Active History

“If ye break faith – we shall not sleep?”

December 8, 2015 1 Comment

By Mary Chaktsiris and Stephanie Bangarth

We leave you our deaths: give them their meaning: give them an end to the war and a true peace: give them a victory that ends the war and a peace afterwards: give them their meaning.” – Archibald MacLeish, ‘The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak’ (1941)

On March 18, 1931, A.W. Neil, MP for Comox-Alberni in British Columbia, introduced a motion in the House of Commons to have Armistice Day observed on November 11 and “on no other date.” Another MP, C.W. Dickie of Nanaimo, also speaking on behalf of veterans, moved an amendment changing the name from “Armistice” to “Remembrance” Day. This term, Dickie felt, better “implies that we wish to remember and perpetuate.” Parliament swiftly adopted these resolutions and Canada held its first ‘Remembrance Day’ on November 11, 1931. The hour of annual remembrance was fixed at 11 a.m. on 11 November, the time and date of the Armistice in Europe.

Department of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / ecopy, R112-4004-8-E, Remembrance Day Ceremonies, Ottawa, 1962.

Canadians first started to collect around military cenotaphs in 1902 at the end of the Boer War when the nation indulged in a great, patriotic burst of memorial-building. Monuments to Canada’s first foreign war were erected in city parks and town squares from Victoria to Halifax. Over the next decade, huge crowds would gather around them. By 1918 the trauma and slaughter of the First World War meant that new memorials would be built, but this time they were mostly sombre creations designed simply to honour the dead as opposed to marking military success. In the decades that followed through the Second World War, the Korean War, and Afghanistan, Canadians have gathered faithfully around such memorials each November 11 to remember.

But what is it that we are remembering? And who and what are we leaving out? In many ways we have been confined by a very narrow definition of remembrance. This narrowing represents a lost opportunity to think more deeply about war and its effects, to reflect on the causes of war making, and to search for ways to understand war, death, and sacrifice as meaningful in our modern lives. Continue reading →

Canadian Girls In Training: 100 Years With A Purpose

December 7, 2015 3 Comments

by Krista McCracken

Canadian Girls in Training group in South River, Ontario. Public domain image.

Canadian Girls in Training group in South River, Ontario, circa 1954. Public domain image.

Last week 50 women gathered at a church along the North Shore of Lake Huron to celebrate their shared memories, reminisce over local connections, and reflect on the national Canadian Girls in Training (CGIT) movement. This year marks the 100th anniversary of CGIT. I volunteered during the local anniversary celebration and learned about what CGIT meant for this particular group of women.

The celebration was filled with moments of laughter and the type of storytelling you would expect from a group of close friends – hair catching on fire during a candlelight service, pie being spilt on tea guests, and reflections on lasting bonds of friendship. CGIT was also praised as providing leadership on social issues, providing opportunities for girls to take on leadership roles, and as a place to develop confidence and the ability to speak your mind.

CGIT was established in 1915 by the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and the major protestant denominations in Canada as a means of promoting Christian living in girls aged 12-17. The CGIT movement was started by four young Canadian women: Winnifred Thomas, Olive Ziegler, Una Saunders, and Constance Body.

As World War One continued overseas Thomas, Ziegler, Saunders, and Body looked at the lack of leadership roles available to young women at home and the need to provide service opportunities for girls. Continue reading →

Further Writing on War, Loss and Remembrance: Reflections on In Flanders Fields: 100 Years

December 4, 2015 1 Comment

By Christopher Schultz

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
– John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields,” Dec 1915

My high school had an award-winning music program. I know this, in part, because I was the only one of my friends not in one of its many bands and ensembles, having given up the clarinet owing to complications arising from an acute case of brace-face. School fundraising went almost exclusively toward an event so important it was capitalized: Band Trip. This was a national competition; ours were among the best musicians in the country. Music featured prominently in school and public life, from assemblies and sports, to city concerts. Those of us with harp-strings across our teeth rather than our fingers, with grunge rather than jazz in our ears, were appreciative listeners and admirers. We bought tickets, ate chocolate bars and ordered Florida oranges to finance their cross-country treks.

We did our bit. Being out of pocket these small sums was rewarded by the tales my friends returned with—the stories of drunken chaperones, who made out with whom, which unfortunate attendee missed curfew, hot tub hijinks—as much as the hardware adorning the school trophy cases. It was easy to swell with pride, an orchestra of emotion. Continue reading →

The University of Victoria History Department’s Refugee Campaign

December 1, 2015 No Comments

Over the past few days the History Department at the University of Victoria has been circulating the following opportunity and challenge among historians in Canada. We have reprinted it here for the interest of our readers and as a great illustration of what we envision as Active History.

Dear Fellow Historians,

No group can better appreciate the historical significance of the current refugee crisis in the Middle East and its implications than historians. We know that this is a crisis unprecedented in our lifetimes and of a proportion rarely seen in world history.

I am sure that many of you, like a group of us at UVic, watched the growing crisis over the past summer and fall with horror and a feeling of helplessness. Recently we decided that we did not have to sit idle as the crisis deepens, and we would like to invite you to join us.

As a group of faculty, staff and students in our History Department we decided to take on the responsibility to sponsor and host a Syrian refugee family. We would like to invite you to join us and, if you can, either 1) make a contribution towards our project or 2) consider organizing among your colleagues and communities to sponsor a refugee family or, 3) both!

Through this process we have learned that we are not really helpless — that we as individuals and as a group of historians can make a real difference in the lives of suffering people, today. Now. We have also learned that these acts of generosity are bringing us closer as a community of scholars.

We invite you to join us in sponsoring a refugee family. Please go to our website where you can learn more about this project and make a donation. Through the Intercultural Association we can offer tax receipts. We are working to raise $50,000 and are half-way there.

This week one of our emeritus faculty has offered to double new contributions up to a ceiling of $5,000 so your donation will mean twice as much.

Our website: http://www.historyrefugee.org/

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HistoryRefugeeCommittee/

We also have the option of a gift card which will allow you to make a donation in lieu of another kind of gift to a family member or friend who perhaps has less need of your support.

Should you wish to start a group to sponsor refugees or bring a group of your colleagues/students together to support this initiative, we would be very happy to share what we have learned about the process and how we have proceeded.

Please join us in making the new year a much brighter one for a desperate family, and then, hopefully, another and another. Together we can light a candle, and in time, a bonfire, against the darkness.

With thanks and best wishes…

John Lutz, chair
On behalf of the UVic Department of History

When Blue Meets Green: A NiCHE series

November 30, 2015 1 Comment

Tina Adcock, an editor of the Otter blog at the Network in Canadian & Environmental history website, organized a series of posts on the intersections between environmental and labour history for the month of November. John-Henry Harter opened the series with his post “When Blue Meets Green: The Intersection of Workers and Environmentalists”. This was followed by Mark McLaughlin’s “Seeing the Forest (Workers) for the Trees: Environmental and Labour History in New Brunswick’s Forests” and “Workers as Commodities: The Case of Asbestos, Quebec” from Jessica van Horssen. The final post from Willeen Keough is being published today: “If a sealer talks about conservation, does anybody hear?” I also contributed a post titled “‘Two chemical works behind him, and a soap factory in front’: Living and Working in London’s Industrial Marshlands,” which, I am republishing below.

The series asks us to rethink the simplistic rhetoric that sets workers against environmentalist. This is particularly relevant in a week where Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall is in Paris to defend oil workers instead of collaborate in reaching a strong agreement to prevent catastrophic climate change. This is effective rhetoric for a popular conservative premier who does not want to simply campaign on the behalf of big oil companies and he is correct that real action on climate change will be difficult for workers in the coal and oil industries (though the global price of oil likely has a bigger influence on the second group). It is not clear that a shift away from fossil fuels will significantly damage the wider economy over the long term and the economic cost of inaction are becoming increasingly clear.

Environmental history helps break down the simplistic workers vs environment narratives. Workers were often exposed to the same toxins that damaged the wider ecosystem and environmental destruction has hampered economic growth in the longer term. Shovel ready environmental remediation projects have provided a lot of jobs for unemployed workers in the past and given the stubbornly low price of oil, it is possible that green energy and other retrofitting projects will provide crucial jobs to help offset the layoffs in the oil patch.

Two chemical works behind him, and a soap factory in front”: Living and Working in London’s Industrial Marshlands

Continue reading →

The Future of Loyalist Studies

November 28, 2015 No Comments

As part of our partnership with the new early Canadian history blog Borealia, we’ll be posting highlights from that website here every Saturday in November.

By Christopher F. Minty

benjamin-west-john-eardley-wilmot-1812-yale-center-for-british-art-paul-mellon-collection “Intractable issues vex loyalist studies.” These were the words Ruma Chopra used in an essay, published in History Compass, in 2013. She’s right. As of mid-2015, loyalist studies has come to an important juncture, and the paths historians, researchers, and students go down in choosing their approaches to loyalist studies, within the next decade or so, will affect scholarship for well over a generation.[1]

To be sure, in recent years loyalist studies has made considerable strides. Scholarship by Chopra, Maya Jasanoff, Judith Van Buskirk, Phillip Papas, Keith Mason, Christopher Sparshott, and the writers and editors of The Loyal Atlantic and Loyalism and the Formation of the British World, among others, have pushed loyalist studies forward into new, exciting areas. Above all, they have placed it within an Atlantic framework and questioned what it meant to be a “loyalist.”

This scholarship, in turn, is being driven forward by a number of graduate students and junior faculty. The likes of Kimberly Nath (Delaware), Pete Walker (Columbia), Sophie Jones (Liverpool), Christina Carrick (BU), Justin Clement (UC, Davis), Rachel Hermann (Southampton), and Don Johnson (North Dakota State), among others, are bringing new methodologies and outlooks to loyalist studies or aspects of it. But with this upturn in scholarship, where are we to go from here? [Read More]

“Trustees of the Future” and the Echoes of History

November 27, 2015 No Comments

By Calyssa Erb

Prime Minister Robert Borden speaking in 1915 – from Wikicommons

On 23 October 1916, two years into the Great War, Prime Minister Robert Borden spoke to Canadians with the goal of inspiring more citizens to get involved in the war effort. Nearly a century later on 22 October 2014, following the shooting at Canada’s National War Memorial in Ottawa and fears of another attack on Canadian soil, Prime Minister Stephen Harper addressed the nation to encourage unity and resilience in the Canadian people by drawing upon the previous century’s rhetoric of dedication and Canadian spirit. The proximity of the dates on which each speech was made – although ninety-eight years apart – draws them closer together temporally to emphasize the parallels in prime ministerial discourse during times of heightened national anxiety. The similarities in context and rhetoric bridge the temporal distance between the speeches, connecting the past and present. In very different eras these two Conservative Prime Ministers saw fit to assert narratives of a unified Canadian identity and of Canada’s place on the global stage, when faced with moments of national crisis. The similarities are made all the more significant by Harper’s clear determination to reshape Canada’s image from its late-20^th century “peacekeeping” ideal to a “warrior nation” one instead. Continue reading →

Assessing the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation

November 26, 2015 No Comments

by Sean Carleton, Crystal Fraser, and John Milloy

Earlier this month, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) opened its physical and digital doors to the public. The Centre is located in Chancellor’s Hall at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg and its online archive contains “Terabytes of Testimony,” including 35,000 photos, five million government, church, and school documents, 7000 survivor statements, and a host of other materials (art, poems, music, and physical items) collected by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). It is an impressive and important collection. The NCTR’s mandate is to “preserve the memory of Canada’s Residential School system and legacy. Not just for a few years, but forever.”

It is hard to believe that less than twenty years ago, the Indian Residential School (IRS) system was still operating and the vast majority of Canadians were in the dark about the history and ongoing effects of the schools. In contrast, the volume of traffic to the NCTR’s digital archive was initially so high that the site crashed on multiple occasions in its first week. People’s interest in the history of residential schools “broke” the internet, so to speak. Given the long and hard-fought battles by former students, survivors, advocates, and academics to bring Canada’s residential school system to the public’s attention to facilitate redress, the opening of the NCTR and the public’s positive response so far, is a significant step towards reconciliation and healing.

As emerging and established scholars of Canada’s IRS system, we are heartened to witness the opening of the NCTR, and we are optimistic about the Centre’s potential as a powerful resource to ensure these varied and complex histories are not forgotten. Yet, we approach the NCTR cautiously and not uncritically. Much work remains. The archive is still incomplete and it is limited in significant ways. Given the Centre’s importance, we offer an assessment of the NCTR by way of briefly tracing its background and outlining our initial thoughts on its many strengths and limitations. Our aim is to spark a conversation about how historians might critically engage with this new resource to help shape the future of residential school research and to aid meaningful reconciliation. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Seventy-Four: SHARIAsource

November 25, 2015 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

On November 16, parts of Harvard University were closed for a few hours following a bomb threat. Access to Harvard Yard was restricted while police searched several buildings. It was an interesting experience – the helicopter circling above was certainly unique – particularly in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Paris. Despite the fact that, at the time, there was no information about who made the threat or why, message boards were full of epithets referring to this being the product of a Muslim plot. (I don’t know why I still read the occasional message board)

Occurrences of Islamophobia have been well documented recently, with one of the prime claims being that Muslims want to impose Sharia Law in North America. Sean Hannity, for one, is obsessed with Sharia Law. What you find, though, is that a lot of these claims are inaccurate, based on extreme examples, or oversimplified. While this is partly the result of the sound bite media environment, it also speaks to the challenge of finding thorough, well rounded, and accessible English language material on Sharia.

To help counter this, the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School is launching SHARIAsource, a new website devoted to providing accurate and accessible information about Sharia Law. In working with scholars and practitioners around the world, the editors are hoping to provide a space to provide information, engage in debate, and serve as an outlet for primary sources.
Continue reading →

The European Extreme Right Yesterday and Today

November 24, 2015 1 Comment

Alban Bargain-Villéger

Logos of 11 extreme right parties. leftfutures.org

The “Europe of Nations and Freedom”: 11 extreme right parties. leftfutures.org

Studies on the European ultra-nationalist right are not exactly rare. Over the last couple of decades, many a tree has been felled and much ink has been spilled on the extreme right in our day and age and its connections (or lack thereof) with the fascist movements and parties of old. But despite the abundance of works on that topic, the ideological nature of the ultra-nationalist right, its medium-to-long-term plans, and its very location on the extreme right of the political spectrum are still subject to controversy. While not engaging directly with the debates surrounding the essence of fascism, this post focuses on some major genealogical links between several far right European parties and central facets of pre-1945 fascism.

First of all, it should be noted that the all too easy equation of the contemporary nationalist right with fascism has been rightly qualified by many eminent specialists, including Robert Paxton, whose seminal Anatomy of Fascism (2004) has opened up fresh perspectives on the subject. Continue reading →

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