Active History

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

May 12, 2015 2 Comments

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 →

The Abortion Caravan and Anti-Vietnam War Activism

May 11, 2015 2 Comments

York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, ASC04612.

[Editors Note: This is the second of a series of five posts on the Abortion Caravan that will be running this month.]

By Shannon Stettner

Often when we study activism surrounding an issue like abortion, we do so in isolation, paying little attention to the multiple protest identities of activists. While I hadn’t anticipated writing an article on connecting abortion rights to anti-war activism, my interviews with Abortion Caravan participants revealed particularly strong claims of attachment to or identification with opposition to the Vietnam War that demanded further exploration. Some of the Caravaners came to Canada with draft-resister relatives from the United States, while others lived in communal housing with draft resisters and deserters. The majority settled in Vancouver and Toronto, the two cities in which most of the Caravaners lived. Many women recalled their commitment to anti-war activities, including helping to smuggle deserters over the border into Canada and attending and organizing demonstrations and forums for peace. This post explores these linkages, drawing connections between the tactics used by activists in the pro-choice and anti-war movements as well as their competing interests.[1]
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The Women Are Coming; The Abortion Caravan of 1970

May 11, 2015 2 Comments

York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, ASC04612.

[Editors Note: This is the first of a series of five posts on the Abortion Caravan that will be running this month.]

By Christabelle Sethna and Shannon Stettner

On April 27, 1970, members of the Vancouver Women’s Caucus (VWC) set off on a journey to Ottawa in an “Abortion Caravan” to protest the new abortion law. Under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the Liberal government passed an Omnibus Bill in 1969 that reformed the Criminal Code, decriminalizing contraception and legalizing consensual homosexual sex as well as abortion. Legal abortion was now possible only when a doctor referred a pregnant woman to a Therapeutic Abortion Committee (TAC) made up of three to five doctors in an accredited hospital. The TAC determined on a case-by-case basis whether or not the abortion was necessary to save the life or health of a pregnant woman. Although intended to prevent illegal abortion and its potential negative health consequences for women, the new law was unevenly applied and created backlogs and delays. Nascent women’s liberation groups like the VWC denounced it as restrictive to women in general and unfair to poor women in particular and began organizing around repealing the abortion law. The Ottawa Citizen quoted VWC member Dawn Carrell Hemingway as saying: “The only way we can get abortion removed from the Criminal Code is not by letters to the government or pressure through channels. The only way is if large numbers of women come together and do something. Numbers and actions are more important than presenting briefs.”[1] Continue reading →

Review of Bruno Ramirez’s Inside the Historical Film

May 8, 2015 No Comments

By C.S. Ogden

What stake does historical research have in fictionalized cinematic productions? Does film offer another medium to convey this research effectively to new audiences? What role can the academic historian take within such endeavours? In his latest book Inside the Historical Film, Bruno Ramirez, a history professor and screenwriter at Université de Montréal, considers these issues by investigating the relationship between historical research and cinematic narratives.

McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014
238 pages, Paperback $29.95.

Acknowledging both the attraction to and the scepticism of historical film by historians, Ramirez traces the study of historical film. He does not focus solely on how various films have portrayed historical events. He also asks how fiction has been employed for these kinds of narrations: is it used primarily to increase a film’s commercial viability or does it have the potential to augment an audience’s understanding of the past? The manner in which historians and filmmakers engage with these notions inform the book’s chapters.

Ramirez explores the development and professionalization of the scholarly study of history and film during the twentieth century. He acknowledges the importance of film’s visual and technical components and more could be added here about the visuality of film but he is careful not to stray from the book’s major theme. He notes that the appeal and challenge of film is through its combination of the visual and the dramaturgical. The result is that the “filmic image, in other words, speaks through its own language” (33). Continue reading →

OpenTextbooks in Canadian History: Part I

May 7, 2015 1 Comment

By John Belshaw

I had this ‘eureka’ moment in the barber’s chair. Well, I thought, if a book is like a railway line, heading in one direction from west to east, then an e-book is more like a mine elevator, heading from the surface into the depths, from top to bottom or, perhaps, from north to south. If that’s the case, then an OpenTextbook is like a hive. It is living, fluid, with junctions that run up, down, outward in several horizons but also in three dimensions. It offers options rather than a singular pathway, complexity rather than guiderails, a little more risk but the possibility of greater rewards.

Moving from metaphor to practicality, the OpenTextbook is just plain different from conventional textbooks. For starters, it’s smart. It can evolve. Instead of waiting for the (inevitable) umpteenth edition, you (the prof) can refine and effectively create the newest edition. What if your textbook could be made to look more like something from Harry Potter, with moving images on the page? What if it could function differently?

What if it was available for free? Continue reading →

Labour rights, Socio-Economic Rights, and the Limitations of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

May 6, 2015 No Comments

by Christo Aivalis

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Canadian workers have the right to strike as per Section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This builds on a 2007 ruling that bestowed the right to bargain collectively. Both reversed a 1987 Supreme Court ruling, and two similar cases (‘the labour trilogy,’) which excluded those rights. But still absent from the Charter are rights to basic economic security, and this omission is not an oversight.

Rather, Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s vision for the Charter was to serve as a locus for a liberal and secular patriotism based in a collective understanding of what human rights did and did not entail. This combined with a failure of the New Democratic Party and organized labour to fight for social, economic, and labour rights, giving us a limited conception of rights that continues to shape our national philosophy, guide our approach to policy, and limit the validity and promise of our democracy.

For Trudeau, the Charter was to forge a societal recognition that rights should not politicized, because they “are the common heritage of all Canadians.” In contrast to the 1867 constitution, which lacked an educational message about what Canada was and aspired to, the Charter would also constitute a pedagogical tool and “enlightened basis for patriotism.” But Trudeau was clear that this collective patriotism would not include workers and poor Canadians, even as it included numerous minorities. The workers and poor were omitted “because economic rights do not simply restrain others in order to protect the individual in the exercise of his freedoms, but instead seek to impose obligations on the state or others for the positive benefit of the individual.”[1] Continue reading →

Sharing Local History on the John Rowswell Hub Trail

May 5, 2015 1 Comment

by Stacey Devlin

The Great Lakes, showing the location of Sault Ste. Marie. Satellite data: SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE, 24 April 2000.

Situated at the meeting point of three Great Lakes on the traditional territories of Garden River and Batchewana First Nations, Sault Ste. Marie is one of Canada’s oldest settlements. Its natural beauty, rich past, and diverse culture make it an exceptional place to live, work, and visit. Even so, it’s not always easy to find or access information about the city’s many cultural assets. How can we more actively engage with the heritage that surrounds “the Sault”?

Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to address this question through the Animating the John Rowswell Hub Trail Project. This project is led by the Sault-based Northern Ontario Research, Development, Ideas and Knowledge (NORDIK) Institute in collaboration with the City’s Planning Department and in partnership with over 40 community organizations and individuals. Growing out of a belief that the Sault is ready for culture (including history, the arts, the built environment, and the natural environment) to be highlighted in the community on a large scale, its goal is to provide an information platform that respects and includes the diverse perspectives that make the Sault what it is today. To achieve this goal, the project makes innovative use of one crucial piece of City infrastructure: the John Rowswell Hub Trail. Continue reading →

Toronto vs. Montréal: A Short History

May 4, 2015 1 Comment

By Daniel Ross

Tory and Coderre, Toronto Sun

Last month, the mayors of Canada’s two largest cities met in Toronto, and the mood was positive. After discussing business partnerships, security, the upcoming federal election and—inevitably—hockey, Denis Coderre and John Tory announced a new era for relations between Montréal and Toronto. “The two solitudes are over,” stated the charismatic Coderre, who last made the news in Toronto for snubbing then-Mayor Rob Ford at the 2014 Big Cities Summit in Ottawa. Instead, he and Tory evoked a “strategic alliance” between the two metropolises, to be formalized with sister-city status sometime in the next few months.

What this new partnership will amount to is anyone’s guess. Both cities could use some good news, after four years of Rob Ford’s drug-addled behaviour and the revelations of corruption made by the Charbonneau Commission. The big issues that Tory and Coderre hope to raise together in the upcoming election—infrastructure, housing, transportation—are crucial ones; but Ottawa has proved very able in ignoring similar campaigns in the past. Rather than predicting where this mayoral love-in will lead, I’d like to use the occasion to look back at nearly two centuries of real (and imagined) rivalry. Continue reading →

Starbucks: Welfare Capitalism, Public Education, and the History and Possibility of American Social Democracy

April 30, 2015 2 Comments

By Jason Ellis

starbucks.com

Welfare capitalism is back in vogue. Earlier this month Starbucks announced that it will expand an existing company benefit program that offers university tuition coverage to Starbucks workers. The expansion of the program, a plan to extend these benefits to 23,000 workers over the next decade at a cost of $250 million, will target “opportunity youth,” i.e. unemployed 16- to 24-year olds. While this is an innovative move on Starbucks’ part, it is also a move that brings to mind and joins together interesting historical precedents in American working-class, corporate, welfare, and education histories. This small announcement by a big corporation is the spindle from which I will unravel threads of a discussion of the history and possibility of social democracy in the United States. My argument is that historic American commitments to welfare capitalism and to public education spending, and the revival of both in the Starbucks’ announcement, may hint at a dormant social democracy in US society and politics today. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Sixty-One: The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas and the JFK Assassination

April 29, 2015 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. Over the past fifty years, that assassination has resulted in investigations, speculation, and conspiracies about how and why Kennedy died. From the Warren Commission to the Oliver Stone movie, JFK and the circumstances of his death have captured a place in the American imagination. The circumstances of his brother’s and son’s deaths have, along with the romance of life in Camelot, further cemented Kennedy’s place as an American cultural icon.

In 1989, a temporary exhibit opened in Dallas exploring the assassination, its aftermath, and JFK’s legacy. That temporary exhibit has since evolved into the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. Located on the same floor where Lee Harvey Oswald shot the President, the Sixth Floor Museum takes guests from the early days of the Kennedy administration to Walter Cronkite delivering the news to a stunned nation to the conspiracies surrounding the assassination and all points in between. Visitors are guided by an audio tour that supplements the printed material and in addition to the videos and other artifacts, are able to get a glimpse of Oswald’s view onto Elm Street.
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