Active History

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 →

Heritage Toronto Awards: Call for Nominations

April 18, 2014 No Comments

The Heritage Toronto Awards celebrate outstanding contributions in the promotion and conservation of Toronto’s history and heritage by professionals and volunteers.

The deadline for nominations is 4:30pm, May 16, 2014.

Check out the poster below for more details.

“And bold and adventurous amazons they were”: Colonial encounters with LGBT Indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest fur-trade

April 17, 2014 2 Comments

By Eric Wright

An earlier version of post originally appeared on the author’s blog Actually History.

In 1814, an Irish fur-trader in the employ of the Northwest Company by the name of Ross Cox was conducting business with Indigenous people near present day Spokane, Washington when he encountered, in his eyes, a remarkable individual. In his journal under the titillating heading of “A Curious Account of a Hermaphroditic Chief”, Cox described this person as,

A remarkable being. The Indians allege he belongs to the epicene gender. He wears a woman’s dress, overloaded with a profusion of beads, thimbles and small shells; add to which, the upper part of the face and the manner of wearing the hair are quite feminine; but these appearances are more than counterbalanced by a rough beard, and a masculine tone of voice.

Cox’s encounter with this “hermaphrodite chief” is just one of several known interactions between male fur-traders and people who are often referred to today as “third gendered” in the 18^th and 19^th century fur-trade in the Pacific Northwest. People of a “third gender” in North American Indigenous societies were men and women whose gendered work roles, styles of dress, and behaviours did not accord in some degree to what was expected of someone of their biological sex. Today, they might identify as a “transgendered person” or perhaps “intersexed.” In terms of sexual orientation, third gendered people could be attracted to members of the same sex, but not necessarily. Of course, it does not really make sense to speak literally of “same-sex” attraction within a non-dualistic gender/sex system.

In this short article, I shed light on a few of these moments of encounter that have not been lost to history. As we might expect, some interactions followed the standard script of colonialism – male fur-traders heaped disdain and sometimes violence upon third gender Indigenous people. These interactions resulted from an ideological context of imperialism in which Indigenous people were doubly stigmatized – once for being Indigenous and once for being third gendered. Yet there were notable exceptions to a pattern of violence, like that of Ross Cox narrated above. In these cases, European male fur-traders not only tolerated third gendered Indigenous people; they showed them a degree of respect in their writings and interactions. Accounting for the respectful nature of some interactions in this period proves a much more difficult task.

Continue reading →

How Does History Help Explain Bitcoins?

April 16, 2014 No Comments

By Jonathan McQuarrie

Lately, Bitcoins have received considerable attention from the media. The recent failure of the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox exchange, where users could exchange their Bitcoins for national currencies, sparked particular concern. The website managed to lose some 850,000 Bitcoins, which at the time were valued at approximately $400 million. For the last month, proponents of Bitcoins, such as Coinbase founder Fred Ehrasam, have been in damage control mode. Despite the recent bad headlines, they argue, the fundamental technological principles behind Bitcoins are sound. They are fond of noting that during the early days of the internet (back in the dimly remembered 1990s), start-ups and failures abounded. They scoff at naysayers like Warren Buffett, arguing that he does not understand the technology behind Bitcoins.

The system behind Bitcoins is indeed complex, but here is my simplified understanding. The origins go back to a 2008 article by ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ (widely believed to be a pseudonym), where s/he outlined the development of a ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash system.’ The basic goal is to create a system of exchange where two users can spend Bitcoins with values determined and security protected by other users. When two people make an exchange using Bitcoins, their exchange generates a publicly recorded transaction, designed to ensure that a person does not try to spend the same Bitcoin twice. The public transaction has an associated hash (generated by the cryptographic hash function SHA-2), which presents a mathematical challenge. Users called miners verify the transaction by providing a proof for the mathematical challenge. The hash also provides a means for the miner to demonstrate that their computer resources solved the challenge. The miner adds the verified transaction, called a block, to a chain of blocks that extends back to the beginning of Bitcoins, and receives a portion of the fee charged to the people making the transaction in exchange for their work to create blocks. Miners are also able to create new Bitcoins as a reward for their work in extending the transaction block chains—as the chain is extended, more Bitcoins are issued, though the speed at which this occurs decreases as more Bitcoins enter the system. Decreasing speed is designed to ensure that they remain scarce, which is a fundamental element of almost any currency. Calling people who create transaction blocks ‘miners’ emphasizes the scarcity of currency – deliberately evoking connections to gold (that most recognizable of specie) and impressing that in order to get wealth, one must work.

As the ‘mining’ metaphor suggests, historical analogies have been used for explaining Bitcoin’s potentials and shortcomings. Continue reading →

Old Conflicts in a New Century: The Problems of Prairie Grain Transportation

April 15, 2014 2 Comments

From Wikipedia

By Laura Larsen

Few Canadians missed the news stories of grain piling up on the prairies and denunciations of the system’s failures. The Federal government’s recent announcement of financial penalties for the railways is the latest act in a long running problem facing western Canadian grain farmers: how to economically get their grain to market when long stretches of prairie and three mountain ranges stand between them and the ocean ports that export about seventy per cent of western Canada’s grain.

Economically exporting prairie grain is a complicated relationship between farmers, elevator companies, railways, and port terminals all of whom have conflicting interests which have been a wellspring of conflict since Confederation. Canada consistently produces around twenty per cent of the world’s tradable grain. While many other countries grow grain, only Argentina, Australia, the United States, and Ukraine regularly produce domestic surpluses which can be exported. Competition among these nations for their place in the international grain market is fierce. Like all bulk commodities, grain’s cost rises with transportation distance. All of western Canada’s competitors are much closer to deep water ports for their grain exports. When grain is not moving off the prairies it means unhappy customers, lost sales, and Canadian farmers who are not getting paid. Continue reading →

Memory and the Built Landscape: Edmonton’s Architectural Heritage Website

April 14, 2014 No Comments

By Tim O’Grady

When you think of important events in your life, chances are you associate them with physical places. Whether it is your childhood home, a former school, or a family cottage or favourite vacation spot, the connection between memory and place is intangible, though very real. People are connected to the buildings in their city. They have lived their lives in and around them, and many of these structures hold a special place in their personal narratives.

Memory and Landscape

Defining memory can be difficult. For the purposes of this post, I will follow the definition provided by John Bodnar, who states that public (or collective) memory is not simply a time dimension between past and present, but is the interpretation of reality. Peter Burke describes five ways in which memory is transmitted: oral traditions, written documents, still or moving pictures, actions (dance, craft etc.), and space. Randall Mason in his article “Fixing Historic Preservation” argues historic preservation is the cultivation of society’s collective memory, and believes historic fabric, such as buildings, is essential to sustaining memory. To support this, he quotes sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who said “it is the spatial image alone that, by reason of its stability, gives us an illusion of not having changed through time and of retrieving the past in the present.” Continue reading →

Faster Than a Speeding Canoe: ‘The Superheroes’ of the Fur Trade

April 11, 2014 No Comments

By Eve Dutton

There’s a certain image that the term “voyageur” conjures up in the Canadian consciousness: bearded, burly, and boastful rascals who prized their independence above all else, accomplished feats of superhuman strength and endurance, and braved the uncharted wilds with a song in their heart. This portrait of the voyageur has a long pedigree — it comes to us directly from post journals and other contemporary writings, which are often taken as the final word on the subject. It was embellished over the years by soulful idylls and popular histories such as Peter C. Newman’s Company of Adventurers.

In Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade, Carolyn Podruchny rightly calls these mythical stereotypes the “comic-book superheroes” of Canadian history (2). However, as she notes in her introduction, there is a dearth of scholarship on voyageurs. Podruchny proposes that because voyageurs lived in a state of liminality, or transition, and because this informed their entire world order, the best approach to a cultural history of voyageur identity is a metaphorical “voyage” through the physical landscape and their social geography. Continue reading →

The Ethics of Active History

April 10, 2014 No Comments

By Andrew Nurse

One of the great innovations of the now aging “New Social History” (NSH) was its commitment to uncovering a past about which people knew little. The NSH focused on what we might, in a non-pejorative way, call the broad mass of people: workers, slaves, peasants, First Nations, women, among others whose names appeared at best briefly in the historical record, if at all. The new social historians were guided by a broad range of heuristics (far broader than their critics at the time made it seem) and deployed new investigative strategies. They combed and compiled census records, hunted through archives for any sign of ordinary people, made use of “folklore” and oral traditions, and read official records (court proceedings, marriage and baptismal records, newspaper accounts, chronicles) in different ways.

I “grew up” with the NHS and its work was breathtaking and inspiring. In uncovering the lived experiences of ordinary people, social history brought history to life. For me, the lived experience of past times –with all of its grinding poverty, charismatic religions, popular traditions, and struggles — gave history a purpose that was something more than the “names and dates” one-damn-thing-after-another approach that has been so caricatured by educators, commentators, and historians. I was also struck, and continue to be so, by social history’s profound ethical imperative: everyone deserved to have their history written. It was deeply problematic and politically disturbing to reserve history only for “great men.” There was something powerfully democratic in social history and the fact that “old white men” seemed not to like it only confirmed, to me, its democratic character.

That was then. Time goes by and I find that I have become one of those “old white men” (well … middle aged) whose work I used to find so misplaced. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Thirty-Seven: Historical Figure Reality Shows

April 9, 2014 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

Love ’em or hate ’em, reality shows have fundamentally changed television over the past 20 years. Every night networks put on hours of reality programming that is inexpensive to produce and draws ratings (and advertising revenues). While some shows are based on competition, others simply follow ‘real’ people as they go about their daily lives. The (main) problem I have with this, however, is that there is no connection to the people on the show.

So that got us to thinking – what would make us care about reality shows? The answer – put on historical figures. Granted, actually doing such a thing would be extremely difficult given that most historical figures suffer from the unfortunate medical condition of being deceased. Despite this obstacle, we invited back popular History Slam regular Aaron Boyes and tried and put together some reality shows featuring historical figures that we would want to watch.
Continue reading →

New Paper: Sean Carleton: Rebranding Canada with Comics

April 8, 2014 No Comments

ActiveHistory.ca is pleased to announce the publication of Sean Carleton’s Rebranding Canada with Comics: Canada 1812: Forged in Fire and the Continuing Co-optation of Tecumseh:

Canada 1812: Forged in Fire. With permission.

In the current age of austerity, the Harper Government allocated over $28 million to commemorate the 200^th anniversary of the War of 1812. For many historians this proved to be an unpopular decision. It even drew the ire of the much-maligned Jack Granatstein, who pointed out, “This is also a government that’s slashing the national archives dramatically and killing the national library by cuts. On the one hand they’re good for history and on the other hand they’re bad for history—you sometimes wonder if they really know what they are doing.”[1]

While historians are right to critique the controversial costs of the bicentennial celebrations in light of cuts to crucial public services, it is important to understand the government’s commemorative project as part of a more pernicious strategy of nation-building Continue reading →

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