Active History

Film: Mary Ann Shadd Revisited: Echoes from an Old House

March 8, 2016 3 Comments

This film, by Allison Margot Smith, is about a collection of letters to and from African American abolitionist Mary Ann Shadd between 1851 and 1863 – years that she lived in Canada. The letters were left in her house near Chatham Ontario when she returned to the U.S.A. and were eventually forgotten. They were accidentally rediscovered in 1974 by the then owners of her house, when they had the house torn down, just before the rubble was burned. When offered, the letters were accepted by Archives of Ontario for preservation. The premise of Smith’s film is that, had the letters been found before the 1960s, they might not have been offered to, or accepted by the Archives. She argues that it was the emergence in the 1960s of ideas about Social History, the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement that led the owners of the letters and the Archives to realize their importance.

The telling of the story of Mary Ann Shadd’s letters on film presented challenges for Smith both as a historian and a filmmaker. She wanted her research to be thorough while ensuring that the messages were well presented in a film medium. The research was complicated by the fact that the letters had two histories – one 19^th– and the other 20^th-century. These histories unfolded in what she came to understand as a complex borderland. In the making of the film Smith wanted to both challenge her audience while at the same time keeping them interested, emotionally engaged, and aesthetically pleased. Click here to read a deeper reflection on Smith’s influences, experiences, challenges in making this film.

Allison Smith is a recent graduate from Carleton University’s Master of Public History program where her research centred on Canadian history, and in particular, Black history in Canada. During her undergraduate and master’s work she was the recipient of numerous academic awards, including a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Scholarship, Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS), the Don Wilton Campbell Scholarship, the Lester B Pearson Scholarship, and a Senate Medal for Outstanding Academic Achievement. She now combines her recent academic work in history with her earlier academic and work experience in computer science to produce public history products of a technological nature. She has produced two historical documentary films on Black history in Canada, several online exhibit websites on historical topics, and 3D digital images of museum artifacts.

Virtual Spaces, Contested Histories: A Retrospective of a One-Day Symposium on “Envisioning Technologies”

March 7, 2016 4 Comments

By Roy Hanes and Beth A. Robertson

Technological advances have historically been integral to creating inclusive spaces of learning, whether in schools, universities or public libraries, especially as the discourse has shifted from one of ‘charity’ to a human right. Yet how does one tell that story in an online format that is similarly inclusive and accessible? On Thursday, March 3, 2016, Carleton University’s Disability Research Group hosted a symposium to launch and gain feedback on a virtual exhibit intended for just that purpose entitled Envisioning Technologies: Historical Insights into Educational Technologies for Persons who are Blind or Partially Sighted in Canada Since 1892. [1] The event brought together community members who were blind or partially sighted, scholars, librarians, students, archivists and curators to engage with the exhibit and ultimately help the Disabilities Research Group refine and expand the project.

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Simulating History: The Use of Historical and Political Simulations in the History Classroom

March 5, 2016 No Comments

Active History is proud to present a video each week from New Directions in Active History. The conference took place at Huron University College on October 2-4, 2015 and brought together scholars, students, professionals and community members to discuss a wide range of topics pertaining to active history.

In this week’s video, we continue the discussion on active and engaged learning in public school classrooms. Brent Pavey, Head of History at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, shares his vision of how to engage students in political and historical debates. He explains numerous simulations which he has implemented in the classroom from mock UN Security Council meetings to Confederation debates. Pavey explains that the goal of these projects is to “engage students so they can imagine fulfilling the shoes of political and historical figures.” He hopes that these types of projects not only allow students to learn the material in an interesting way, but also introduce students to historical debates with which Canada continues to grapple. Pavey also offers advice to educators about outcomes that are either unrealistic or historically inaccurate. He urges educators that debriefing with students is important because during reflection, learning will often occur.

History Slam Episode Seventy-Nine: Open Access

March 4, 2016 2 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

Open Access There are certain universal experiences that go along with being involved in academics, one of which is explaining the publishing model of academic journals. This is particularly difficult for grad students, who, upon their first publication, are confronted by family members wondering how much they got paid. It’s a well meaning question, but it’s a bit of a downer to have to explain how academic publishing works and that, as today’s guest aptly puts it, it’s a gift culture. The work is done in the pursuit of knowledge with the primary goal not being monetary gain, but rather having the information available for public consumption.

Recently, that final point has increasingly been scrutinized by the Open Access movement, which is explored by Peter Suber in this openly accessible book. More and more scholars are moving away from journals with paid subscriptions in favour of open access publications. Sometimes that’s not possible, however, which is why some institutions are requiring their faculty to put copies of their publications in open access repositories in their libraries.

At Harvard University the push towards open access has been led by the Office for Scholarly Communication, which has been able to get each school to agree to participate in its open access repository. Through Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH), publications by Harvard faculty are freely available to anyone. The site has been quite successful since its launch, recently surpassing 7 million downloads. They also maintain an Open Access Directory, which includes listings of open access materials and different funding models for open access journals.
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Investment for Development: The Plodding History of Canadian Development Finance

March 3, 2016 1 Comment

(Active History is pleased to present today’s post in partnership with aidhistory.ca)

Jill Campbell-Miller

Diefenbaker at the Prime Minister’s Commonwealth Conference in 1960. Diefenbaker was anxious to develop economic connections with the Commonwealth, but few opportunities to do so existed outside of joint aid initiatives. Wikimedia Commons.

In the area of development finance Canada has lagged behind its international partners in the G7, only promising to establish a development finance institution (DFI) in the 2015 budget, some 67 years after the UK established the first DFI. This might come as surprise, since blending the interests of domestic Canadian businesses and official development assistance (ODA) has been an objective of the Canadian government since the early days of aid-giving in the 1950s, to the delight of some, and the dismay of others.

The apparent Canadian disinterest in the potential of development finance goes back to 1958. Continue reading →

The Ninth Floor: Finding Black Power in Montreal

March 2, 2016 3 Comments

By Camille Robert
Translated by Thomas Peace

This review originally appeared in French on Artichaut magazine and HistoireEngagee.ca

Kennedy Frederick speaking at student assembly at Sir George Williams. (From NFB Interview with Welwyn Jacob, click for link)

Kennedy Frederick speaking at student assembly at Sir George Williams. (Photo from NFB interview with producer Selwyn Jacob, click for link)

In many way, the image of Montreal in the 1960s is defined by the 1967 World’s Fair. Often celebrated as one of the key moments in the Quiet Revolution, official imagery of the city situated it as a centre-point in a modernized and globalized world. This rosy summertime image, however, is snowed over when we consider Montreal’s immigrant population and their direct relationships to the colonial processes that underlay Expo ’67.

This is the subject of Mina Shum’s The Ninth Floor. Focusing on the key leaders in the “Sir George Williams Affair,” Shum’s film argues that while Expo ’67 might have been a pivotal moment warmly caressing the city’s official self-image, the occupation of the ninth floor of the Henry F. Hall building at Sir George Williams University (today Concordia University) exposed a colder reality, marking an important moment in the history of Montreal’s Black Power movement. Continue reading →

Virtual Histories of Disability and Assistive Devices

March 1, 2016 5 Comments

Introduction to the Exhibit by Dominique Marshall on behalf of Carleton University’s Disabilities Research Group

Machines of the past hold many of the secrets for designers of future technologies. This is why in the 1960s, a mechanic from Gatineau with 2% vision, personally collected precious old Braille printing machines. Roland Galarneau laboured in his basement for over a decade, in a workshop of his own extraordinary making, to train himself in mechanical work in the short term, with the ambition of revolutionizing reading for students who were blind in the longer term. Many inventions and a quarter of century later, with the support of individuals, public institutions and private enterprises, Galarneau came up with an automated convertor of text into braille which would be sold worldwide.[1] He later donated his antiques to the Canadian Science and Technology Museum (CSTM) in Ottawa, including the first prototype of the “Converto-Braille”, a teleprinter Galarneau made in part with telephone relays procured by his colleagues working at nearby Bell Canada and Northern Electric.[2]

Galarneau’s inventions and others will be included within Envisioning Technologies, a virtual exhibit in the making that is dedicated to telling the stories of both users and innovators who have influenced and helped shape educational technologies for persons who are blind or partially sighted in Canada, from the nineteenth-century to the present. This latest Active History exhibit will provide a preview of some of the objects and stories that will comprise Envisioning Technologies, with the hopes of extending the conversation to a wider community of historians and the public before the official launch of the website in the spring. Continue reading →

Marjorie Stinson, the Flying Schoolmarm

February 29, 2016 2 Comments

By Liz Millward

On December 4, 1915 Joseph Gorman of Ottawa graduated from the Stinson Flying School at San Antonio, Texas, and returned to Canada in order to sign up with the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). He was the first graduate for twenty-one year-old Marjorie Stinson, the instructor who taught him to fly in the record time of two weeks (totalling about four hours of flying time). Some years later Stinson reflected that “perhaps I might never have begun teaching men to fly had it not been for a group of youngsters who feared the war would be over before they could get into a fight.”[1] Unable to get sufficient hours in at the Wright Flying School at Dayton, Ohio, Gorman and three other Canadian men wired Stinson “asking if I would take them on. I wired back a ‘yes’ and down they came before I was quite ready for them.”[2] Stinson’s story, which will make an appearance at the War in the Air exhibition curated by John Maker at the Canadian War Museum in 2016, provides a fascinating glimpse into the excitement and sense of possibility generated by the confused scramble of wartime regulators to make sense of new technologies.

CFWW Millward - Katherine Stinson and her Curtiss aeroplane - small

Katherine Stinson (sister of Marjorie) and her Curtiss airplane. Wikipedia

Together with her sister Katherine and brothers Edward and Jack, Stinson was a member of what came to be described in the press as the “Flying Family.” Katherine was the first member of this family who learned to fly, in 1912 under the tutelage of Max Lille. In May 1913 she incorporated the “Stinson Aviation Company” to manufacture aeroplanes, with capital stock of $10,000, herself as president and her mother, Emma B. Stinson, as secretary and treasurer. Within a month Katherine had bought a Wright model “B” biplane to develop her flying skills and the company began to grow.[3] The following year Marjorie asked her mother for $450 and travelled by train to take lessons at the Wright School. After 4.5 hours in the air she earned her Aero Club of America Pilot’s Certificate No. 303 (dated August 12, 1914), performed some exhibition flights, and then became the main flying instructor at the new branch of the family business, the Stinson School of Flying. Her first graduate was Gorman, who gained Certificate No. 371. That only 67 other people (all men) had earned their licences between Stinson and Gorman gives a sense of how much aviation at the time operated on the principle of the newly minted pilot teaching the next one in line how to fly. Marjorie also taught both of her brothers: Edward in December 1915 and Jack in January 1916.

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The Digital Historian Project

February 27, 2016 No Comments

In this week’s video, Neil Orford, a history teacher in the Upper Grand District School Board, discusses a program he designed and implemented called the Digital Historian Project. The Digital Historian Project attempts to tie together history and math through a blended learning environment. In this video Neil outlines his motivations as well as the program’s core vision. He also discusses the challenges faced in running this program, and how integrating an “outside the box” historical and mathematical outlook creates a positive learning environment in which most of the participants will thrive. Using an online database, the program is taught at the local museum in Dufferin County, emphasizing the necessary relationship he has built with his municipality and local museum. This innovative approach to teaching history has garnered support from international organizations. His students were selected to be youth representatives at the 71st D-Day Memorial service in Normandy. Through this program, Neil has hoped to offer history and math in a richer and more involved environment in order to stimulate self-driven interest in history.

Activehistory.ca repost – “When People Eat Chocolate, They Are Eating My Flesh”: Slavery and the Dark Side of Chocolate

February 26, 2016 1 Comment

As part of Black History Month every Friday in February we’re featuring some of our most popular posts and podcasts on Black History.

The following post was originally featured on June 30, 2010

By Karlee Sapoznik

Whether it’s a Mars, Cadbury, Hershey, Nestle or Snickers chocolate bar, most of us relish biting into one of life’s most tasty, cheap indulgences: chocolate.

While the cocoa industry has profited from the use of forced labour in West Africa since the early nineteenth century, over the past decade more and more alarming reports of child slavery in the cocoa industry have come to the fore. Amadou, previously one of the over 200,000 estimated children to be enslaved in cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast alone, told Free the Slaves that “When people eat chocolate, they are eating my flesh.”

The Ivory Coast produces roughly half of the world’s cocoa today. In his recent documentary, entitled The Dark Side of Chocolate , Danish journalist Miki Mistrati seeks to answer the following question: “Is the chocolate we eat produced with the use of child labor and trafficked children?”

In effect, the question is really not whether the chocolate we eat is produced using child labour or trafficked children. Rather, it is twofold: where exactly is this happening and in what numbers? Further, how do we take further measures

Drissa’s scars from being beat after trying to escape

beyond what is already being done under the law, by the International Cocoa Initiative, the chocolate companies, local law enforcement, activists, the general public and grass roots organizations to truly end this?

The link between slavery and commodities is certainly not new. In the late eighteenth century, the British, like many other countries, directly profited from the slave trade and slavery as they took their tea or used slave-produced products on a daily basis. However, little by little, the London Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade succeeded in rallying popular sentiment against slavery and slave-produced commodities.

Click here to continue reading.

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