Active History

History Slam Episode Forty-Seven: Sensationalism, the Donnelly Massacre, and Small-Town Canada

July 16, 2014 1 Comment

By Sean Graham

Factionalism tends to be viewed negatively – particularly when examined through a political lens – but for storytellers, factionalism can be a very effective tool. The conflict created by these factions has led to some of the best cultural material ever made. The Capulets and the Montagues, the Jets and the Sharks, and Bayside and Valley are all examples of classic factional disputes that have produced terrific stories. Even professional wrestling bases a good number of its story lines on factional disputes – the introduction of the NWO in the 1990s single-handedly changed the industry.

But those are all fictional and when real-world factionalism goes too far the results can be devastating. One only needs to look at the battles between drug cartels in Mexico to understand the damage that factionalism can bring. Occasionally, though, the violence that stems from factionalism takes on a new meaning and over time can even be, to a certain degree, celebrated. There is a growing market for artifacts and antiques from the Hatfields and McCoys and the feud even spawned an Emmy-winning mini-series in 2012. When past violence reaches that point, there can be an opportunity for those who continue to be affected by the violence to re-claim the story and take ownership of the past.

That is what has happened recently in Lucan, Ontario, a small town north of London. On February 4, 1880, the feud between the Donnelly family and what was known as the local ‘peace’ committee came to a head when five members of the Donnelly family were killed. Nobody was ever convicted of the crime and for a long time the residents of Lucan didn’t want to talk about it. As amateur historians continued to look into the massacre and as the principals of the dispute lost the battle against time, the town started to open up about the event. Part of this was to address what happened, but there is also a desire to re-claim the town’s image. The townspeople don’t want the town to only be known for the massacre and by openly discussing the event and including it in tourism guides, the town can take control of the image being presented.
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Urban Transformations: An Avenue For Academic Work in the Community

July 14, 2014 No Comments

By Jay Young and Daniel Ross

Toronto’s St. Clair Avenue West is an important transit and economic artery as well as the hub for several of the city’s most diverse and dynamic neighbourhoods. Historically it was a key east-west axis for development in Toronto northof Bloor Street, and today the street continues to grow and change in step with the expanding city. Its communities have attracted not only the attention of journalists and local writers but also academic researchers, from the sociologists who authored Crestwood Heights to historical geographer Richard Harris, whose ground-breaking work on self-built housing makes us rethink the process of suburbanization.

As urban historians, we were excited when the Wychwood Barns Community Association (WBCA)–an energetic not-for-profit organization of dedicated local residents–asked us if we would be interested in organizing an academic symposium or idea exchange about the St. Clair West corridor. The result was “Urban Transformations: The Past, Present, and Future of Toronto’s St. Clair West”. Over the weekend of June 20-22, the event opened the doors of the Artscape Wychwood Barns (a former streetcar maintenance/storage facility now adapted into a vibrant centre of the community) to academics and urbanists, seeking to bring them together to promote a greater understanding of urban life along St. Clair Avenue West, while placing its story in the contexts of Toronto, Canada and urban change worldwide.

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Situating War Resistance within Canadian History

July 10, 2014 No Comments

By Jessica Squires

At this year’s Canadian Historical Association meeting in St. Catharines, I participated in a round table discussion about war resistance. As the panel showed, war resistance history is a growing area of research, offering a different perspective on traditional histories of war, politics, international relations, and social movements.

The panelists included Bruce Douville (Algoma University), Rose Fine-Meyer (University of Toronto), Marie Hammond-Callaghan (Mount Allison University), Geoff Keelan (University of Waterloo), and me (Independent Scholar), and was chaired and commentated by Lara Campbell (Simon Fraser University).

As Lara Campbell queried before the conference, “Given all of the federal government focus on war commemoration, how might our work on war resistance contribute to a more complex/nuanced understanding of war? Do you think it is possible, in some way, to ‘insert’ the memory of war resistance into these sorts of public discussions?” Jamie Swift and Ian McKay’s book Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety (Between the Lines, 2012) has kick-started a conversation about this topic, also highlighted in my book on the Canadian anti-draft movement. The book Campbell is co-editing with Catherine Gidney and Mike Dawson, Raise Every Voice: War Resistance in Canadian History, forthcoming from Between the Lines in 2015, will be another important contribution to this discussion.

In “La Macaza: Two Canadian Peace Protests in the 1960s,” Bruce Douville described two 1964 protests at La Macaza, Quebec against the presence at the military base of American nuclear weapons. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Forty-Six: Ontario’s Spring Bear Hunt

July 9, 2014 2 Comments

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By Sean Graham

Back in April, Ontario’s minority Liberal government announced the return of the spring bear hunt, which had been eliminated in 1999. In doing so, the government cited “public safety and human-bear conflicts” as a primary motivation for the decision. This has led to a rather heated debate over the effectiveness of a hunt to curb these incidents – with hunters arguing it would be an effective form of wildlife management and opponents claiming that the hunt would not make a noticeable difference in the number of incidents between people and bears.

The hunt was re-instituted as a pilot project for 2014 and 2015 and was only for eight communities in Northern Ontario. This year’s hunt ended on June 15 and with Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals recently winning a majority government, it will be interesting to see what happens when the project ends in 2016.
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Marking WWI with a Travelling Exhibit

July 8, 2014 1 Comment

By Timothy Humphries

As the official guardian of Ontario’s historical record, the Archives of Ontario is keenly aware that it must offer the public easy access to its vast and diverse holdings, and provide widespread opportunities to know more about our province’s rich and storied past. To this end, the Archives has long sought partnerships with museums, libraries, art and community centres – just about anyone, really, who values the Archives’ contributions to the life of the province – to collaborate on ways of disseminating this knowledge and maximizing the Archives’ outreach.

Have exhibit, will travel
One of the most effective collaborative tools continues to be the travelling exhibit. The Archives makes available 12 robust travelling exhibits. They consist of three to five panels that measure two and a half feet wide by seven feet high and provide contextual information, including images and maps. The topic of each exhibit may be thematic, such as sports in Ontario, or commemorative, such as World War I. They are offered completely free of charge, including shipping – you read that right – usually for periods of one to three months.

Travelling exhibits reaffirm and energize the Archives’ mandate in communities large and small, from Cornwall to Kenora and from Windsor to Moosonee. Since they act as a means to increase awareness of what the Archives has to offer, our travelling exhibits showcase and speak to our collections and resources. Continue reading →

Three Tools for the Web-Savvy Historian: Memento, Zotero, and WebCite

July 7, 2014 6 Comments

Over 200,000 citations or references to these websites exist in Google Books, and this is basically what you’ll get when you follow them. There’s no excuse for this anymore.

By Ian Milligan

“Sorry, the page you were looking for is no longer available.” In everyday web browsing, a frustration. In recreating or retracing the steps of a scholarly paper, it’s a potential nightmare. Luckily, three tools exist that users should be using to properly cite, store, and retrieve web information – before it’s too late and the material is gone!

Historians, writers, and users of the Web cite and draw on web-based material every day. Journal articles are replete with cited (and almost certainly uncited) digital material: websites, blogs, online newspapers, all pointing towards URLs. Many of these links will die. I don’t write this to be morbid, but to point out a fact. For example, if we search “http://geocities.com/” in Google Books we receive 247,000 results. Most of those are references to sites hosted on GeoCities that are now dead. If you follow those links, you’ll get the error that the “GeoCities web site you were trying to reach is no longer available.

What can we do? We can use three tools. Memento to retrieve archived web pages from multiple sources, WebCite to properly cite and store archived material, and Zotero to create your own personal database of archived snapshots. Let’s look at them all in turn. Continue reading →

Celebration as History; History as Celebration

July 3, 2014 1 Comment

By Andrew Nurse

Celebrate: to observe (a day) or commemorate (an event) with ceremonies or festivities ~Dictionary.com

Celebrations don’t have a particularly good reputation among professional historians … and, for good reason. As a series of studies of national, regionalized, local and provincial commemorative events demonstrate, celebrations are politically fraught. Canada Day might stand — at this point in our yearly calendar — as a case in point, but so too folk festivals, “old home weeks,” and the parade of militarily-oriented events ushered in by the current government. In the place that has become my hometown (Sackville, NB), a heritage site situated in a shady, quiet corner of town overlooking a swan pond celebrates the town’s “founders.” The town holiday is replete with a parade that will do much the same thing. Sometimes there are plays telling the story of local pioneers and recently the Baptist churches in town celebrated their 250th anniversary with a series of historical enactments, a video, and a massed church service that made frequent reference to the past.

Historians have been wary of such celebratory events because they don’t really tell us much about the past. Serious study of public history has been asking probing questions of such celebrations for some time. What is actually being celebrated? Whose history is constructed as history? Who is left out of this past and hence deracinated? Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Forty-Five: Verene Shepherd and Women’s History in the Caribbean

June 25, 2014 2 Comments

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By Sean Graham

This is the first episode in our series of podcasts recorded at the 2014 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. The conference was held May 22-25 at the University of Toronto.

As an undergrad, I had the opportunity to spend a year studying at the University of the West Indies in Barbados. At the time it was a pretty easy decision to go – I love North Bay, but the chance to trade Lake Nipissing for the Caribbean Sea was too good to pass up. When I first arrived I was picked up at the airport by two students from the student’s union and I distinctly remember that as we headed towards campus, I could barely understand the two of them as they spoke to each other. Of course my initial reaction to this was that if the lectures are anything like that, I would flunk out pretty quickly. Fortunately, I managed to pick up on the accents around campus and had a productive year. Over the course of the year, things like TNT BBQ Hut, Natalie Gonzalez, and the Texaco Station were things that came to define Barbados for me personally. Academically, though, I was stuck by the high caliber work coming out of UWI.

The University of the West Indies spans three campuses – the Mona Campus in Jamaica, the St. Augustine in Tinidad and Tobago, and the Cave Hill Campus in Barbados. Each campus has its own specialty and serves students from across the region. In terms of history, between the three campuses, UWI is home to some of the top historians in the world – a list that includes Hilary Beckles and Swithin Wilmot.

Of all the stuff I came across, however, the one name that continued to show up on my reading lists was Verene Shepherd. Professor Shepherd is currently the Director of the Institute for Gender & Development Studies at the University of West Indies, Mona Campus, Her publications include I Want to Disturb my Neighbour, Livestock, Sugar and Slavery: Contested Terrain in Colonial Jamaica, and Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspectives. She is also the host of weekly radio program entitled Talking History, which airs Saturday mornings in Jamaica and can be streamed through Nationwide 90FM.
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Politicians, Organizers, and the Making of Quebec’s National Holiday’s Public Policy, 1976-1984

June 24, 2014 1 Comment

By Marc-André Gagnon

Spreading across North America in the mid-19^th century, Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day was established by French Canadian nationalist elites to signify the existence of a distinct French and Catholic society through the use of public demonstrations. The Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society, a patriotic association founded in Montreal in 1842, mobilized resources and used the celebration as a moment of reflection on the unique challenges posed by an anglo-dominant society in an effort to remind French Canadians of their duty to maintain their language, traditions, and faith.

By the 1960s, however, this long-time symbol of the solidarity among members of the “French-Canadian family” started to be contested. With the changing nature of French Canadian nationalism, the rise of the sovereigntist movement in Quebec, and the greater secularization of society, organizers were forced to rethink the celebration. In addition, new actors, in particular the Quebec provincial government, intervened through its funding of the event – with a major turning point being the election of Réné Lévesque’s Parti Québécois in November 1976. Seeking to build support for its vision of civic nationalism, Lévesque’s government issued a decree in May 1977 stating that the traditional Saint-Jean Baptiste Day should be also known as Quebec’s Fête nationale. His government also decided to take a proactive stance in institutionalizing the holiday’s organization and funding through the creation of the Comité organisateur de la fête nationale and the Programme d’aide technique et financière for local events. Once based on private and community initiatives, especially those of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Societies, June 24 celebrations became instrumental at a time when the Quebec nationalist movement was a major focal point of Canada’s political life.

The historiography of Saint Jean Baptiste Day has tended to use cultural analysis to trace the contours of the PQ government’s efforts to build a new tradition around these celebrations[1].Based in part on new archival material from the Mouvement national des Québécois fonds, National Assembly debates, and newspapers, my work explores the public policies around these celebrations. It provides a descriptive analysis of these policies, their consequences on the political debate, and ultimately their demise in 1984. It accounts for how various citizen groups and St-Jean Baptiste organizers participated in shaping these policies, especially after the 1977 celebrations.
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Community Driven: Thirty Years of Science North

June 23, 2014 1 Comment

By Krista McCracken

Science North, Sudbury Ontario.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Science North in Sudbury, Ontario. The establishment of Science North is deeply rooted in the Sudbury community and represents a truly Northern approach to establishing a science centre. From the mid-1950s to the 1970s prominent community members in the Sudbury area were advocating for the establishment of a mining museum. Locally a shift occurred in the late 1970s when the community support moved toward the idea of a general science centre instead of an institution dedicated solely to geology or mining.

A large investment by Inco Limited in 1981 helped launch dreams of a science centre into a reality. This $5 million dollar capital donation to the project was the largest single corporate donation to a community project in Canada at the time. Following Inco’s donation other community organizations, individuals, and levels of government began to support the project. Science North opened to the public on June 19, 1984 and was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip on October 4, 1984. A summary of the Queen’s visit and an overview of some of the early exhibits at Science North can be seen here (PDF).

In addition to the idea of celebrating local mining Science North was seen as an opportunity to diversify the economy of Sudbury. The late 1970s and early 1980s had seen a number of mining strikes that had impacted huge portions of the community. Science North was viewed as a way to mend the relationship between Inco and community members while simultaneously attracting tourists and building something that the community could be proud of. Continue reading →

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