Emotion and History: The Book of Negroes

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By Andrew Nurse

What kinds of emotions does history call up? What purposes do emotions serve as part of historical understanding? The answer to the first question is simple: strong ones, at least to judge from the polemics that periodically polarize the work of professional historians or public discourse on the past. The second question is more difficult to address because emotions vary. What I find breathtaking or inspiring, someone else finds lacklustre or irrelevant. But, emotional reactions to history indicate something. At the very least they show how important the past is and how connected many people feel to it. After all, if the past were irrelevant, it would not garner strong emotion. Emotional connections to the past, I want to suggest, can do other things as well. They might allow — or, perhaps, even force — us to think about the past and its relationship to the present in challenging, different, and important ways. Continue reading →

Spoils of the War of 1812: Part III: Anishinaabe Aspirations

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By Alan Corbiere

This is the third part of a series of essays by Alan Corbiere focusing on Anishinaabe participation in the War of 1812. 

Amédée Forestier, Signing of the Treaty of Ghent, Christmas Eve, 1814. No Anishinaabeg Present.

Amédée Forestier, Signing of the Treaty of Ghent, Christmas Eve, 1814. No Anishinaabeg Present.

The Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe, Odawa, Potowatomi) have always revered the island of Michilimackinac, so much so that at the conclusion of the War of 1812, the Odawa tried to keep it in their possession. The Odawa suggested that the British negotiators offer the Americans a greater quantity of Anishinaabe land on the mainland as a price to keep Michilimackinac in the possession of the Anishinaabeg with trading access allowed to the British. We know that this did not happen but was it possible?

This is the third and final post in a series exploring this question. In January, I discussed the importance of Michilimackinac for Anishinaabe peoples and last month’s essay addressed British policy as it was explained to the Anishinaabeg in council. Today’s post focuses on the Anishinaabe reactions to the Treaty of Ghent, official news of which was sent to the Department of Indian Affairs on 12 March 1815 with instructions to “notify the same, in full council, to the Indian Warriors.”[1]

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Research is Getting a Bit More Open: Good News for Historical Research in Canada

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A knowledge explosion!

A knowledge explosion!

By Ian Milligan

When we started up ActiveHistory.ca way back in 2009 (!), we did it with a pretty simple vision in mind: historians were producing good scholarship, but it was inaccessible. It was inaccessible for a few reasons: sometimes we don’t exactly write for a general audience (we’ve been guilty of dropping jargon around this site too, I know, but we try), and even if you wanted to read most of what we do, you’d have to pay. Books are a relative bargain – you can get an academic paperback for $20-35 dollars. Articles are not a good deal in comparison: one-offs are around $25. We figured a free website would be one way to reach people, and I think we’ve tapped into an audience here.

Well, maybe ActiveHistory.ca’s got some more competition on the block, thanks to a great new policy from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, or SSHRC. SSHRC’s the federal granting agency that helps support research in Canada: historians apply to it with our project ideas, and generally around one in five of us get good news. That sounds low, and alarmingly it’s dropping, but it’s high enough that your average historian employed full-time at a university can hold out some hope that they’ll get it. All that is to say: SSHRC has some power, because they give us money, and money speaks. Continue reading →

An (Ice) Bridge to the Past: Niagara Falls has Frozen

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by Daniel Macfarlane [Originally published on the Otter]

Niagara Falls has frozen. Well, not really. The entire water flow of the famous Horseshoe Falls doesn’t actually freeze, despite ‘polar vortexes’ (more commonly known to most Canadians as ‘winter’). Water keeps flowing underneath the ice. The American Falls does occasionally dry up due to ice jams upstream (and this has happened once in recorded history to the Horseshoe Falls: see note [1]). Tourists are nonetheless flocking to see the gelid cataract – and some people are even climbing it!

Elevated view of Horseshoe Falls in Winter 2013. Daniel Macfarlane

Elevated view of Horseshoe Falls in Winter 2013. Daniel Macfarlane

Wind can send large chunks of ice from Lake Erie down the Niagara River. Ice jams at the base of the waterfalls form what are known as “ice bridges.”  In the 19th century these congealed water spans became an occasion for festivities, as the two Niagara Falls communities on either side of the international border would use them for transnational ice parties. Talk about having a drink on the rocks! Continue reading →

Sexing Up Canada’s First World War

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By Zachary Abram

VD Poster 1Canadian 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 →

Moral Goodness and Venereal Disease: Sexual Health Education in Ontario

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By Krista McCracken

Pure Girl Is Waiting Somewhere Poster. 1922. American Social Health Association

Pure Girl Is Waiting Somewhere Poster. 1922. American Social Health Association

The Ontario government recently announced significant changes to the health and physical education curriculum in Ontario schools. This revision includes updating the outdated sexual health education curriculum that hasn’t been changed since 1998. The previous curriculum was designed in an era before text messages, smart phones, and the social media.

Very similar to the curriculum changes proposed in 2010 the recent updated sexual education program includes instruction on consent, the risks of posting sexual material online, sexting, gender identity, and mental health. Copies of the complete revised elementary and secondary health physical education curriculum can be found here and here. The Ontario government has also released parent guides which highlight the changes to the sexual health instruction. So far these changes have been protested, praised, and dissected. Since its introduction Ontario’s sexual health instruction has often been a point of controversy and has repeatedly been revised to reflect a changing society and changing conceptions of relationships, sexuality, and morals.

Sexual health education in Ontario has a long standing history and has been incorporated into classroom instruction long before it was formalized in written curriculum documents. The movement to support the creation of sexual health education programs began in the early 1900s, often with organizations such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union promoting social hygiene. The earliest forms of sexual health education emphasized the dangers of sexual activity and was strongly linked to concepts of goodness and sin. Continue reading →

Film Friday: Tilco Striker

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Active History is pleased to present our first Film Friday. If you have created a film about history and are interested in screening it on our site, drop us a line.

By Matthew Hayes

Inimage the middle of winter in 1965, women workers at a plastics factory in Peterborough, Ontario went on strike. The Tilco strikers were fighting against unacceptable treatment – harassment and pitifully low wages – from management. I originally made this short film as an entry to OPSEU Local 365’s contest celebrating Trent University’s 50th anniversary. The contest called for creative entries that highlighted the role of organized labour. The film is based on Joan Sangster’s 2004 article “”We No Longer Respect the Law”: The Tilco Strike, Labour Injunctions, and the State”, from Labour/Le Travail. Continue reading →

The Home Archivist – Dust, Mold, and Adhesives, Part II

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Home-Archivist-300x170 2By Jessica Dunkin

In the last post, I introduced readers of the Home Archivist to two institutions committed to the preservation of Canada’s documentary heritage, Library and Archives Canada’s (LAC) Preservation Centre and the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI), and two professionals at work in the field of paper conservation, Doris St-Jacques and Greg Hill. I also provided readers with a list of safety equipment and tools that paper conservators use to process historical documents. In part two, we will explore how conservation professionals put those tools to use when they encounter paper documents affected by dust, mold, soot, adhesives, and other accretions.

Greg and Jess 127737-0006

Conservator Greg Hill and Author Jessica Dunkin at the Canadian Conservation Institute {Photo Credit: © Government of Canada, Canadian Conservation Institute, CCI 127737-0006}

A quick disclaimer, these posts are not intended as an instruction manual for the home conservator, but rather to increase public awareness of heritage conservation and to demonstrate the technical skill required to perform conservation treatments on paper. LAC and CCI have specialized facilities designed for the conservation and preservation of a wide range of archival materials. No home laboratory, however well equipped, can stand in for these kinds of facilities. Nor can a blog post replace the training and technical expertise of a professional conservator, especially when dealing with potentially hazardous substances like mold and animal accretions or performing delicate work like tear repair. To locate a conservator in Canada, please contact the Canadian Association of Professional Conservators (CAPC).

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Before turning our attention to treatment options for the MacKendrick letters, I want to pause briefly to consider three guiding principles in the field of heritage conservation. Recognizing that historically some treatment practices and materials have been damaging to documents and artifacts, and that current practices may also prove to be harmful, conservators should only perform treatments that are reversible. They should also adhere to the principle of minimal intervention, which, to borrow from the Saskatchewan Heritage Foundation, “means to do as much as necessary and as little as possible.” The objective here is to preserve the document for future users without compromising the integrity of the original. For paper documents, some cleaning, typically surface cleaning, is advisable to improve readability. It may also be necessary to remove substances such as dust, soot, and adhesives that hasten deterioration. Continue reading →

An American Legion in the CEF? Crossing Borders during “Canada’s” First World War

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By Chris Dickon

Canadian Cross of Sacrifice at Arlington National Cemetery

Canadian Cross of Sacrifice at Arlington National Cemetery

On the American Armistice Day, November 11, 1927, the United States and Canada came together at Arlington Cemetery outside of Washington DC to dedicate a monument to Americans who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), Canada’s First World War army. The representatives that day remarked upon a feature of their shared history that was not well understood and appreciated at the time, or since.

In a government memo a month earlier, perhaps in preparation for the November 11th event, Canadian officials estimated that 40,000 Americans had enlisted in the CEF, Continue reading →

Willkommen im Anthropozän (Welcome to the Anthropocene)

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By Jim Clifford

UASC Container Ship (created by Roel Hemkes. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)

I recently visited the special Willkommen im Anthropozän exhibition at the science and technology Deutsches Museum in Munich and was very impressed by the museum’s efforts to convey the history and science of the anthropocene in a complex but accessible manner. The anthropocene thesis, introduced about fifteen years ago, argues that humans are transforming the global environment at an unprecedented scale. The Deutsches Museum exhibition is the first major effort to explore the anthropocene in a museum. The English digital companion website hosted by the Rachel Carson Center introduces the concept broadly:

Crumbling skyscrapers, crushed soda cans, and worn-out car tires: concrete, aluminum, and plastic are the physical traces of our time. It is a time in which humans intervene in nature, and thus change and shape it. A world has developed in which humans and their needs play a dominant role in the ecological system. The human influence is so great that man-made changes are becoming visible in the geological record and there is talk that a new geological era has arrived: welcome to the Anthropocene. [About the exhibition]

Proponents, such as Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, argue we’ve left the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago, and started a new geological epoch. There is no scientific consensus in the field of geology and the anthropocene is not yet formally recognized as an epoch, but their is little doubt humans are changing the world in which we live. The global environment has significantly altered during the past few centuries, from climate change and mass deforestation to artificial fertilizers, global supply networks and rapid urbanization. These transformations are not universally negative or apocalyptic, but even the more benign result in a new dynamic between humans and the other lifeforms with which we share the planet.  For this reason, the anthropocene is developing into a major field of study and is starting to gain some traction in the media (see this radio documentary produced for The Current on CBC Radio and a cover story from The Economist, both from 2011).  These media stories along with the success of the first month the Deutsches exhibition suggests the anthropocene is transitioning from an academic to a public discussion.

Continue reading →