Active History

What is the “Right Way” to commemorate the First World War?

April 7, 2014 3 Comments

Michael Gove (from the Wikipedia Commons)

By Jonathan Weier

Those who regularly read the British press have been exposed, over the past three months, to a vitriolic war of words over the legacy and meaning of the First World War in Britain. This controversy has become increasingly acrimonious as representatives of the Conservative government and their sympathizers have sought to paint a number of British historians as disloyal for presenting a view of the First World War that minimizes the glory and moral superiority of the British war effort.

The first salvo in this controversy was fired by Michael Gove, the British Education Secretary, in a January 2nd editorial in the Daily Mail. In his editorial, Gove argued that there is a “right way” to commemorate and learn from the First World War, and to honour the sacrifice of British soldiers Continue reading →

Video: Karen Ferguson – “The Yin-Yang of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.”

April 4, 2014 No Comments

Our historical memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X most often sets them in opposition — racial integrationism vs. separatism, pacifism vs. violence, “good” vs. “bad” black leader (or vice versa). But what happens if we move beyond this dualism and examine these African American icons together? What if we consider how and why their respective struggles for black liberation and historical legacies were and are interconnected and interdependent?

Karen Ferguson’s talk — part of the SFU History Department’s Heroes and Villains series — does just that, and promises both to complicate your idea of both men and deepen your understanding of the African American freedom struggle.

Dr. Ferguson holds a doctorate in African-American history from Duke University in North Carolina. Her research is concerned with the ways that race and public policy intersect in American urban politics. Her latest book, Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), considers the continuities and changes in racial liberalism in the 1960s and 1970s as its focus shifted from civil-rights integrationism to multiculturalism.

The next (and final) lecture of the Heroes and Villains series, “Ottoman Hero or Frontier Villain? Ahmed Feyzi Pasha, 1839-1915,” will be held on April 3rd. Click here for details. Like other lectures from the series, video of the final talk will appear on ActiveHistory.ca.

More With Less? A Historical View of the NSGEU Labour Dispute

April 3, 2014 1 Comment

Nurse, Elderly Home Corridor. Wikimedia Commons. 31 December 2012.

By Lachlan MacKinnon

Almost 300 nurses in the Halifax region of Nova Scotia walked off the job on Tuesday in a one-day wildcat strike, although those working in cancer care, emergency and dialysis units, and veterans care remained at work. The ongoing dispute between the Nova Scotia Government and General Employees Union (NSGEU), which represents more than 2,400 nurses and nearly 35,000 other healthcare workers, and their employer, the Capital District Health Authority, is twofold: the union is asking for an increase in nurse-to-patient ratios while also challenging the controversial “Bill 37.” The bill, also known as the “Essential Health and Community Services Act,” seeks to deny nurses, paramedics, and 911 operators the right to strike until an essential services agreement is put into place. Such an agreement would see senior nurses pulled from their duties to negotiate the terms of “essential services” with employers for several months before any collective bargaining takes place.

The striking NSGEU workers were ordered back to work on Tuesday, and the union has announced that legal strike action is scheduled to begin on Thursday morning. The Nova Scotia Nurses Union (NSNU), who represent an additional 6500 nurses in the province, are not in a position to strike but have declared their shared opposition to the planned legislation. With these issues in mind, as nurses and other healthcare workers are poised to strike and the provincial government seeks to limit their right to do so, we have an opportunity to briefly explore the history of healthcare and nurses unions in Canada and to reflect upon the continued importance of organized labour in fighting for the rights of Canadian workers. Continue reading →

Canada’s Presence in the World: A Discussion with the Right Honorable Joe Clark

April 2, 2014 No Comments

By Andrew Sopko and Sarah Dougherty

On January 31^st 2014, the Right Honorable Joe Clark came to Carleton University to discuss his new book, How We Lead: Canada in a Century of Change (Random House, 2013), with students in Professor Norman Hillmer’s seminar on nationalism, internationalism, and political culture. This book, by the former prime minister and foreign minister is, in his own words, “a reflection on what Canadians have accomplished at our best, specifically in international affairs.” (p.4) In his book and the discussion which followed, Clark expressed his desire to see Canada re-engage with international issues, to re-take its position as a global leader. He agreed with the Carleton students that Canada has abandoned its impressive tradition of global leadership.

How We Lead outlines the dramatic dismissal of activist international policy that has taken place under the watch of the current government. Continue reading →

Government Cuts Funding After Five Years of ActiveHistory.ca

April 1, 2014 10 Comments

closed-sign.big_ Happy April Fool’s Day! We’re happy to be celebrating our fifth year and thank you to our readers for all your support over the years!

After five years of operation, ActiveHistory.ca will be shutting down because of government funding cuts. This website, originally envisioned as a Canadian version of Britain’s popular History & Policy website, grew into a widely accessed collection of blog posts, podcasts, book reviews, and short papers. Continue reading →

Bones, Ghosts and Human Rights: How Science Can Further Justice

March 31, 2014 No Comments

A public lecture by Luis Fondebrider, recorded at the University of Saskatchewan on February 10, 2014

Luis Fondebrider teaches in the Department of Legal Medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. He is President of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team and has been involved in international tribunals on political violence and human rights, focusing on the use of forensic anthropology in identifying victims of mass violence, in over forty countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe.

Sponsored by the Department of History.
Funded by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity, College of Arts and Science, Humanities Research Unit, the Vice-President Research, and the CRC in Medical History; with the support of Departments of Psychology, Anthropology and Archeology, Political Studies, Sociology, Community Health and Epidemiology, and English. Jon Bath, the Director of the Humanities and Fine Arts Digital Research Centre, edited the film.

If you are hosting a public lecture related to history and have the funding or skills to record and edit the talk, ActiveHistory.ca would be happy to post it to our YouTube channel and feature it on this website.

Past Protection: Conservation at the Archives of Ontario

March 28, 2014 No Comments

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.

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

March 26, 2014 1 Comment

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

March 25, 2014 1 Comment

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

March 24, 2014 6 Comments

“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 →

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