Ten books to contextualize the history of infectious diseases and vaccinations

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By Kate Barker

[Editors Note: This is the first in a number of follow up posts from the Infectious Disease, Contagion and the History of Vaccines theme week edited by Ian Mosby, Erika Dyck and Jim Clifford. We would like to thank Sean Kheraj for putting us in contact with Kate Barker for this post.]

As a journalist, I am sometimes accused of being a relativist, or worse, a “presentist” because I look to the past to make sense of today. I haven’t got a problem with that. Here’s a case in point. Consider the parallels between these two primary sources:

Don’t!!

Don’t permit your precious little ones to be vaccinated.

Vaccination is not only unnatural, filthy and unclean,

but positively dangerous to health and life.[1]

An emerging body of evidence indicates that vaccines can damage a child’s developing immune system and brain, leading to life-threatening or debilitating disorders like autism, ADHD, asthma, peanut allergy, juvenile diabetes, etc, or to SIDS – death itself.[2]

The first is an excerpt from an 1885 pamphlet distributed in Montreal during a smallpox outbreak. The second comes from the website of the national Canadian not-for-profit organization Vaccine Choice Canada.

It is important to work as historians without occluding our vision of the past with the cultural accretions of our own time—to a point. True objectivity is impossible, but we can signpost our peculiar biases in time and space along the way. Many of the scholars considered here do just that while drawing direct links between their work and contemporary events. Perhaps that isn’t surprising. After all, history and journalism share the same core—a quest for truth and great story telling. Continue reading →

Burrard Inlet, Beaches, and Oil Spills: A Historical Perspective

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by Sean Kheraj

Last week, British Columbians once again witnessed the effects of oil on Burrard Inlet. Local authorities cautioned residents to avoid the water along the shores in Vancouver and West Vancouver after a large slick of bunker fuel oil appeared on the surface of Burrard Inlet. Around 5pm Wednesday, April 8, 2015, a boater notified Port Metro Vancouver that an oil slick was visible and likely leaking from from one of the numerous freighters moored in the inlet. By Friday morning, the Coast Guard estimated that the leak was at least 2,700 litres.

Twitter users posted dozens of photos of globs of oil washed up along the shoreline. They took selfies of their hands dipped in the shiny black residue.

It was a beautiful sunny day, but one that many residents of the Lower Mainland agreed was a sad reminder of the ever-present risks involved with the transportation and use of oil on the harbour.

Of course, this was not the first time that Vancouver’s beaches were coated with oil. Off-shore oil spills on Canada’s Pacific coast and Burrard Inlet have happened before. While they have not been frequent occurrences, these spills have been one of the historical consequences of increased shipping in the harbour, expanded refining activity, and the transportation and use of petroleum products in post-war Canadian energy history. Oily messes are signatures of Canada’s oil-based economy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Sixty: Studying Professional Wrestling

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By Sean Graham

Between the ages of 5 and 12 I spent many Saturday mornings scanning the television channels looking for the wrestling shows. Whether WWF (now WWE) or WCW, I loved watching the matches and seeing how the storylines unfolded from week to week. As I slowly discovered that the outcomes were pre-determined I gradually lost interest, but over time I have come to appreciate the ways in which professional wrestling promoters are able to tell stories. Of course there are issues with the ways in which professional wrestling depicts women and minorities and the industry’s issues with substance abuse are well documented, but at its core professional wrestling is about telling stories.

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with A.J. Ortega from the University of Houston-Victoria about studying professional wrestling in an academic setting. We chat about the challenges of legitimizing the industry in the eyes of academics, problems associated with the use of stereotypes, and his experience as a professional wrestling referee. In addition to his work on wrestling, you can find his writing at www.ajortega.net.
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Terry Fox: A Unifying Influence on Canada?

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This post is the second in a series of four marking the 35th anniversary of Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope.

By Jenny Ellison

Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press

Just months before his death in June 1981, Fitness and Amateur Sport Canada (FAS) announced the first annual “Terry Fox Marathon of Hope Day.” A series of 10-kilometre runs in locations across Canada would “commemorate Terry’s great marathon achievement” and his “courage and unifying influence on our nation.” This announcement from FAS built on widespread national interest in commemorating Terry Fox. Letters poured into the offices of Ministry of Amateur Sport and Prime Ministers Office, calling for a national celebration in honour of Fox. In these letters Fox was described not only as a hero but also as a man who “joined Canada together at a time when” it “was growing farther and farther apart.”

Nationalism was a key part of the public conversation when Fox began his cross-Canada run on April 12, 1980. Six weeks later Quebecers would vote in a referendum on sovereignty-association. Even though 60 percent of voters in the province voted against transforming their relationship to Canada, the issue of Quebec separation loomed large in the minds of English Canadians. Commentators of the time described 1980 as a bleak year. For example, Globe and Mail editorialist John Fraser described Canada as a nation with fractures “as wide as they have every been.” And, in his in his 1981 Lament for a Nation-style polemical Canada Lost, Canada Found, journalist Peter Desbarats characterized this period as one with a “never-ending panorama of missed opportunities…and vast potentialities that never seem to be realized.” Terry Fox ran directly into this national malaise, a good news story at a time when Canada seemed to be in crisis.

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“What Next for WITH?”: A Scandalously Brief History of a Feminist Listerv

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By Beth A. Robertson

In 1983, eminent historian of technology, Joan Rothschild wrote “the omission of the female affects how we know and what we know, and our very deepest beliefs and concerns about technology…” [1] Her words were one of many that began to challenge how women were strategically distanced from technology, science and empirical knowledge more broadly. Not one to leave revolution to chance, Joan Rothschild was also active in establishing a more prominent voice for women in the academic field of technological history. She briefly charts this development in the edited collection Machina Ex Dea. Here, Rothschild writes of the growing involvement of women in the Society for the History of Technology throughout the 1970s, as well as the founding of the special interest group Women in Technological History (WITH) in 1976. As Rothschild writes, WITH was formed with the aim of encouraging feminist analysis and research in the field of the history of technology. Although emerging from the American context, this feminist organization quickly gained an international membership, drawing scholars from Canada, Europe, Asia and beyond.  Continue reading →

The Ideological Work of Commemoration

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By Jamie Swift

In the 1985 Argentinian film, The Official Story, one of the characters, a student, angrily proclaims that his country’s history textbooks had been “written by assassins.” Stories, as we know, vary considerably in the telling. The dominant narrative – to use the now shopworn term – tends to be recounted by the loudest voices. Hardly assassins. But often people with only a passing acquaintance with evidence.

So it is with the Official Story of Canada’s wars.

Just as the Harper government’s spasm of bellicose patriotic storytelling got underway with the centenary of the War of 1812, Governor General David Johnson came up with a curious claim. “When we study our history and the wars in which we fought, the wars overseas, it has been to purchase our freedom, our liberties.” [1]

Such bloodletting would, presumably, include such noble struggles in buying Canadian liberty as the Boer War, fought to ensure British mining companies gained access to South Africa’s vast gold deposits. Tellingly, the government recently added the South African war to Ottawa’s National War Memorial, ignoring the civilian death toll in concentration camps run by the British that far exceeded the number of actual Boer fighters killed in combat. Continue reading →

Terry Fox Was an Activist

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This month, Active History is pleased to present a series of posts by Jenny Ellison marking the 35th anniversary of Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope.

By Jenny Ellison

5288858

Winnipeg Free Press

A few years ago, I made a visit to Library and Archives Canada to pull files about Terry Fox. In a folder labeled “Terry Fox Marathon of Hope Day” I found forty letters to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Governor General Edward Schreyer and Minister of Sport Gerald Regan about the runner. Written during his lifetime and just after his death in June 1981, the letters were earnest, handwritten documentation of what most of us already know: many Canadians feel an emotional connection to Terry Fox.

I am a Terry Fox runner and have been, on and off, since I was a kid. Is there anything more Canadian than the annual fundraising runs for cancer research? Named one of the “greatest Canadians” in CBC’s 2004 TV show of the same name, and again in 2014, Fox is a go-to symbol in conversations about national heroes. But what else is there to say about him? What does studying his life add to our understanding of Canada today and in the past?
Continue reading →

“Setting Canadian History Right?: A Response to Ken Coates’ ‘Second Thoughts about Residential Schools’”

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By Crystal Fraser and Ian Mosby

As two young historians of Canada’s notorious Indian Residential School System – one finishing her PhD, the other currently in his second postdoctoral fellowship – we were wary when we saw Ken Coates’ recent opinion piece in the Dorchester Review.[1] At a first glance, the title, in particular, had us worried: “Second Thoughts about Residential Schools” brought to mind Thomas Flanagan’s misguided monograph First Nations? Second Thoughts. Though deeply concerned at what lay ahead, Coates is an historian we both respect a great deal, so, from our computers in Alberta and Ontario, we read on.

The commentary itself was clearly written to spark a debate. Like many of the editorials that fill Canadian newspapers, it is written in a conversational style without footnotes or references and – more importantly – it attempts to challenge what Coates’ sees as hegemonic narratives characterizing the study of Indian residential schools. And given that the online version of the article (like every page on the Dorchester Review website) is flanked by quotes from David Frum proclaiming that the journal is “Setting Canadian history right,” the essay’s ambition to upend the sacred cows of the Canadian historical profession, itself, are immediately apparent.

Coates stresses that he has “struggled over the last thirty years to make sense of the impact of residential schools on Aboriginal people” and the essay is presented as a culmination of that “struggle.” To be sure, his is a piece about how academics might struggle with their own politics under the veil of objectivity and how that relates to the kinds of historical research we undertake. Another historian, one specializing in Indian residential schooling, might have more deeply probed, for instance, how Indigenous people have struggled with the long legacy and effects of Indian residential schools. Coates, though, begins in a decidedly personal place located well outside of Indigenous experiences: namely, memories of attending an Anglican summer camp located near the Carcross Residential School and spending a week in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, as “the guest of a Catholic research school” where “the rules and regulations almost turned [him] into a twelve-year-old Che Guevera by the time [he] left.”

This leads us to the two most problematic elements of Coates’ essay that, together, constitute the crux of his argument. [Read More]

 

ActiveHistory.ca is pleased to publish Crystal Fraser and Ian Mosby’s response to Ken Coates’s ‘Second Thoughts about Residential Schools’ as part of our Papers Section. ActiveHistory.ca strives to provide timely, well-written and thoroughly researched papers on a variety of history-related topics.  Expanded conference papers or short essays that introduce an upcoming book project or respond to current affairs are great starting points for the type of paper we publish. For more information visit our Papers Section or contact papers@activehistory.ca. 

Spring 2015 History Matters Series Explores Sports History

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The Spring 2015 History Matters lecture series takes an entertaining and slightly idiosyncratic look at sports history to mark the Pan Am games in Toronto. The series—now in its fifth year–is a partnership between ActiveHistory.ca and the Toronto Public Library.

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Vaccines and the Environmental History of Medicine

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By Liza Piper

Editor’s note: This post was originally published by The Otter and is the second in a series of posts edited by Tina Adcock considering the intersection between environmental history and the histories of science, technology, and medicine.

In recent weeks, stories with pro-vaccination and anti-vaccination sentiments have appeared prominently in the news. They address the measles cases that originated in Disneyland and the fears of a significant increase in measles cases in Ebola-affected nations, where the latter disease has disrupted vaccination programs. In the Disneyland cases, media reports have highlighted the role of parents who refused to vaccinate their children. This is, in part, a legacy of Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent research linking autism to the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine. These reports discuss the role unvaccinated children can play in diminishing herd immunity and spreading otherwise well-controlled “diseases of childhood” like measles, but including also mumps (see the NHL outbreaks from last year), rubella, and whooping cough. Continue reading →