Active History

Remote Silvertown Transforms Again

August 10, 2015 No Comments

By Jim Clifford
https://youtu.be/Qym5jPSlyWE

Industrial Silvertown is not a standard tourist attraction in London, though in recent years thousands of people have peered down on the remaining factories from the Emirates Air Line cable cars as they descend toward Victoria Dock and the ExCel convention centre. It was nonetheless a really important region of heavy industrial development during the late nineteenth century and is again on the frontline of rapid development. Most waterfront property in East London, from the banks of the Thames to the Limehouse Cut canal and the Lower Lea, are undergoing redevelopment as glass towers transform urban landscape. This is not the first time waterfront property underwent rapid transformation, as many of London’s nineteenth century factories required access to rivers or canals to carry coal and other raw materials.

At the start of the nineteenth century Silvertown did not exist. It was simply the southern edge of Plaistow Level, a large marsh on the Essex side of the Lea River and well beyond the eastern edge of London’s outskirts in Poplar. The first Ordnance Survey for the region, from 1805, shows extensive marshlands from the Redriff Marsh that later became the Surrey Docks through to the Roding river and beyond. Industrial development, more docks and working class residential districts spread throughout much of these wetlands in the century that followed.

Ordnance Survey First Series, 1805

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The Second Battle of Ypres and the Creation of a YMCA Hero

August 7, 2015 No Comments

ActiveHistory.ca is on a three-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in next week. This week, we’ve asked the editors of Canada’s First World War to select some of their most popular and favourite posts.

This essay was originally posted on 12 May 2015

By Jonathan Weier

Weier, Second Ypres and YMCA Hero - image 1 Among the approximately 2000 members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force killed at the Second Battle of Ypres in late April and early May 1915 was the only Canadian YMCA worker killed in combat during the First World War. YMCA Honourary Captain Oscar Irwin, attached to the 10th Battalion of the CEF, was killed when he joined the battalion as it set out to retake St. Julien from the Germans in the early morning of April 23rd.^[1] Irwin appears frequently in the YMCA’s commemoration of its First World War service, as the heroic embodiment of the YMCA’s masculine ideals, its message of service, and as a symbol of Christian sacrifice. Irwin’s example, both in life and in death, provided a venue by which the YMCA and its workers could address the tensions and challenges faced by many men involved in non-combatant service during the First World War. Continue reading →

Sexing Up Canada’s First World War

August 6, 2015 No Comments

This essay was originally posted on 3 March 2015

By Zachary Abram

VD Poster 1 Canadian cultural memory of the First World War is conspicuously asexual considering Canadians had among the highest rates for venereal disease in the British Expeditionary Force, with an infection rate that reached as high as 28.7%. [1] Anyone with a passing interest in the First World War is familiar with Trench Foot and its symptoms are synonymous with the squalor of trench warfare. Yet, only 74,711 cases of Trench Foot were treated during the entire war.[2] Venereal Disease accounted for 416,891 hospital admissions in the British Army.[3] A soldier was five times more likely to be admitted to hospital for syphilis and gonorrhea but in the popular imagination it is Trench Foot that persists. There is a reticence, perhaps the result of inherited Victorian prudery or the unwillingness to “sully the reputations” of the war dead, to discuss soldiers’ sex lives. As a result, discussions of the First World War tend to elide the bedroom in favour of the trench. Continue reading →

Promises Broken, or Politics as Usual?

August 5, 2015 No Comments

This essay was originally posted on 27 January 2015

By Jonathan Scotland

Despite the Conservative Party of Canada’s fondness for promoting its support for Canada’s military, since assuming government in 2006 the federal government’s relationship with veterans has been rocky at best. By the close of last year’s parliament it seemed that new criticisms were being leveled at Julian Fantino, Minister of Veterans Affairs, on a daily basis. His department’s handling of the New Veterans Charter (NVC) and treatment of soldiers’ mental health came in for special criticism. Critics also added neglected war graves, unspent funds, cuts to the Veterans’ Affairs’ disability awards branch, and inadequate access to a growing list of complaints. Fantino, at least, was struck off that list early in the new year when he was replaced as Minister by Erin O’Toole, a sign the government is trying to repair its reputation with veterans.

In British Columbia wounded veterans have taken Ottawa to court over the change from life-long pensions to one-time, lump-sum payments. This shift, the veterans argue, amounts to a breach of trust between soldiers and the crown, a social contract that dates to at least the First World War.

Their suit builds on Aboriginal case law by invoking the honour of the crown. If it succeeds, it will be precedent setting. Veterans’ benefits will henceforth be enshrined as a permanent fiduciary responsibility.

With parliamentary sovereignty at stake, government lawyers are vigorously seeking to have the suit thrown out.

At the heart of the case are Prime Minister Robert Borden’s wartime commitments to Canada’s troops. Continue reading →

1864 vs. 1914: A Commemorative Showdown

August 4, 2015 2 Comments

This essay was originally posted on 11 November 2014

By Sarah Glassford

1864

As I sat by the window of a popular coffee shop in downtown Charlottetown on a warm afternoon in September 2014, two student actors from the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) appeared on the street corner opposite, heading toward nearby Province House, seat of the provincial legislature. He wore a three-piece suit and top hat; she sported a shirtwaist, hoop skirt, elaborate hat, and shawl. This is a common sight near Province House during the summer tourist season,[i] but it struck me as noteworthy because I happened to be brainstorming thoughts for a post on Prince Edward Island (PEI) and the First World War centenary. The sight of 1860s-style citizens promenading down the street in 2014 reminded me that all commemoration takes place in a crowded landscape of competing commemorations, even when the subject is as globally game-changing as the First World War.

PEI, Canada’s smallest province, has been celebrating 2014 in grand style all year long, but not because of anything to do with the First World War centenary. Instead, the island is celebrating the 150^th anniversary of the 1864 Charlottetown Conference, when the then-colony of PEI hosted the first serious discussions of a confederation of British North American colonies – a union that eventually became the Dominion of Canada. Continue reading →

Series @ ActiveHistory.ca: 2014-2015

July 31, 2015 2 Comments

As part of our summer hiatus, ActiveHistory.ca is featuring summaries of the papers and series we’ve run over the past year. Today, we provide a list of the series we’ve published since September 2014:

The Home Archivist (by Jess Dunkin) – Ongoing

Introduction (September)
The Grand Seduction (October)
Getting my Hands Dirty (November)
Dust, Mold and Adhesives – Part I (February)
Dust, Mold and Adhesives – Part II (February)
Making Arrangements (April)

Anishinaabeg in the War of 1812 (by Alan Corbiere)

More than Tecumseh and his Indians (September)
Mookomaanish: The Damn Knife (Odaawaa Chief and Warrior) (October)
Jean Baptiste Assiginack: The Starling aka Blackbird
Spoils of the War of 1812: Part I: The Importance of Michilimackinac (January)
Spoils of the War of 1812: Part II: British Honour (February)
Spoils of the War of 1812: Part III: Anishinaabe Aspirations (March)

200 Years of the Old Chieftain – January 2015

Old Chieftain or Old Charlatan? Assessing Sir John’s Complex Legacy through Political Cartoons (Thomas Peace)
John A. Macdonald’s Aryan Canada: Aboriginal Genocide and Chinese Exclusion (Timothy Stanley)
Birthing a Dominion (Christa Zellar Thomas)
Old Tomorrow’s Bicentennial: Don’t Think Motivation, Think Law (James Daschuk)
Epilogue: Critical Indigenous Reflections on Sir John A. Macdonald

Infectious Disease, Contagion and the History of Vaccines – March/April 2015

Introduction (Jim Clifford, Erika Dyck, Ian Mosby)
“Be Wise – Immunize!”: Vaccine Promotion in Canada During the 20th Century (Catherine Carstairs)
Victory with Vaccines? A Modified Account for the Twenty-first Century (Anne Hardy)
Funding, failures, and faux pas: Vaccines and the complicated task of sharing responsibility for global health (Casey Hurrell)
Bacille de Calmette-Guérin, or BCG Vaccine for Tuberculosis (Maureen Lux)
Quarantined but Not Forgotten: Combatting Vaccination Resistance with Historical Education (Sara Wilmshurst)
The Vaccination Experience: Historical Insights from Children and Families (Mona Gleason)
Personifying Pestilence: How Political Cartoons Shape Our Views of Disease (Jacob Steere-Williams)
An Epidemic in Madness? (Mat Sevilli and Erika Dyck)
Animal Matter: The Making of ‘Pure’ Bovine Vaccine at the Connaught Laboratories and Farm at the Turn of the Century (Joanna Dean)
A Brief History of Vaccines in Colonial Africa (Jessica Pearson-Patel)
Vaccines and the Environmental History of Medicine (Lisa Piper)

Commemorating 35 years of the Marathon of Hope (Jenny Ellison) – April 2015

Thirty Five Years after the Abortion Caravan – May 2015

The Women Are Coming; The Abortion Caravan of 1970 (Christabelle Sethna and Shannon Stettner)
The Abortion Caravan and Anti-Vietnam War Activism (Shannon Stettner)
The Abortion Caravan and RCMP Surveillance (Christabelle Sethna)
The New Abortion Caravan (Karissa Patton)
Reassessing the Abortion Caravan (Christabelle Sethna and Shannon Stettner)

Activehistory.ca repost – John A. Macdonald’s Aryan Canada: Aboriginal Genocide and Chinese Exclusion

July 30, 2015 No Comments

ActiveHistory.ca is on a three-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in mid-August. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our most popular and favourite posts from the past year. We will also be highlighting some of the special series and papers we’ve run this year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers.

The following post was originally featured on January 7, 2015.

By Timothy J. Stanley

Racisms are central to the creation of Canada through European dominance over the vast territories of the First Nations, Inuit and Métis people. A case in point is provided by John Alexander Macdonald and his enactment of Asian exclusion and the genocide of the people of the southern plains.[1]

Macdonald not only excluded the Chinese, he personally introduced biological racism as a defining characteristic of Canadianness. Biological racisms depart from older racisms by constructing allegedly natural, immutable and inescapable racial categories on the basis of supposed biological differences. Previous racisms had been based on alleged cultural characteristics that could change over time.[2] Macdonald’s fixing of difference was neither accidental nor simply the result of mere prejudice.

While debating the 1885 Electoral Franchise Act in the House of Commons, legislation he later called “my greatest triumph”,[3] Macdonald proposed that “Chinamen” should not have the right to vote on the grounds that they were “foreigners” and that “the Chinese has no British instincts or British feelings or aspirations.”[4] When a member of the opposition asked whether naturalized Chinese ceased to be “Chinamen”, Macdonald amended his legislation to exclude “a person of Mongolian or Chinese race.”[5] The opposition object that the Chinese were “industrious people” who had “voted in the last election,” or had “as good a right [to] be allowed to vote as any other British subject of foreign extraction.”[6] This led Macdonald to make clear that Chinese exclusion was necessary to ensure European dominance. He warned, “if [the Chinese] came in great numbers and settled on the Pacific coast they might control the vote of that whole Province, and they would send Chinese representative to sit here, who would represent Chinese eccentricities, Chinese immorality, Asiatic principles altogether opposite to our wishes; and, in the even balance of parties, they might enforce those Asiatic principles, those immoralities . . . , the eccentricities which are abhorrent to the Aryan race and Aryan principles, on this House.” He then claimed that the Chinese and Europeans were separate species: “the Aryan races will not wholesomely amalgamate with the Africans or the Asiatics” and that “the cross of those races, like the cross of the dog and the fox, is not successful; it cannot be, and never will be.” Chinese exclusion was necessary or, as he told the House, “the Aryan character of the future of British America should be destroyed . . .”[7]

Macdonald’s comments shocked his contemporaries in Parliament. He was the only member of the Canadian Parliament to use the term “Aryan” during the 1870s and 1880s, as well as the only member to argue that Asians and Europeans were separate species.

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – ‘It’s history, like it or not’: the Significance of Sudbury’s Superstack

July 29, 2015 No Comments

The following post was originally featured on November 17, 2014.

By Mike Commito and Kaleigh Bradley

Standing at a height of 1,250 feet, the Sudbury Superstack is the second tallest chimney in the world and runner-up to the CN Tower for the tallest structure in Canada. Until 1987, Sudbury Ontario had the dubious honour of having the world’s tallest smokestack. Today, the Stack is seen by some as a marker for Sudbury’s rich mining heritage but for others, it is also part of a much larger history of health and environmental problems.

“Sudbury and the Beast.” Courtesy of local photographer Greta Clarke.

Since the nineteenth century, Sudbury’s landscape was ravaged by the effects of the mining industry; over the years the vegetation disappeared with acid rain, and farmers found themselves unable to grow crops in the highly acidic soil. The International Nickel Company (INCO) built the Superstack in 1972 to disperse sulphur dioxide (SO₂) and other pollutants away from the area, thereby addressing health and environmental concerns. The Stack’s construction coincided with a community regreening movement, which has reversed some of the environmental damage. The Superstack reduced local emission rates in recent years, but one could argue that INCO simply passed the buck, and the dispersion of SO₂ became somebody else’s problem. Moreover, the Sudbury area continues to have higher rates of asthma and lung cancer than other parts of Ontario. For better or for worse, the Superstack has been a landmark along the Sudbury skyline for over forty years. And when Vale (formerly INCO) recently proposed demolishing the Superstack in the local media, we watched as an interesting public debate about the significance, history, and future of the stack ensued.

On November 3^rd 2014, Kelly Strong of Vale announced that the company considered demolishing the Superstack. This news is not surprising and is in keeping with Vale’s ongoing $1 billion Clean AER Project, designed to reduce SO₂emissions. If the Superstack is removed it will be replaced by a smaller chimney, but this will mark a big departure not only in the company’s operational history, but for local history as well. Continue reading →

ActiveHistory.ca repost – More than “Prisoners”: Discovering Welfare History in Holy Trinity Cemetery, Thornhill

July 28, 2015 No Comments

The following post was originally featured on February 3, 2015.

By Danielle Terbenche

Five grave markers

In 2012, I began attending Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Thornhill, Ontario. After learning I was a historian, some church members invited me to join the cemetery board. During my first visit to the church’s historic cemetery, I was intrigued by five concrete crosses marking the graves of eight men, dating from 1928 to 1931. In a poor state of repair, and inscribed only with the names and death dates of the men, they looked nothing like the more elaborate marker that surrounded them, both historic and modern. At the time, I had no idea that over the next year, these crosses would lead me to an investigative journey of the history of early twentieth-century welfare institutions, social policy, homelessness, and unemployment. It was a project that demonstrated the hidden stories and social histories that may be represented through small, seemingly inconsequential artefacts. This article documents my search for answers about these mysterious gravestones.

Built c. 1829-30 on Yonge Street, Trinity Church (as it was formerly known) is the oldest church building still in use in the Anglican Diocese of Toronto. In 1950, the church was moved to Brooke Street, southwest of the original location; however, the cemetery remains at the original site on Yonge. Still in active use, Holy Trinity Cemetery contains several graves of historical significance to the Thornhill and Richmond Hill areas, including the grave of Colonel Robert Moodie, killed on Yonge Street near Montgomery’s Tavern during the 1837 Rebellion.

Holy Trinity Church

This history made me wonder if the five “mystery” crosses occupying a small rectangular plot of land towards the rear of the cemetery were historically significant. Age, weathering, and inappropriate repairs over eighty years had left them in a deteriorated condition; the names and death dates on some were barely visible. I wondered: Why were these graves so different? Who were these men buried in these plots? What was significant about the period 1928-31? Who installed the markers? Why were they not as structurally sound as other markers in the cemetery?

I asked about the graves at a cemetery board meeting and was told the men were “prisoners” from the Langstaff Industrial Farm. The farm, which opened in 1913 as an adjunct facility to ease overcrowding at Toronto’s Don Jail, operated as a minimum-security men’s prison for inebriates and petty criminals until it closed in 1958.

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – The .tp country domain name, 1997-2015: In memoriam

July 27, 2015 No Comments

The following post was originally featured on March 16, 2015.

http://freedom.tp

by David Webster

The internet deleted its first virtual country this month. It wasn’t that bad: Timor-Leste is now a real country, and doesn’t need its original internet domain name any longer. But the .tp top-level country domain name (ccTLD, in the lingo) has a story to tell as it ends its 18-year history.

In 1997, the former Portuguese colony of Timor-Leste (East Timor) was nearing the final years of its struggle for independence from a brutal Indonesian military occupation that had started in 1975. Using a hosting service in Ireland, a contact address for the most famous Timorese political prisoner, and a clever tactic to squat on an unclaimed county code, activists launched the top-level domain .tp and its first site, freedom.tp.

It was a period when all countries and territories had recently been assigned two-letter codes, alongside the .com and .org domain suffixes. Most of these are familiar – .ca for Canada, .id for Indonesia, .ie for Ireland, and so on. In 1997, many country domain names were unclaimed. Among them was .tp, reserved for Portuguese Timor (Timor Português).

Portuguese Timor had long ceased to be. The 1974 Carnation revolution in Portugal set the last European world empire’s colonies on the road to independence. That included Portuguese Timor, the eastern half of an island off the north coast of Australia, sharing its other half with an Indonesian province.

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