Past Protection: Conservation at the Archives of Ontario

      No Comments on Past Protection: Conservation at the Archives of Ontario

By Jenny Prior

Meet Shannon Coles, a conservator at the Archives of Ontario. Shannon’s been stabilizing archival records and preparing them for digitization and reproduction for our on-site World War I exhibit, Dear Sadie, launching this summer.

Q: Shannon, what led you to your unique and interesting occupation?

A: Going to museums as a kid always frustrated me because I wanted to touch everything! With my job, there are no barriers between the records and me.

Conservation work is an eclectic mix of science, art, and history, and these disciplines have always interested me. You need to study chemistry to understand how and why the materials degrade. The artistic elements are fine-hand skills and an appreciation for the documents themselves. And of course being fascinated by history doesn’t hurt.

Shannon getting up close and personal with archival records. Photo credit: James Bowers .

Shannon getting up close and personal with archival records. Photo credit: James Bowers.

Q: How do you decide if a record can be displayed?   

A: In the Archives of Ontario’s preservation department, we’re responsible for the long-term physical protection of all the archival materials. Exhibiting records speeds up chemical reactions, which in turn accelerates deterioration. Continue reading →

Why is this time Different? Political Implications of prolonged Economic Downturns

      1 Comment on Why is this time Different? Political Implications of prolonged Economic Downturns

By David Zylberberg

Historians place a disproportionate emphasis on the 1930s when teaching European History. The decade looms large in our courses with discussions of economic depressions, the rise of far-right political parties and the onset of the Second World War. We generally try to instill greater complexity to our lectures but a fairly straight-forward narrative emerges: Economic collapse and high unemployment contribute to the election of far-right political parties, war and 6 million dead Jews. Interestingly, the Eurozone’s economic trajectory since the financial collapse of 2008 has been similar to that of the 1930s but political spectrums have barely changed. Why?

A number of economists and economic historians have noted that the overall European economy performed similarly between 2007 and 2014 as it had done between 1929 and 1936. Both continent-wide comparisons mask major regional hardships, since Britain in the 1930s or Germany and France in the 2010s have fared relatively well. The circumstances in a number of Eurozone countries are staggeringly bad. After 2008, Latvia lost a quarter of its economy within a year and 10% had emigrated within two years. The Greek economy contracted by 13.5% between 2007 and 2012 and continues to shrink with a quarter of the adult workforce unemployed. Meanwhile, in both Greece and Spain over half of the workforce under the age of 25 is unemployed. The lack of employment for those entering the workforce will limit their skill development, while the general hesitancy of employers to hire the long-term unemployed will hurt this cohort going forward. The current generation of 20-25 year olds in Spain and Greece might have the worst long-term employment prospects of any cohort ever. Economic conditions have also noticeably deteriorated in Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands and Denmark over the last six years. Continue reading →

Preserving History as it Happens: The Internet Archive and the Crimean Crisis

      1 Comment on Preserving History as it Happens: The Internet Archive and the Crimean Crisis

By Ian Milligan

“Thirty goons break into your office and confiscate your computers, your hard drives, your files.. and with them, a big chunk of your institutional memory. Who you gonna call?” These were the words Bob Garfield used in a recent episode of On the Media, to address the storming of the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism. On Saturday, March 1st, 2014, during the Russian occupation of the Crimea, men with guns stormed and occupied the offices of the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism. The staff fled, managing to take only part of their files and equipment, although not everything. Over the rest of the weekend, the Center reached out to the Internet Archive to preserve their web material. The episode attracted the attention of the global media, web archivists, and historians. Historians deal with source losses all the time – sources destroyed by events (from wars, political malfeasance, and so forth) – but here we see how quickly the process of archiving and preserving has sped up.

The Internet Archive, which I’ve written about before for ActiveHistory, tries to back up much of the publicly-accessible web. It had not however captured comprehensive holdings of this particular site. If something happened, if the servers were wiped, there were fears that all of their past stories, information, and so forth would be lost. These would be critical for the group, but also, of course, for historians. So from their offices in San Francisco, the Internet Archive’s Archive-It service carried out a comprehensive sweep of the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism’s website, capturing it now 14 times between March 1st and 19th. 5,185 videos have been captured. Indeed, in case they were taken down off YouTube, they are now preserved.

Continue reading →

Soldier Suicide after the Great War: A First Look

      6 Comments on Soldier Suicide after the Great War: A First Look

“Mud and barbed wire through which the Canadians advanced during the Battle of Passchendaele,” November 1917. William Rider-Rider / Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-002165

“Mud and barbed wire through which the Canadians advanced during the Battle of Passchendaele,” November 1917. William Rider-Rider / Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-002165

By Jonathan Scotland

On 20 January 1919 Charles Campbell killed himself. The resident of Brockville, Ontario was the first of many veterans of the First World War to commit suicide that year. Others included Ross Puttilo, Alexander Fowler, William Bailey, and William Dowier. There would be more. Their deaths remind us that recent suicides in the Canadian military are part of a longer historical trajectory of soldier suicide.

With few exceptions, Canadian historians ignore the question of soldier suicide.[1] The military has done a better job of studying the issue and now recognizes that solder suicide is a serious concern. In 2012, the Department of National Defence released Suicide in the Canadian Force, 1995-2012, only the second such report in the military’s history. It found no significant increase in suicide rates between the mid 1990s and the end of Canada’s mission in Afghanistan.  In fact, the report concluded that suicide rates in the military were lower than the civilian population.

This should be no surprise. Recruits, after all, are screened before they join the forces. That there was no statistically significant increase in suicide, despite perceptions to the contrary, is more surprising. This finding is supported by new research on suicide more generally and recent studies have found that old ideas about rising suicide rates, particularly in modern urban environments, are simply not born out by the evidence.

What we lack is a historical picture to put these deaths in context. Continue reading →

After All is Said and Done

      3 Comments on After All is Said and Done

By Peter Seixas

After all is said and done, and The Historical Thinking Project has been laid to rest, the biggest question in history education is still up for grabs.  What is history education for?  Leaving aside whether it is well taught or poorly taught, what are we aiming for?  Here is a smattering of possibilities, as they surface from time to time in public discussion and debate.

  • We teach history to promote national solidarity, a shared collective identity among people, most of whom will never see each other face to face.
  • We learn history to meet obligations to our forebears, who struggled, sacrificed and suffered to make the world that we have inherited.
  • We teach history to transmit the wisdom of the great actors, thinkers and writers of past generations to the next.
  • We learn history to transcend the past’s follies and foibles, the “mistakes,” that we are otherwise “condemned to repeat.”
  • We teach history to come to terms with the crimes and injustices of the past.
  • We learn history to preserve traditions.
  • We teach history for its own sake.

Each of these has considerable currency.  Any talk show host moderating a discussion of history education is likely to get stuck on one or the other.  Yet, many of them are in large part mutually contradictory.  They do, however, have one thing in common (other than the last, which I find nonsensical): they underscore the connections among past, present and future. Continue reading →

The Need for Professional Development and Support for Teachers

      No Comments on The Need for Professional Development and Support for Teachers

By Jill Colyer

When I first started teaching I didn’t feel very successful in my history classroom. (Of course, it is hard to feel successful at all when you first start teaching because the entire experience is overwhelming and incredibly difficult.) After a few years, my feeling that something was missing in my history classes hadn’t gone away.

I didn’t have this feeling in my other classes. When I taught psychology, or law, or politics, I felt that students were highly engaged in the subject matter and that they felt and cared deeply about the issues under investigation. Students would often come in to my class and share that they’d had an argument with a parent over dinner about an issue we’d explored in class, or that they’d seen a news item or documentary about something we’d explored together and they wanted to discuss the new information they they had learned.

Nothing like this ever really happened in my history classes, although I always had a few history buffs in my courseses who were excited about every minute detail we studied. These students often, in fact, had more historical information stored in their heads than I did. Continue reading →

Teaching History: Historical Consciousness and Quebec’s Youth

      1 Comment on Teaching History: Historical Consciousness and Quebec’s Youth

By Jocelyn Létourneau
Translated by Thomas Peace
On peut lire la version française ici

Letourneau - 1Who was the first Premier of Quebec? In what year did the asbestos strike take place? What was the pivotal moment in the Quiet Revolution? Very few young people in Quebec can answer these three questions correctly. In trying to address this problem, scholars and pundits have explained to us that today’s youth have only a limited historical understanding and are generally disinterested in the past.

I don’t think that this is true, at least not entirely. Young people care about the past, though – with a handful of exceptions – their historical understanding is narrow rather than broad. In fact, my research suggests that rather than having no historical imagination or representations, they employ a somewhat simplistic understanding of the past as a useful tool for situating their lives in the present. In other words: youth understand without knowing; they have a strong personal vision of history at the cost of a comprehensive knowledge about the collective past.

Continue reading →

Understanding Historical Thinking with Canadians and their Pasts

      No Comments on Understanding Historical Thinking with Canadians and their Pasts

By Del Muise, Marg Conrad and Gerald Friesen,

cdns and pastsCanadians and their Pasts was a SSHRC-funded Community-University Research Alliance project, involving seven co-investigators from six different universities and a dozen community partners. At its core was a systematic survey of 3,419 Canadians on their engagement with and attitudes toward the past. Its key findings are discussed in a recently released book Canadians and their Pasts exploring the rise of a public historical consciousness in the years since the Centennial of Confederation in 1967 and analyzing how Canadians’ responded to the survey’s seventy questions based on age, culture, education, ethnicity, gender, and language, etc. This brief note restricts itself to a few observations on questions bearing directly on “Historical Thinking” among adult Canadians in their everyday practices of thinking about the past. Over the course of the project several conferences and symposia explored aspects of the project, many of them listed on its web site. Continue reading →

The Necessity of Historical Thinking in Museums

      No Comments on The Necessity of Historical Thinking in Museums

By Elisabeth Tower

Museums today acknowledge that their visitors are learner communities and that those learner communities bring with them knowledge and authority about the past.  This may take the form of personal memory, family heritage, past learning or experiences.  Further, learner communities may have their own evidence about the past and may bring different lenses to the interpretation of that evidence.  The struggle for museums has not been to acknowledge that this authority about the past exists within its learner communities.  Rather, the challenge lies first with getting learners themselves to acknowledge and assert their own authority in or with the museum, and second for the museum and learner to navigate these shared authorities between and amongst them. Continue reading →

Synthesis and Fragmentation: the Case of Historians as Undergraduate Teachers

      No Comments on Synthesis and Fragmentation: the Case of Historians as Undergraduate Teachers

By Ruth Sandwell

Collectively, historians’ work consists of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing a vast edifice of knowledge about which generalizations and synthesis will vary according to the purposes of the historians and the audiences to whom they are directing any particular manifestation of their work. Historians tend to identify their work exclusively with their purposes and audiences as specialist scholars. But if history is a dialogue amongst people about the interpretation of meaningful evidence left over from the past, that dialogue occurs not only in our published articles and at scholarly conferences, but also in our undergraduate teaching. And it is through teaching, not writing, that historians reach what is certainly our largest, and what may be our most important, audience: undergraduate students. Continue reading →