Active History

History Slam Episode Eighty-Seven: Enron

June 23, 2016 2 Comments

By Sean Graham

enron A couple of years ago, the National Arts Centre produced Enron, a show that documented one of the most infamous corporate bankruptcies in recent memory. While I don’t remember much of the plot, I do remember that it was about 45 minutes too long and that there was some really weird symbolism with actors wearing dinosaur heads. Overall, I wasn’t a big fan of the production, but some in the crowd gave it a standing ovation – a reaction I attributed to the show being a rather scathing indictment of Enron and its leadership.

Like all dramatizations, though, Enron certainly took some creative liberties (I’m fairly confident there weren’t any dinosaurs at the actual company) and the real story is much more nuanced. What started as an energy company slowly expanded to include derivatives and other complex financial products. Of course, there was some actual fraud going on, but there were also some ideas that, at the time, seemed innovative and unique. Through the 1990s, Enron’s model was taught in a lot of business schools as a pinnacle of modern business practices. That was until the fall of 2001, when everything came crashing down.

In this episode of the History Slam I talk with Gavin Benke of Boston University about his research on Enron. We chat about the company’s origins, how an energy company got involved in complex financial management, and Enron’s relationship with 1990s culture. We also talk about how 9/11 influenced public perception of the company and George W. Bush’s place in the story.

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In Conversation: Teaching and Learning Canada’s First World War

June 21, 2016 2 Comments

By Sarah Glassford and Ruby Madigan

Preamble

During the winter 2014 semester, we (the authors) experienced HIST 309A “Canada and the First World War” from opposite sides of the teaching-and-learning equation. Sarah was teaching the course, offered by the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) Department of History, while Ruby was a student taking the course as an elective.

We came at the course from very different angles: Sarah pursued a traditional “straight-through” path from high school through undergraduate and graduate education to the professoriate; Ruby followed a more circuitous route, returning to university as a mature student. Sarah was a single working woman; Ruby was a wife and mother of a young child, attending school full-time. Sarah was a Canadian citizen teaching Canadian history she had learned within Canada; Ruby was an American citizen, now encountering the Canadian version of the First World War for the first time.

We talked outside of class about many things, including the fact that we were uniquely positioned to think together about what it means to teach and learn the history of Canada’s First World War in the early twenty-first century. This post is the product of several conversations and a more formal Q&A email exchange over the two years since the class ended. We draw no broad conclusions, but hope to spark further conversations about what and how we teach, and how that teaching is received and experienced by students.

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Slow Scholarship as Political Action: The Culture of Speed and the Challenge of Inclusion within the Academy

June 20, 2016 3 Comments

By Beth A. Robertson

It is June, when it might be presumed that the business of academic life is winding down as students, faculty and staff ready themselves for summer vacation. This is simply not the case, however. I write this piece in between meetings, grant applications, research, writing commitments, and numerous looming deadlines. And I am by no means the only one, if only judging from my twitter feed.

“Busy Academics” Twitter Feed (June 2016)

Although this could all be chalked up to the nature of scholarly life, the speed within which many historians and other academics work may not be so innocuous. By recognizing this, I am by no means articulating a new idea.

In late May, Sean Graham interviewed one of the people who are helping raise concerns about this trend towards speed during episode 85 of ActiveHistory’s History Slam Podcast. Alison Mountz is one of a growing number of academics who are beginning to argue for “slow scholarship”. In a 2015 article, Mountz and eleven other co-authors discuss the “acceleration of time in which we are expected to do more and more.”[1] Whether it be publishing, teaching, grant writing, administration or simply the pressure “to stay on constant alert through demands of social media,” academic life is increasingly being shaped by a mounting number of tasks through which we are deemed productive, or not. This, the authors argue is “part of the ongoing restructuring of the neoliberal university,” that includes “reduced state funding, increased contingent labour and the elimination of programs,” – a phenomena which others have also written of both within and beyond academia.[2] Continue reading →

The (im)possibility of raceless equality: blacks as workers and thieves in the Big Hole experience

June 16, 2016 No Comments

By Rachel Hatcher

[This is the third post in the Learning and unlearning history in South Africa’s public spaces series.]

South Africa and its universities have been working for over two decades to eliminate racism from their midst and become metaphoric rainbows of inclusion and equality. This project faces serious challenges from various quarters, some unexpected.

Briefly imagine, if you will, growing up in a conservative Afrikaner family and community. Though apartheid had ended a dozen years before, you encounter few black South Africans in your daily existence. There are no black students or teachers at the Afrikaans school you attend, just as there are no black congregants or priests in the Dutch Reformed Church which has such an important impact on how you see the world. You have no black neighbours in the gated, suburban community you live in. Those blacks who do appear in your life have peripheral, and subordinate, roles—they clean your house and tend your mother’s garden. Outside the home, they perform similar functions. You have never been explicitly told blacks are inferior or can and should only have a secondary place in society, but nor have you ever been told blacks are equal.

Now imagine entering university, even a traditionally conservative and Afrikaner one like the University of Pretoria (UP), and suddenly being confronted with the reality that blacks are, in fact, your equals. Indeed, they might even be in positions of power over you and be able to control your future. The experience, according to then Dean of Education at UP, Jonathan Jansen, is jarring, to say the least. In his auto-biographical work, Knowledge in the blood: Confronting race and the apartheid past, Jansen credits this kind of culture shock, and the normalization of blacks as subordinate that lies behind it, as being at the root of South Africa’s and South African universities’ difficult journey toward “transformation,” a journey punctuated by physically and non-physically violent incidents of racial (i.e., anti-black) hatred. Continue reading →

Reports from New Directions in Active History: Digitising Childhood Evacuation: A Serendipitous Pursuit of Active History

June 15, 2016 3 Comments

By Claire L. Halstead

As historians, we are increasingly under pressure to make our research “active” and relate to a public audience. This spurs us to discover new methods of engagement and innovative ways to present our findings. The digital revolution or “turn” has encouraged historians not only to use sources available online, but also to adopt digital tools and methods to analyse traditional sources and, in some cases, create entirely new digital sources for research. Using digital methods allows us to extract more from our sources, while increasing the potential of appealing to and engaging with the wider public. Using the study of the evacuation of British children to Canada in the Second World War as an example, this post is intended to be a source of encouragement; while digital history can appear daunting, the rewards can far outweigh the costs.

The Roots of Evacuation Continue reading →

‘It Might Have Been Us’: 70 Years since the Windsor to Tecumseh Tornado

June 14, 2016 1 Comment

By Katrina Ackerman

Windsor Star Photo, c.1946

At the age of ten, my father, two sisters, and I were driving through Alberta when a tornado struck. We were traveling from Trail, British Columbia to Saskatchewan for a relative’s wedding when a storm materialized in High River, a few hours from our hotel. We saw the aftermath of the storm on the news from the safety of our hotel, and the memory of that moment remains imprinted on my mind.^[1] This experience led to a much longer fascination of mine with tornadoes — an interest that is not unique. As Kevin Rozario argues in The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America, “Spectacles of calamity command our attention because they present an occasion for processing, intellectually and emotionally, the experience of living in a world of systematic ruin and renewal, destruction and reconstruction, where technological and environmental disasters always loom.” I’ve witnessed several severe storms across Canada since that first childhood encounter, but nothing to the effect of the devastating storm that touched down in the borderland region of Detroit-Windsor seventy years ago. Continue reading →

Election 2016: Super delegates in historical perspective

June 13, 2016 1 Comment

Oscar Winberg

US Capitol. Martin Falbisoner, Wikipedia Commons

One of the more common complaints about this year’s U.S. presidential nominating race has been that the process is “undemocratic.” While it has been made vocally by Donald Trump on the Republican side, it is most often made by Bernie Sanders supporters and is especially aimed at the so-called “super delegates” of the Democratic Party. After the Associated Press declared Hillary Clinton the presumptive nominee a day before the decisive primaries in California and New Jersey, the talk about a “rigged” process again surfaced. The complaints of an undemocratic nomination process are diverse, yet share the basic premise that unpledged delegates are seen as a modern equivalent of the notorious smoke-filled rooms of conventions past, undemocratically concentrating power to “party elites” over the will of the people. Historically, however, this premise is not only complicated but false. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Eighty-Six: Remaking the Rust Belt

June 8, 2016 1 Comment

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By Sean Graham

Remaking the Rust Belt When I first arrived at Harvard University in August, I was introduced to the person with whom I would be sharing an office. An assistant professor at Wayne State University, Tracy Neumann has served as the other William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow in the Canada Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University for the 2015-2016 academic year.

An urban historian, Tracy’s new book Remaking the Rust Belt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America, which just came out, explores urban development (or redevelopment) in the steel towns of Pittsburgh and Hamilton. Through a transnational examination, she is able to explore how concepts and strategies of urban renewal varied between these cities and how, in both cases, these processes operated within a transatlantic framework.

In this episode of the History Slam I talk with friend-of-the-show-Tracy-Neumann. We talk about the Canada Program at Harvard, industrial redevelopment in Pittsburgh and Hamilton, and some of the major differences between Canada and the United States.

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“Deeply regret to inform you”: War and Loss in the Trapp Family

June 7, 2016 2 Comments

By Mike Bechthold

The loss of a loved one during the First World War was often conveyed by a telegram beginning with the life-altering preamble, “Deeply regret to inform you….” This simple piece of paper heralded the deaths of sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers leaving families to pick up the pieces. Rudyard Kipling, writing of the loss of his son Jack, who was killed on the Western Front in September 1915, captured the sentiments of parents everywhere:

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,…[1]

The Trapp family of New Westminster, British Columbia knew the feeling of loss better than most. Four Trapp sons went off to the First World War and only one returned. Such terrible loss speaks to us when we look back at the war, but we should not give Kipling the last word. In some cases comfort could be found, and for the Trapp family it came from Raymond Collishaw, one of the great aces over the Western Front, and a fellow British Columbian.

Raymond Collishaw, 1918. All images from the Raymond Collishaw Fonds, Library and Archives Canada, MG 30-E280, R2492-0-5-E.

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Shuttering Archives: A UNESCO Recognized Collection to Close its Doors to the Public

June 6, 2016 2 Comments

Thomas Peace

Le Séminaire du Québec

Last month I spent two weeks working in one of my favourite archives: Le Centre de référence de l’Amérique francophone. This archive – run by Quebec’s Museum of Civilization – is one of the oldest in the country, not only holding the records of the Quebec Seminary (which begin in 1623), but also many important documents related to New France and the early relationship between the diverse peoples of northeastern North America, the French Empire and the Catholic church. The archive holds unique Indigenous language documents and is critical for anyone interested in understanding Canada’s early history. With the Centre located in the seminary buildings themselves, the archive remains more or less in situ since the French regime (bearing in mind that the complex has expanded considerably over the intervening centuries). It is these qualities that led to the collection’s 2007 registration in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program; a recognition closely linked to Quebec City’s own place on UNESCO’s World Heritage list.

Letters patents of the king for the establishment of the Séminaire de Québec, 1663

It came as a shock then that upon my arrival at the Centre in early May I learned from the reference archivist that this might be my final visit to this important archival collection. On 23 June this archive is scheduled to close for an indefinite amount of time as the Museum of Civilization struggles to meet its budgetary needs. Continue reading →

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