Active History

Techno-Feeling in the Classroom: Technology, Empathy and Learning

September 4, 2014 No Comments

Beth A. Robertson

Technology forms us as much as we, in turn, form technology. This is not a new idea by any means, as many scholars, from Donna Haraway to Don Ihde, have argued much the same. More than apparatuses that are used benignly to perform certain functions, technology infuses our social order, our sense of self, and how we learn. However much we might ponder this conception of technology in theory, does knowing this shape our approach to the classroom? As I currently scramble to finalize details for teaching this Fall, I am struck by how computing technologies in particular have become ubiquitous in the modern university classroom. Whether online platforms, an array of applications or social networks, teaching at the university level requires a regular engagement with digital technologies of some form. The process by which we have arrived here has not necessarily been smooth and is still a matter of discussion—much as recent Active History posts by Sean Kheraj and Gregory Kennedy demonstrate.

Last year, I designed a reflection assignment around the use of Google Maps for a course on transnational sexualities. It was and is still my desire that this will not only develop student’s writing and research skills (although that is definitely one benefit). I also hope that students will use the assignment to rethink their own understandings of sex and intimacy in light of the experiences of others, living in different places and at different times. In other words, I integrated Google Maps into an assignment intended to foster a sense of empathy among my students on a global scale. The astute and creative reflections I received from my students while teaching this course convinced me that the assignment was (and I hope will continue to be) a success. In retrospect, I think the assignment performed another function as well. Reading the thoughts of my students about how they were ingesting the material of the course, alongside their perspective of various urban environments they ‘explored’ through Google Maps, at times made me reconsider my own thinking, or see a particular theory in a different light. Obviously Google Maps was not the only factor that encouraged my students to think critically about global processes and its consequences upon historical and contemporary patterns of sexuality. It does, however, seem apparent that the technology at least helped stimulate a way of thinking among my students, which, in turn, influenced how and what I taught. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Fifty: Growing Up Consumers

September 3, 2014 2 Comments

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By Sean Graham

Whenever I go back to my parents’ house, I am confronted with a pile of stuff from my childhood that they want me to go through. From clothes to toys to sports equipment, there’s a lot of things that I had growing up that I no longer need or want. And from what I gather, this is not a unique situation as well have things from our childhoods that collect in basements and attics.

These items are remnants of our roles as childhood consumers. Growing up we all encounter a world in which we are expected to take our roles as consumers – the frequent studies showing how much advertising children are exposed to on a daily basis speaks to this. And that pressure on young people to becoming active consumers has been an important part of the study of consumerism in recent years.

In this episode of the History Slam, I chat with Katharine Rollwagen of Vancouver Island University about her research on childhood consumerism. We talk about marketing towards kids during the Depression, the impact of the Baby Boom, and the methodology of studying consumerism. This is the final episode in our series recorded at this year’s Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting in St. Catharine’s, Ontario.

Sean Graham is a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa where he is currently working on a project that examines the early years of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He has previously studied at Nipissing University, the University of the West Indies, and the University of Regina and like any red-blooded Canadian his ultimate dream is to be a curling champion while living on a diet of beer and poutine.

ActiveHistory.ca repost – International Women’s Day (IWD) and Human Rights 2014

August 29, 2014 3 Comments

ActiveHistory.ca is on a two-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in early September. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our most popular blog posts from this site over the past five years and some of the editors’ favourite posts from the past year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers – see you again in September!

The following post was originally featured on March 7, 2014.

By Veronica Strong-Boag

Author’s note: This post was commissioned as an IWD blog by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. It was initially approved and posted by the Museum on 4 March 2014. It was, however, almost immediately withdrawn as ‘Communications’ at the Museum deemed the one line comment on the current federal Conservative government unacceptable as written. The offer of a substantive footnote and illustrative example from the author brought no reply. ActiveHistory.ca has reposted this time-sensitive contribution here, to which examples of anti-women policies and a footnote have been added.

International Women’s Day on 8^th March should be a key date in the human rights calendar. Its place is hard-won. When Charlotte Bunch, a leading figure in the creation of UN Women (2010), insisted in 1990 that women’s rights are human rights in the Human Rights Quarterly and Edward Broadbent, from the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, served in 1993 as a judge in the Vienna Tribunal on Women’s Human Rights, one half of humanity’s entitlement to fair dealing remained globally contested. That struggle continues.

Although recognition that women’s rights are human rights pre-dates even writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) in the western tradition, IWD emerged in 1908 with a mass women suffrage meeting organized by American socialists. By 1911 the idea had reached Europe, where again it persisted as a special interest of the left. Unlike ‘Mother’s Day,’ also first observed in 1908, which celebrated women as maternal and peace-loving, IWD initially concentrated on waged and industrial labour. Early champions such as the German socialist Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) intended to highlight tragedies such as the 1911 New York Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and economic oppression generally. When IWD became an official holiday in Russia after 1917 and in the new People’s Republic of China in 1949, even as both countries failed to offer equality, liberal democracies, not to mention dictatorships, shied away.

Champions of equality, however, persisted.

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – Indigenous History in the Classroom: Four Principles, Four Questions

August 28, 2014 No Comments

The following post was originally featured on November 18, 2013.

By Carolyn Podruchny

Is teaching Indigenous history any different than teaching other histories? This question was posed to organizers of a day-long Teaching History Symposium on history, heritage, and education for Toronto area public school teachers, heritage experts, graduate students, and faculty members in the History Department at York University.[1] Rather than providing an answer, I suggest more questions to consider, and principles to guide decisions about teaching Indigenous history. I suspect that methods employed in teaching Indigenous histories can serve as a model for teaching about the histories of all peoples in the past.

I am a historian of Indigenous peoples and French colonists on the land that came to be known as Canada, and I specialize widely in histories of Anishinaabe, Cree, and Metis. I teach courses that are specific to Indigenous histories and general early Canadian or early North American histories that happen to include a majority of material that concerns Indigenous peoples. I do not have any Indigenous heritage myself, and I recognize my past as a descendent of Ukrainian immigrants on the Canadian prairies. I have benefitted from the system of colonialism implemented by the Canadian government, which dispossessed Indigenous peoples. My grandparents farmed on Cree, Anishinaabe, and Metis lands in western Manitoba (outside of Ethelbert and Ozerna); I grew up in Selkirk, Manitoba on the site of a former Anishinaabe community, the Peguis Band, which was relocated 160 km north in 1907.[2] Today I live on Mississauga land (in the town of Oakville), and I want to recognize that York University occupies lands that were once home to Mississaugas, other Anishinaabeg, Wendats, and Eries.[3]

Why am I acknowledging my ethnic heritage and history, and why do I remark on the past owners of the lands on which I live and work? I do so for three reasons.

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – Tracking Canada’s History of Oil Pipeline Spills

August 27, 2014 No Comments

The following post was originally featured on November 7, 2013.

Crowds gather to watch cranes joining two ends of an oil pipeline before the official ceremony commemorating the joining of the pipeline of an oil tanker terminal, Portland, Maine, with refineries in Montreal, Quebec, 1941. Source: Library and Archives Canada, WRM 1054.

By Sean Kheraj

Last week, CBC News published a series of articles about energy pipeline safety on Canada’s federally-regulated system of oil and gas pipelines, revealing that between 2000 and 2011 Canada suffered 1,047 separate pipeline incidents. Its findings confirm my own earlier research on the history of oil pipeline spills on the network of interprovincial and international oil pipelines that fall under the jurisdiction of the National Energy Board.

Under an access-to-information request, CBC reporters obtained a data set of pipeline incidents covering a period from 2000 to 2011. It showed that the number of incidents swelled from 45 in 2000 to 142 in 2011. This roughly corresponds with what I found for the period from 2000-2009.

These new reports demonstrate the great difficulty and challenge of documenting the history of oil pipeline spills in Canada. Upon receiving a CD with 405 pages of incident reports, CBC reporters quickly realized that they needed to recompile this data to make it machine-readable for analysis. Furthermore, the data sets were inconsistent and, in some instances, incomplete. For the most part, the information on pipeline incidents on the federally-regulated system is provided by the pipeline operators and not by NEB staff. As such, the information arrives in an unpredictable format from incident to incident. This left CBC with no choice but to sift through all of the 1,047 incidents and fill in the blanks with other NEB documents and reports from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (the regulator responsible for reporting on major pipeline incidents).

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – Gin and Tonic: A Short History of a Stiff Drink

August 26, 2014 No Comments

The following post was originally featured on August 14, 2012.

Gin and Tonic. Image from Wikipedia.

By Jay Young

The Gin and Tonic – what better a drink during the dog days of summer? Put some ice in a glass, pour one part gin, add another part tonic water, finish with a slice of lime, and you have a refreshing drink to counter the heat. But it is also steeped in the history of medicine, global commodity frontiers, and the expansion of the British Empire.

Let’s start with the gin. Although it is commonly known as the quintessential English spirit, the history of gin underlines the island’s connections to the outside world. The origin of gin – unlike the drink itself – is quite murky. Sylvius de Bouve, a sixteenth-century Dutch physician, is the individual associated with the development of gin. He created a highly-alcoholic medicinal concoction called Jenever. It featured the essential oils of juniper berries, which the physician believed could improve circulation and cure other ailments. The berry, deriving from a small coniferous plant, had long been treasured for its medicinal properties, including its use during the plague.

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – An Unsettling Prairie History: A Review of James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains

August 25, 2014 No Comments

The following post was originally featured on December 5, 2013.

By Kevin Plummer

“Those Reserve Indians are in a deplorable state of destitution, they receive from the Indian Department just enough food to keep soul and body together, they are all but naked, many of them barefooted,” Lawrence Clarke wrote in 1880 of near-starvation Cree around Fort Carlton. “Should sickness break out among them in their present weakly state,” the long-time Hudson’s Bay Company employee concluded, “the fatality would be dreadful” (Daschuk, 114).

Sickness did break out, with tuberculosis and other infectious diseases decimating a reserve population made vulnerable to disease by years of famine and inadequate government rations. The loss of life was immense, James Daschuk recounts in Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, and amounted to a “state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities” whose effects “haunt us as a nation still” (186).

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – Slavery in Canada? I Never Learned That!

August 22, 2014 Comments Off

The following post was originally featured on October 23, 2013.

Slavery advertisement from Upper Canada Gazette, 10 February 1806.

By Natasha Henry

The highly anticipated soon-to-be-released film, 12 Years a Slave, has garnered lots of attention following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film provides a shocking but realistic depiction of American slavery. It is based on the life of Solomon Northrup, a free man, who was kidnapped from his hometown in New York and sold south into slavery. Northup is able to regain his freedom after Canadian Samuel Bass, a carpenter from Prescott, Upper Canada, writes several letters to authorities in New York on his behalf. No doubt, Canadians are proud of the usual portrayal of us as crusaders against American slavery and wear the badge of “Canadians as abolitionists” with honour. Canadians readily embrace the notion of Canada as a haven for American freedom-seekers, who were escaping the same conditions that Solomon Northup endured. Once he was freed, Northrup himself helped fugitives flee to Canada, the “Promised Land.”

But what about Canadian slavery?

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – A Climate Migration Primer

August 21, 2014 No Comments

The following post was originally featured on January 23, 2014.

By Merle Massie

So, I’m writing a book.

What follows, for your January darn-it’s-cold-and-I’m-ready-for-something-kind-of-fun reading pleasure, is a primer (briefing notes) about the book. Given the growing recognition that Mother Nature remains strong and rather angry about human-induced climate change – kudos to everyone who spent Christmas with no power – I’m writing about human migration.

Drawing lessons from families who pulled up stakes and moved during the Great Trek from one biome (prairie south) to another (boreal north) due to drastic climate and economic problems during the Great Depression and Dirty Thirties, this book is based on history but with an eye to practical suggestions for the future. Imagine me having a conversation with my Grandpa and Grandma: what should I do to be prepared? Some of the following five lessons may or may not apply to your situation. It depends if you have a horse. Lessons may be tongue-in-cheek or serious. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which is which.

The underlying premise of the book is that climate change is happening and is worsening, and that Canada (in particular, Canada’s middle north and north) has been pinpointed as a place to which climate migrants from around the world may flee.

So, let’s get started, shall we?

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ActiveHistory.ca repost – Of History and Headlines: Reflections of an Accidental Public Historian

August 20, 2014 No Comments

The following post was originally featured on April 29, 2014.

By Ian Mosby

When I first heard Alvin Dixon’s voice I was driving along Dupont Avenue in Toronto with my partner, Laural, and our three-month-old son, Oscar. Dixon was talking to Rick MacInnes-Rae, who was filling in as the co-host of the CBC Radio show As It Happens. The interview was about Dixon’s experience at the Alberni Indian residential school (AIRS) where he had unwittingly been part of a recently uncovered nutrition experiment conducted by the federal government during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In addition to describing his memories of the experiment – in impressive and accurate detail – Dixon talked in a jarringly blunt manner about hunger and about the horrors of life in that notorious institution on the west coast of Vancouver Island. “It was totally inadequate food a lot of the time,” Dixon told MacInnes-Rae. “I remember all of us kids having to steal fruit, steal carrots and potatoes so that we could roast potatoes somewhere off site on a fire and eat them – because we were never full when we left the dining room table.”

Dixon had long suspected that something had been done to them at the school. “As early as 20 years ago,” Dixon told MacInnes-Rae, “I heard that there were these experiments from former students who worked in the kitchens.” And when asked what it said to him that his federal government was willing to do this, Dixon responded that it affirmed what he’d always believed: “That the federal government and most Canadians don’t give a shit what happens with us as First Nations people. They’re on our stolen lands, our holy lands and they’re not going to be happy until they have it all. They were trying to eliminate us. So that’s not surprising.”

By the end of the interview I was in tears – something that would happen with increasing frequency over the coming months as I met, corresponded with, and listened to the stories of survivors of these experiments and of Canada’s Indian residential school system more generally. While I’m still not sure what I expected to happen after I published my research on these experiments, I don’t think anything could have prepared me for how profoundly the strength, courage, and anger of survivors like Dixon would change my life and my perspective on what it meant to be an (active) historian.

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