Active History

I Dig the Past

May 5, 2014 No Comments

By Jay Young

With optimistic thoughts of warm summer days soon approaching, I recently decided to tackle the backyard. We moved into a home in Toronto last year and we had anticipated some outdoor projects ahead. This included the widening of a backyard walkway and the erection of a few vegetable planter beds there too. Much of the hard work is now complete, and we look forward to spending some time enjoying the fruits of our labour. Looking back, I’ve come to realize that my recent tasks have a direct relationship with the past.

Even before starting my backyard project, I’ve felt the meaning of the past within my home. An hour of research at the City of Toronto Archives revealed that the janitor of the nearby elementary school lived here during the 1930s and 1940s. A bit more time in the archives would probably show more inhabitants and their backgrounds.

For the past few decades, our house had been home to a family who had migrated from Italy in the early 1970s. They left their own touches on the building by constructing the cantina in the basement, incorporating architectural details, and caring for a deep backyard garden.

My wife and I hoped to keep the tradition of the backyard garden alive. Soon after we moved in, neighbours told us that the family’s mother had worked hard to maintain a productive vegetable garden for many decades. One neighbour remembered her coming into the street and announcing the “insalata” she had to share with anyone interested. Another reflected that the garden was her pride and joy, her passion even late in life. I heard of harvests of tomatoes and many varieties of lettuce. When raking the leaves and weeds that had followed last summer’s fallow, I found a handful of garden markers. This confirmed neighbourly observations, but also revealed other crops: red peppers and zucchini.

I began to see my backyard as a kind of archive made of human actions and the environment around me. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Thirty-Nine: Corpus, a play about the Holocaust, Memory, and History

May 3, 2014 2 Comments

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By Sean Graham

Corpus is currently in the midst of its world premiere run at Arts Court Theatre in Ottawa. Shows run through May 10, 2014. For further information, go to counterpointplayers.com

This past Monday evening marked the end of Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). The occasion brought with it tributes to those whole were killed and reminders that such atrocities can never be allowed again. But, as can happen with any day of remembrance, it brought questions about how we remember the Holocaust and whose memories have shaped our understanding of the genocide. As the number of survivors who are still alive continues to decrease with time, will our memory of the Holocaust change? Is there room for new memories that may emerge in still unseen journals or still untold stories? What about those memories that we will never have the opportunity to hear? How do we account for them? These questions remind us that there is never a universal understanding of an event, particularly one that elicits such strong reactions.

In Corpus, a young genocide scholar named Megan (Sascha Cole) is forced to confront these questions when she becomes captivated after uncovering an unexpected relationship between the wife of a Nazi officer and a Polish Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz. With the help of her online lover Heinrich (Daniel Sadavoy), Megan pursues the story with the excited energy of a PhD student eager to take her place in the academy. As she delves further into her research, however, she encounters the contested terrain of memory and how elusive the ‘truth’ can be.
Continue reading →

The War to End All Wars: A Look Back at World War One – A Video Series from the Department of History at York University

May 2, 2014 1 Comment

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914, it set off a chain of events that became one of the deadliest combats in human history, known as the First World War. To mark the centennial of the start of this war, York University’s Department of History has produced a documentary series, entitled The War to End All Wars: A Look Back at World War I.

Comprised of six English-language episodes and one French-language episode, the series includes 14 of York’s History professors discussing various events of the war, including: The World at War, Canada at War, Women at War, Empires at War, Technologies at War, The Spoils of War and Les Canadiens français et la Première Guerre mondiale. “The series of videos in English and French, offers an opportunity to better understand the impact that the First World War had on Canadians and the world,” said Marcel Martel, Chair of the Department of History. Continue reading to watch them all! Continue reading →

Ten Books to Contextualize the Alberta Tar Sands

May 1, 2014 2 Comments

By Stacy Nation-Knapper, Andrew Watson, and Sean Kheraj

Athabasca Tar Sands, 1892. Source: Library and Archives Canada.

Last year, Nature’s Past, the Canadian environmental history podcast, published a special series called, “Histories of Canadian Environmental Issues”. Each episode focused on a different contemporary environmental issue and featured interviews and discussions with historians whose research explains the context and background. Following up on that project, we are publishing six articles with ActiveHistory.ca that provide annotated lists of ten books and articles that contextualize each of the environmental issues from the podcast series.

The eighth and final episode of the series examined the history of the Alberta tar sands, arguably one of the most significant contemporary Canadian environmental issues. This episode featured a panel of speakers from the 2013 American Society for Environmental History who participated on a plenary titled, “The Fossil Fuel Dilemma: Vision, Values, and Technoscience in the Alberta Oil Sands.” We also interviewed Dr. Andrew Weaver, a climatologist from University of Victoria, member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a Green Party of BC Member of the Legislative Assembly.

Nature’s Past Episode 38: Histories of Canadian Environmental Issues, Part VIII – Tar Sands

Here are ten books to contextualize the Alberta tar sands: Continue reading →

The CBC, Budget Cuts, and the Environmental Movement

April 30, 2014 No Comments

By Ryan O’Connor

On April 10^th CBC/Radio Canada announced an immediate budget cut of $130 million. This move will have dire consequences for the network, with 657 jobs cut over the next two years, numerous service cutbacks, and a reduction in original television programming. Having already lost the Canadian rights to broadcast the National Hockey League to Rogers Communications – the iconic and revenue-rich Hockey Night in Canada will air for two more seasons under the production of Rogers before fading to black – the network has since announced it will no longer compete for professional sports altogether. Needless to say, the future of the CBC is uncertain.

In times like this it is worth remembering the important work carried out by the network. For me, nowhere is this clearer than in the CBC’s work on the environment. Many are familiar with The Nature of Things, which has aired on television since 1960, and with arch-environmentalist David Suzuki as its host since 1979. Suzuki came to The Nature of Things having hosted the radio program Quirks and Quarks since its inception in 1975. Both programs have played an important role in popularizing science and bring environmental issues to the forefront of the public’s mind. Incidentally, they remain among the CBC’s more popular programs.

Larry Gosnell. Photo courtesy of Denise Gosnell.

Lesser known is the CBC’s role in kickstarting environmental activism in Ontario. On October 22, 1967 the network broadcast an original program titled The Air of Death. Produced by Larry Gosnell and hosted by national news anchor Stanley Burke, this program aimed to awaken Canadians to the realities of air pollution. (Many, it seems, naively believed air pollution was a problem in the United States, but one that didn’t seep across the border.) This program drew a sizeable audience and received rave reviews for its informative message, but it also raised the hackles of industry for its depiction of events in Dunnville, Ontario, where effluent from the nearby Electric Reduction Company (ERCO) phosphate plant was damaging farmers’ crops and crippling livestock. While ERCO had previously acknowledged its fault, and had been paying damages to farmers affected by its fluorine pollution, the company took exception to allegations that it was making members of the community sick. A veritable witch hunt ensued, with officials at ERCO endeavouring to discredit Gosnell, Burke, and the rest of the team responsible for The Air of Death. Two high profile investigations ensued: a one-sided Royal Commission in which friends of ERCO served as commissioners and a Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC) hearing that exonerated those responsible for the program from the accusations of shoddy workmanship and bias. Continue reading →

Of History and Headlines: Reflections of an Accidental Public Historian

April 29, 2014 5 Comments

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. Continue reading →

The Value of Thinking Big: Experimenting with Pedestrian Space in Toronto, 1970s and 2014

April 28, 2014 3 Comments

By Daniel Ross

Beaches International Jazz Festival

In cities across Canada, citizens are emerging from their winter hibernation to a spring and summer season packed with street festivals, concerts, and other special events. In Toronto alone there are hundreds each year, from Salsa on St. Clair to Pride to the literary Word on the Street, and on summer weekends it’s hard to walk more than a few blocks downtown without stumbling across a city block crowded with vendors, beer gardens, and band shells. But despite our eagerness to get out and celebrate warm weather, cities like Toronto have always had a love/hate relationship with street closures. This is evident in city hall’s lukewarm response to a recent proposal—Open Streets—to close Bloor Street for a few Sundays this summer.

Ciclovia in Bogota. Photo courtesy of Mike’s Bogota Blog

In this post I take a look at that plan in light of the project that really started the whole discussion about closing downtown streets in Toronto: the Yonge Street pedestrian mall of the early 1970s. Can the story of the mall help us understand today’s debates over street closures? I’d argue that, among other lessons, it should warn us to think big when we consider the creation of pedestrian space: half-measures tend to create their own problems, and play into the hands of those opposed to repurposing streets. Continue reading →

Video: Thomas Kuehn – “Ottoman Hero or Frontier Villain? Ahmed Feyzi Pasha (1839-1915)”

April 25, 2014 No Comments

The last talk of the SFU History Department’s Heroes and Villains series featured historian Thomas Kuehn‘s reflections on Ahmed Feyzi Pasha. This high-ranking Ottoman bureaucrat and military officer was highly influential in terms of shaping Ottoman policy in strategically important borderlands of the empire in Arabia and present-day Iraq between the mid 1880s and his retirement in 1908. Arguably, he was one of the great imperial pro-consuls of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But unlike his contemporaries Sir Evelyn Baring (Great Britain), General Joseph Gallieni (France), and Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman (Russia), Ahmed Feyzi has received little, if any, scholarly attention.

Kuehn’s lecture here sheds light on Ahmed Feyzi’s highly contradictory record as an administrator and military man by focusing on his three terms as governor-general of Ottoman Yemen, by far the most notorious trouble spot of the late Ottoman Empire, where he served longer than any other high-level Ottoman official: On one hand, his skills as a diplomat and negotiator and his talent as a military commander kept local opposition to Ottoman rule at bay for years and were instrumental in crushing two large-scale uprisings that brought Ottoman rule in Yemen to the brink of collapse. While these actions earned Ahmed Feyzi the admiration of both the Ottoman central government and foreign observers, he was widely known to run a money extortion network of relatives, Ottoman officials, and local elites that systematically overtaxed local residents on a massive scale and seriously undermined the legitimacy of Ottoman rule in southwest Arabia. His success in leading counter-insurgency operations in Yemen and his superior knowledge of local affairs allowed Ahmed Feyzi to make himself indispensable to his superiors in Istanbul and to shield his cronies from prosecution until his patron Sultan Abdulhamid II himself lost power in 1908.

Ahmed Feyzi’s career is full of dramatic episodes: for example, his power struggle with a chief investigator sent from Istanbul in 1892 or his five-day camel ride across the Arabian Desert in 1905 when he was rushed from southern Iraq to Yemen in order to assume command of Ottoman military forces at the most dire moment of the 1904-06 uprising. Looking at Ahmed Feyzi, the Ottoman “empire builder and hero,” and Ahmed Feyzi, the “frontier villain,” allows us to bring to life a little known but nevertheless crucial chapter of Middle East history in the age of high imperialism. Ahmed Feyzi in many ways embodies the dilemmas of the late Ottoman Empire that still possessed the capabilities to expand but at the same time undermined the possibilities for its continued existence.

History Slam Episode Thirty-Eight: Senate Reform with James McHugh

April 23, 2014 1 Comment

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By Sean Graham

The ‘Red Chamber.’ Photo from www.sen.parl.gc.ca

On Friday, the Supreme Court is expected to make a ruling on whether the government can proceed with Senate reform without amending the Constitution. The decision has been a long time coming for Stephen Harper, who has expressed a strong desire to reform the Senate since he was first elected in 2006. The issue of Senate reform has been a particularly prominent issue in the past year – from the spending scandals to Justin Trudeau kicking Liberal senators out of the caucus to Conservative senators refusing to fully support the elections reform bill. The Supreme Court’s decision Friday will fundamentally shape this government’s efforts to reform the Senate moving forward. (Jonathan McQuarrie addressed the issue of Senate reform in this piece back in October)
Continue reading →

Bringing Labour History Alive Through Photos & Film

April 21, 2014 1 Comment

Image D-01635 courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives

By Erica Landrock

Over the past two and a half years, I’ve been working to produce a three part history series about Working People and labour history in British Columbia for BC’s non-profit broadcaster, Knowledge Network. When my team and I began the project back in 2011, it seemed like a straightforward and easily manageable task. How hard could it be to produce a series without filming anything? Choose the stories, write the scripts, select images, edit and voila! Easy. Or so it seemed. We quickly learned there was a very fine balance between making the stories accessible and engaging for an audience, while still telling a true account of history.

The origination of the series came about in a very organic fashion. Jack Munro, a well known British Columbia labour figure was watching Knowledge Network one evening when another documentary I was involved with Edge of the World: BC’s Early Years came on the air. He liked the approach and easy access to history and thought why couldn’t we have something like that but about labour and working people? At the time, Jack was the chair for the Labour Heritage Centre, an organization that helps to bring a voice to the province’s working people. Jack contacted Rudy Buttignol, CEO of Knowledge Network, to see how one would go about getting a series like this made. Not realizing this suggestion was going to spark over two years of work, the idea was a hit and a call went out for proposals to BC’s independent filmmaking community. My team was selected and by the fall of 2011 we were underway. Continue reading →

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