Active History

History Slam Episode Forty-Eight: Ian Mosby and History in the Media

July 29, 2014 3 Comments

By Sean Graham

Just over a year ago, Canadian news outlets started to report on nutritional experiments that had been conducted on First Nations kids at Residential Schools. For a couple of weeks the stories continued to appear on the front pages of newspapers and on nightly newscasts across the country. Featured prominently in many of these stories was Ian Mosby, the historian who wrote the article for Social History/Histoire Sociale detailing the experiments that spawned the media frenzy. As I wrote at the time, it was particularly impressive how Ian navigated the media attention. It would have been easy for him to attempt to take centre stage and use the exposure to further his career. Instead, he was steadfast in ensuring that the story remained the focus.

In the year since, Ian has continued to shed light on the experiments and their long-term ramifications. (Check back tomorrow for a podcast of a talk he delivered in the fall at Acadia). As he wrote in his wonderful piece “Of History and Headlines: Reflections of an Accidental Public Historian”, the stories that have emerged in the past year from survivors of these experiments have been powerful and serve as a reminder of the humanity that can occasionally be lost in studying the humanities.

For as much as Ian stayed in the background during the story, however, I was curious to know what exactly the experience was like. After all, it’s not every day that an article you write spawns front page stories across the country. Dealing with the media (I’ve done some radio interviews on my research on the CBC) can be difficult, time consuming, and intimidating. At the same time, however, it can be fun and rewarding.
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Where have all the censuses gone? A Problem with Digital Data

July 28, 2014 6 Comments

By Thomas Peace

This post is a little late in coming, but hopefully it will be useful for those of us working in pre-twentieth century North American history or with online resources. About a year ago, I discovered that one of the most useful reference resources I use, Statistics Canada’s E-Stat tables of the Censuses of Canada, 1665-1871 had been removed from their website. Living in a country where the current federal government has a bit of a history mucking around with censuses and data collection (for good examples see here, here and here), the removal of this resource upset me. Why had I not heard about E-Stat’s impending demise? Where could I retrieve the valuable and accessible data formerly available for download through this website? And (of course) what type of subtle political purpose could be behind the removal of data from Canada’s early censuses?

Stats Can - 2014
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Parental Rights, Reproductive Rights, and Youth’s Sexuality in Alberta, Then and Now

July 25, 2014 No Comments

The Lethbridge Birth Control and Information Centre Photo

The Lethbridge Birth Control and Information Centre, 1974. 542 7th Street South, Lethbridge, Alberta. Photo courtesy of the Galt Museum and Archives, 19901067001.

By Karissa Patton, MA Student, University of Lethbridge

The struggle for reproductive rights and justice are often associated with women’s activisms of the past, specifically the activism of the late 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s, leading to the 1988 Supreme Court decision that fully decriminalized abortion in Canada.[1] Authors such as Catherine Redfern and Kristine Aune have highlighted a post-feminist argument that claims that feminism does not exist anymore or that feminism is no longer needed. This is based on the premise that we have achieved reproductive justice. With several birth control options widely available, the decriminalization of abortion, and sex education required by provincial curricula, those downplaying the relevance of feminism argue that victory was achieved in the fight for reproductive rights. This argument that we live in a “post feminist society” stems from a lack of understanding, or misunderstanding, of feminism and reproductive rights.[2] The misconception that reproductive rights have been achieved is concerning, as it encourages society to ignore the social barriers and the issues of access that remain prevalent today.

Technological and legal strides have been made since the 1960s and 1970s and yet social, economic and political barriers remain, or are reinvented, based on changing political contexts. Today, we are witnessing important similarities with the 1970s in the social barriers to education about sex, birth control, and abortion. Specifically, with the moral panic around youth’s sexuality, we have seen significant retrenchments in the adult control of sex, birth control, and abortion education.

While I use contemporary examples to illuminate a current need for reproductive rights and justice on a national scale, my research focuses on the history of reproductive rights activism in Southern Alberta during the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, this essay examines one contemporary and one historical case study of adults’ attempts to control youth’s sexuality via youth’s access to sex education as well as birth control and abortion information. Continue reading →

Abortion: The Unfinished Revolution comes to PEI because of unsafe abortion practices

July 24, 2014 1 Comment

Colleen MacQuarrie, Associate Professor and Chair Psychology Department, UPEI

A surgical abortion is a simple 10-minute procedure that once was available to women on Prince Edward Island. In 1986, a strong anti-choice lobbying group shut down this service and for the past 28 years their actions have continued to deny women access to this health service in PEI.[1] Instead, most island women have traveled to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and further to attain abortion services. Recently, we exposed that despite the ability to offer a more cost effective service in PEI, the province refused to repatriate the service, preferring to keep women in a state of exile as medical refugees.

PEI stands alone in refusing women any provincial access to this service, but that doesn’t mean that abortions don’t take place here. An examination of the provincial billing records over the past 18 years tells the real story. Those records show that without legal abortions on PEI, unsafe abortion practices resulted in up to two illegal and/or failed abortion attempts each year.

Complications followed many of these attempts, which suggests that those undertaken without complications were unreported. This finding has historical precedence; research indicates that when illegal abortions were performed, only those that went wrong came to the attention of medical and legal authorities.[2] In addition to the illegal and failed abortions, between 6 and 80 unspecified abortions were recorded each year. An unspecified abortion is an artifact of the coding used to report on procedures for billing purposes and reflects the coders’ level of knowledge about the cause of the abortion. Among these unspecified abortions there may have been illegal or failed attempted abortions. Continue reading →

November 8, 1994

July 23, 2014 1 Comment

Jessica Shaw, PhD candidate, University of Calgary

Abortion evokes strong political and emotional reactions, and tends to be framed around arguments of morality and legality. However, women have had and will continue to have abortions regardless of their morality, regardless of their legality, regardless of what the foetus may or may not be, and regardless of whether they are offered in safe medical settings, or in clandestine conditions. The need for abortion is present for people in every social class, every region, and every belief system. As the debate about abortion rages on, physicians continue to provide women with the abortion care that they need. In Canada, abortion providers are often stigmatized as single-issue activists whose entire identities are described with the derogatory title “abortionist”. By some, they are imagined to be anti-woman, anti-child, and anti-family, and because of this, they are targets for harassment and violence. In reality, abortion providers are mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, daughters, sons, partners, lovers, and friends. They are physicians who support families by ensuring that each woman is able to decide if, when, and how many children to have. In Canada, most abortion providers are family physicians who offer abortion care as a part of their comprehensive medical practice.

While research consistently affirms that the majority of Canadians support abortion rights, there is a faction of society that is anti-abortion, and an even smaller faction that expresses their opposition to abortion by targeting abortion providers for harassment and violence. Most abortion providers will not face acts of violence that are personally directed at them, but most will face harassment, and all live with the awareness that they could be targeted simply for the work that they do. For both new physicians and seasoned abortion providers, there is one event in Canadian history that forever changed the climate in which abortion care is offered.

On November 8, 1994, Dr. Garson Romalis (colloquially known as Gary) survivedthe first recorded sniper attack on a Canadian abortion provider. Continue reading →

Scientific Reasoning in the Canadian Anti-Abortion Movement

July 22, 2014 No Comments

Katrina Ackerman, PhD Candidate, University of Waterloo

Recent media coverage of an Alberta doctor’s refusal to prescribe birth control to walk-in clinic patients indicates the medical profession’s ongoing struggle to balance personal morality and professional ethics. Whether a doctor should be able to deny birth control prescriptions or abortion referrals based on moral or religious grounds is a murky issue and has been prevalent since the formation of Canadian medical societies in the 1800s. The Canadian medical profession’s struggle to maintain control over abortion and contraception can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century when, in their efforts to regulate the profession, medical societies used aspects of science and religion to argue that life begins at conception and condemned alternative medical practitioners for offering methods to terminate pregnancies. In 1892, physicians were instrumental in the criminalization of abortion. Nearly a century later, doctors held an equally prominent role in the liberalization of the procedure.[1] After decades of witnessing women attempt to control their own fertility—and many times die in the process—the Canadian Medical Association advised the federal government to amend the abortion law. In 1969, the federal government liberalized the abortion law to allow the procedure when a mother’s life or health was endangered. While doctors were prominently involved in the liberalization of the abortion law in 1969, divisions immediately heightened within the profession over the justifiability of the procedure.

The reality was that Canadian and international medical societies did not have straightforward scientific reasoning for determining when life began and could not ascertain if or when abortions were acceptable. Scientific beliefs, as well as ethical, legal, and social considerations influenced individuals’ and medical societies’ reasoning on the abortion issue. Advancements in neonatal medicine in the 1970s complicated the issue for abortion rights doctors as innovative medical technologies enabled physicians to highlight embryological development and subsequently convinced many scientifically trained professionals to question the rationality for abortions.[2] In the decade following the revised abortion law, debates over whether abortion could be considered a medically necessary act, without consideration of the fetus, polarized doctors. Continue reading →

Abortion: The Unfinished Revolution Conference, August 7-8, 2014, Charlottetown, PEI

July 21, 2014 2 Comments

Dr. Shannon Stettner, Special Series Guest Editor

It’s hard to study abortion without being an activist. Reading about or hearing women’s experiences with unplanned pregnancies, past and present, and the challenges they encounter and overcome – or don’t – in their efforts to end those pregnancies is politicizing. When you study abortion experiences from the 1960s, like I do, and compare them to the experiences of women in current day New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, you know that the issue is far from resolved.

Our conference, Abortion: The Unfinished Revolution, will be held at the University of Prince Edward Island on August 7 and 8, 2014. When we (Colleen MacQuarrie, Tracy Penny Light and I) decided to issue a call for papers, we had no idea of the response we would get. We anticipated a small, local conference. Instead, over the course of two days, more than 70 papers will be heard, with presenters coming from across North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, India, and Africa. Our conference is the first international academic conference on abortion in Canada. It is clear from the response, that we have touched a nerve – or lit a spark.

The response is all the more surprising, given our location. While we recognized that holding the conference in Toronto might have raised our numbers or made logistics a little easier, our choice to hold the conference in Charlottetown, PEI was deliberate. PEI is the only province where Canadian women have no access to abortion.[1] The anti-abortion movement calls the island “a life sanctuary.” We think it’s time to bring abortion to the island – both symbolically, as we’re doing with the conference, and literally as one of our organizers, Dr. Colleen MacQuarrie, is attempting to do through her study of and activism around abortion on the island. MacQuarrie’s groundbreaking research on the effects that the lack of access to legal abortion has on the women in PEI will be highlighted in one of the posts to appear in this week’s series. Continue reading →

Podcast: 2014 CHA Annual Meeting Keynote Address by Ian McKay

July 18, 2014 No Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

On May 26^th, historian Ian McKay presented the keynote address of the 2014 Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, held in St. Catharines, Ontario.

ActiveHistory.ca is pleased to feature a recording of his talk: “A Half-Century of Possessive Individualism: C.B. Macpherson and the Twenty-First Century Prospects of Liberalism”.

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

July 16, 2014 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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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