Active History

Review of Testimonies and Secrets: The Story of a Nova Scotia Family 1844-1977, by Robert M. Mennel

February 20, 2015 3 Comments

By Christine Moreland

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. Can we then ever really understand who ‘they’ were and how they lived? In Testimonies and Secrets: the Story of a Nova Scotia Family 1844-1977, Robert M. Mennel invites the reader to explore the themes of family, work and community life in a very foreign place: Crousetown, Nova Scotia.

University of Toronto Press, 2013
336 pages, Paperback $26.26.

Mennel pulls together diary entries, letters, oral history and historical texts into a narrative that connects three generations of the Crouse/Eikle family. In 1998, the author discovered a dusty collection of papers that revealed the private thoughts and recollections of John Will Crouse, his daughter Elvie Eikle and her son Harold. Mennel’s interpretation of the family papers focuses on personal relationships between family members, while also considering the influence of global conflicts, social change and the industrial modernization of the period. Overall, the book leaves the impression of an amazing sense of change that occurs through three generations, even as other aspects of daily life endure.Both grandfather and grandson struggled with marriage, community relations and religion. Continue reading →

Who Killed Canadian Studies?

February 19, 2015 7 Comments

By Colin Coates

The world of Canadian Studies, which according to the International Council for Canadian Studies includes some 7,000 scholars in 70 countries, is facing difficult times. Strangely enough, one of its chief opponents seems to be our own government. Since the 1970s successive Liberal and Progressive Conservative federal governments, along with various provincial governments, have supported the principle that targeted funding can enhance the profile of Canadian issues in academic institutions abroad. Most of the time, those governments respected the values of academic freedom, believing that scholars could research and teach about the country without attempting to control what they did. But recently, the current Canadian government has decided that it will no longer support such work. Continue reading →

Spoils of the War of 1812: Part II: British Honour

February 18, 2015 2 Comments

By Alan Corbiere

This post is the second part of a series of essays by Alan Corbiere focusing on Anishinaabeg participation in the War of 1812.

This deputation included Tecumseh’s son and sister

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 in order 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 second in a series of posts that explore this question. Last month I examined Michilimackinac’s importance for Anishinaabe peoples. Today’s post addresses British policy as explained to the Anishinaabeg in Council. Next month, in the final installment in the series, I will focus on Anishinaabe reactions to the news that Great Britain and USA had entered into a peace treaty.

Prior to the War of 1812 General Brock understood that there were not enough British forces to defend the Canadas. He knew that the only chance to defend the colonies was to enlist the aid of the Native peoples, including the Western Confederacy and the Six Nations. Continue reading →

The Anti-Terror Act: Government and Mobility in History

February 17, 2015 No Comments

By Bret Edwards

Last month, the Canadian government introduced the Anti-Terror Act, following recent incidents in Ottawa and Quebec that have elevated fears about “violent jihadism” in Canada and its links to global organizations. There has been a lot of discussion about how new proposed powers of online surveillance in the Act will allow security objectives to trump freedom of expression. Yet less has been said about its other parts that relate to regulating mobility and the additional threat they pose to civil liberties. If it passes, the Act will allow federal authorities to get a court order to restrict the movements of people thought to likely carry out future terrorism and will also relax the legal threshold to prevent citizens suspected of being terrorists from boarding a plane.

These sections of the Act highlight how, in times of perceived crisis, government seeks to control mobility within and across its borders in order to protect society and its dominant values and beliefs. Far from isolated, it is only the latest example of a much longer national history of government regulating movement during periods of anxiety like the current one. And in its scope, it risks repeating instances in the past where authorities overreached in attempting to counter perceived threats to security or prevailing norms. Continue reading →

Turmoil and Meddling at the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK

February 15, 2015 1 Comment

Since the new year began, just six-and-a-half weeks ago, considerable changes have been made to the direction of the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK. Earlier in the month, the High Commission, which collaborates with this UK charity, added four new members to the board, signalling that problems were afoot. Last week, another four members of the board resigned as a faction of the board (bolstered by the new members) motioned (successfully) towards the removal of Rachel Killick, an emeritus professor of Canadian and French studies. These board members are well known to Canadian academics: historian Margaret MacMillan, Canada 2020 advisor Diana Carney, and UK-based Canadian Studies professors Steve Hewitt and Susan Hodgett. The details of the trouble at the Foundation for Canadian Studies can be found on The Globe and Mail, The National Post, and Christopher Moore’s History News. In an effort to better understand this situation, below we repost the notice that Steve Hewitt distributed on Facebook explaining his decision to leave the board:

Dear friends (especially those working on Canada in the UK.)

Last June I became a trustee on the board for the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK. Continue reading →

Podcast: The Sweetest Sounds: Musical Life in Ontario 1880-1920

February 13, 2015 2 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

On October 21, 2014 Madelaine Morrison delivered a talk entitled The Sweetest Sounds: Musical Life in Ontario, 1880-1920 as part of the Ottawa Historical Association lecture series. In her address, Morrison discussed the evolution of the piano and its place in Ontario’s social life during these years.

Activehistory.ca is pleased to present a recording of the talk.

The Allumettières in Sites of Collective Remembering

February 12, 2015 3 Comments

By Conrad McCallum

c121146k There has been a renewed interest in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century story of the female match workers at the former E.B. Eddy Match Factory in Hull, Quebec. For me, this is another good example of recent efforts to regionally situate the big themes of social history in Canada. It also illustrates the challenges of trying to recognize voices of labour history which for the most part do not appear in public commemoration.

The allumettières, as they were known, are chiefly remembered for their role at the centre of two labour disputes, in 1919 and 1924, which were the first in Quebec involving a women’s union. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Fifty-Nine: Curling in Canada

February 11, 2015 4 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

“It’s not just a rock. It’s forty-two pounds of polished granite, with a beveled underbelly and a handle a human being can hold. And it may have no practical purpose in and of itself but it is a repository of human possibility and if it’s handled just right it will exact a kind of poetry. For ten years I’ve drilled for oil in ninety-three countries, five different continents and not once have I done anything to equal the grace of a well thrown rock sliding down a sheet. Not once.” – Chris Cutter (Paul Gross) in Men With Brooms

While that may be a slightly-over-the-top romantic description of curling, it does speak to the place the sport has in this country (Full disclosure: I had the opportunity to be an extra in Men With Brooms, an experience which also gave me the chance to meet Leslie Nielsen and have him sign my copy of Airplane. Because of this, I will forever claim that is an amazing movie). Since the sport entered the Olympics, however, some of the romance seems to have been removed from the game. We’ve gone from overweight guys smoking darts on the ice to a time where curlers are being suspended for PEDs.

Over the past year, I’ve had an opportunity to travel to some of the Canadian Curling Association’s national championships to talk to curlers about the state of the game. From veterans to rookies, there is a clear sense that the sport represents something uniquely Canadian but at the same time there are serious issues that must be addressed in order to ensure its long-term survival.

In this episode of the History Slam I revisit some of my conversations with curlers over the past year. I’ve talked to Olympic Gold Medalists like Kaitlyn Lawes and John Morris, world champions like Mary-Anne Arsenault, national champions like Lisa Weagle, and mainstays on the tour like Chelsea Carey and Stefanie Lawton. We address the state of curling in Canada, the introduction of relegation to the Brier and Scotties, the concept of professional curlers, and the sport’s general diversity problem.
Continue reading →

Passing the Torch: The CBC and Commemoration in 1964 and 2014

February 10, 2015 2 Comments

By Teresa Iacobelli

In 1964, fifty years following the start of the First World War, the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) aired the seventeen-part radio series In Flanders’ Fields. Now, at the centenary of the Great War, the CBC has again leaned upon this series as one of its programming highlights to commemorate the anniversary. In Flanders’ Fields recently re-aired as The Bugle and the Passing Bell. The series was re-edited into ten, half-hour radio programs. While each episode had a brief introduction by host Beza Seife, essentially the programs relied upon the same information and oral histories presented in 1964.

The original In Flanders’ Fields purported to tell the story of the war through the voices of those who were there. The series was drawn from over 800 hours of interviews with 600 veterans from across Canada. While In Flanders’ Fields should be recognized for the breadth of topics that it covered, the program also suffered from significant flaws that included the manipulation of oral history and the practice of “thesis-based research.”

A comparison of the raw interview transcripts with the on-air programs makes these flaws strikingly clear. Raw transcripts reveal interviewers frequently committing blatant transgressions that compromised the integrity of the interviews. Continue reading →

What’s in a Place Name: Adelaide Hoodless and Mona Parsons

February 9, 2015 3 Comments

By Thomas Peace

Adelaide Hoodless with three of her children, circa 1887

Over the past week, ActiveHistory.ca has run a couple of posts about the politics of naming and local commemoration. These essays reminded me of a debate that Paul Bennett and I had a couple of years ago over the merits of renaming schools as the Halifax school board decided that the name Cornwallis was no longer an appropriate moniker for an educational institute (it isn’t BTW). These posts also coincided with a lecture I give every year in the Canadian history survey course on the social gospel, moral reform and suffrage. In this lecture, I spend a few minutes discussing the life and impact of Adelaide Hunter Hoodless, a conservative maternal feminist who played an important role in organizing a number of prominent women’s organizations and more generally in Canadian education at the end of the nineteenth century.

For me, lecturing on Adelaide Hoodless is deeply meaningful. Not only because Hoodless is a fascinating woman but – to be frank – mostly because this is the name of the elementary school I attended in Hamilton, Ontario. So when Kaleigh Bradley posted last Monday about the power of naming and renaming (and the importance of identifying, acknowledging and returning to Indigenous place names), I was reminded of my debate with Paul, where I made a similar argument: names can and should change, and that’s a good thing. In this context, though, and thinking about Adelaide Hoodless, it struck me just how important some settler place names are in determining how we situate ourselves in the world. And sometimes, as I hope to demonstrate at the end of this post, debates over renaming can lead to misguided government policies where naming practices are watered down for fear of controversy.

The impact of the public school’s name on my thinking was a long time coming. Although I spent eight years at Adelaide Hoodless Public School – even visiting her birthplace on a sick day with my Dad – it was not until I started teaching the Canadian history survey course that I came to learn about who Hoodless was and the important ways that she both shaped, and was shaped by, Canadian society. It is quite likely that I would have skipped over her biography in my teaching if it weren’t for the fact that I attended a school named in her honour. But – after digging a little deeper – I’ve increasingly come to believe that Hoodless’s life is worth remembering and teaching. Continue reading →

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