Canada Watch.

By Christopher Moore

During the constitutional wrangles of the 1980s that became known as “Meech Lake,” one of the premiers supposedly remarked that the fathers of confederation were fine men for their time but didn’t know much about telecommunications or the environment. Whatever expertise the first ministers of the 1980s may have had about telco and enviro policy, however, they eventually proved themselves far less successful than the original confederation-makers in the more significant skill of actually drafting and getting ratified a constitution that might last a century and a half.

I have known and admired for years several of the authors whose essays I have been asked to comment on for this collection. All the authors have made valuable contributions to historical knowledge of Canada. But when I read these essays, I heard again that premier. Continue reading →

The Robert Harris group portrait

July 10, 2016 1 Comment

This is the fourteenth post in a two week series in partnership with Canada Watch on the Confederation Debates

By Ged Martin

The founding, in 1880, of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts no doubt represented a landmark in recognition and encouragement of the visual arts in the Dominion. Unfortunately, it was not easy to advance its cultural agenda, especially the central aim of creating a National Gallery. A cramped room on Ottawa’s Bank Street was designated as the Gallery’s first home in May 1882, and it may be that the idea of acquiring a large picture of national import was attractive as a means of forcing the issue of a permanent location. In April 1883, the Academy’s president, Lucius R. O’Brien, submitted a wordy memorandum to the government calling for artistic commemoration of “the meeting of the Conference at which the foundation was laid for the Confederation of the Provinces constituting the Dominion of Canada.” O’Brien did not specify which conference he had in mind, and the project began as a tribute to the meeting in Charlottetown. However, wherever it happened, O’Brien argued that it was “an event of such importance in the annals of the country” that a monumental canvas was required to keep alive the memory of the participants. O’Brien added two further points. One was a hurry-up reminder that the delegates were already dying off. The other was that Robert Harris, “a Canadian artist of ability,” had recently returned from Europe and was “fully competent to paint such a picture.”[1]

Sir John A. Macdonald’s Cabinet was apparently uncertain about how to respond to O’Brien’s plea. Continue reading →

Using history to justify Confederation

July 9, 2016 1 Comment

This is the thirteenth post in a two week series in partnership with Canada Watch on the Confederation Debates

By Marlene Shore

History was frequently invoked in the Confederation debates by both pro-confederates and anti-confederates to justify their positions. All parties realized that they were at a pivotal juncture, when a new set of constitutional arrangements would alter the destinies of the new country’s inhabitants, even though it was politically expedient for some to downplay the prospect of change. Speakers recognized that the American Civil War and the processes of state formation in Italy and Germany constituted part of the context, but in placing the Confederation process within a larger historical narrative, most politicians did not delve very far into the past. There might have been allusions to Shakespeare and the Bible, but members generally focused on how recent concerns — the clergy reserves or political deadlock — provided a justification for Confederation. Apart from George Brown, who articulated the Confederation pact as a key historic moment, the legislative debates reflect an attitude that Confederation would come about in a sequential process responsive to circumstances.

History As Progress

Members of the Legislative Council and Legislative Assembly held a typically 19th-century view of history as the unfolding of progress. Continue reading →

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