Active History

Lessons from the Past, Promises for the Future: Reflections on Historical Thinking in Canadian History

March 17, 2014 4 Comments

By Thomas Peace

“Our historians have almost wholly ignored the existence of slavery in Canada.”

Two weeks ago these words echoed through Fountain Commons here at Acadia University. Historians, educators and activists had gathered for Opening the Academy: New Strategies for Exploring and Sharing African Nova Scotian Histories. The message those of us in the audience heard was that African-Canadian history remains a marginal field in Canadian history. The words above – evoked at the conference, but originally delivered by T. Watson Smith in 1898 to the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society – still hold true today.[1]

It’s not my intention here to delve into the relative merits of this comparison (though a look through Watson Smith’s address makes one wonder just how far historical research has come over the past 115 years). Rather, I want to use Watson Smith’s statement as a way to introduce a more fundamental point about teaching history and communicating information about the past: it isn’t easy and it’s highly political.

This week ActiveHistory.ca has put together a series of blog posts that focus on the Historical Thinking Project. Scheduled to close its doors at the end of the month, the Historical Thinking Project has made a tangible difference in Canada’s historical landscape. Continue reading →

Podcast – “Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland” by Jan Grabowski

March 14, 2014 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Ottawa Historical Association welcomed historian Jan Grabowski in January.

ActiveHistory.ca is happy to feature here his talk, “Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland.”

Grabowski is a professor at the University of Ottawa. His talk is based on his recent book of the same name (Indian University Press, 2013).

Towards a New Vision: A Long View of Canada’s Foreign Policy and Defence Challenges

March 13, 2014 No Comments

By Greg Kennedy

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a roundtable discussion held by the Department of Political Science here at the University of Moncton. The topic was “Current Foreign Policy and Defence Challenges in Canada” and the roundtable included Jocelyn Coulon, an expert on Canada’s involvement with United Nations peacekeeping operations as well as Jean-François Caron, a political science professor studying Canada’s recent emphasis on bilateral relations with the United States.

Needless to say, I learned a lot. In particular, I was struck by the importance of the symbolism of the Canadian peacekeeper in public opinion and the ways in which, since the end of the Cold War, military operations have evolved to include more complex counterinsurgency, reconstruction and other kinds of “nation-building”. My role in this was to bring a historical view to these issues. Given the current international crises in Syria and Ukraine, and this month’s end to Canada’s mission in Afghanistan, it seems an opportune moment to reflect on our country’s role in international affairs as well as how best to orient our military forces moving forward. Continue reading →

Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD On the Canadian Prairies

March 12, 2014 No Comments

Reviewed by Joanne Epp

When University of Saskatchewan professor Erika Dyck began investigating the use of lysergic acid diethylamide (commonly known as LSD) in psychiatric research, she was surprised at what she found. LSD has a bad reputation, to say the least. It’s widely seen as a dangerous drug that leaves its victims permanently damaged and prone to debilitating flashbacks. LSD has also been used in some decidedly unethical CIA-funded experiments. Yet there was a time when medical researchers saw LSD as a promising therapeutic treatment. Dyck describes Psychedelic Psychiatry as the result of her quest to understand the dichotomy between the public perception of the drug and its early history. Continue reading →

Ten Books to Contextualize the Environmental History of Food and Agriculture in Canada

March 11, 2014 1 Comment

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

Hop pickers, Cooper’s farm, Bloomfield. Source: Archives of Ontario

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.

On the sixth and seventh episodes of the series, we explored the environmental history of food and agriculture in Canada. We interviewed Margaret Derry about her book on chicken breeding, Art and Science in Breeding: Creating Better Chickens. We also convened a round table panel with the editors and authors of Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. Food history is a growing field of study and it has many intersections with environmental history.

Nature’s Past Episode 36: Histories of Canadian Environmental Issues, Part VI – Agri-Food Systems I

Nature’s Past Episode 37: Histories of Canadian Environmental Issues, Part VII – Agri-Food Systems II

Here are ten books to contextualize the environmental history of food and agriculture in Canada: Continue reading →

Digital Libraries and National Digitization Programmes: How Does Canada Compare?

March 10, 2014 3 Comments

By Krista McCracken

Springfield College, Babson Library, Archives and Special Collections, accessed via DPLA

Marsh Memorial Readying Room. Photograph from Babson Library, Archives and Special Collections, accessed via DPLA

National digital library projects and national digitization initiatives have emerged across the world in recent years with varying levels of funding, support, and success. How does Canada’s national attempts at digitization and open access compare to international efforts to make material freely accessible online?

The example closest to home is the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) which aims to bring together diverse collections of books, images, historical records, artwork, and audio-visual material in a single open access portal. The DPLA currently includes more than 5,700,000 items from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States.

The DPLA access portal is user friendly and there are a variety of ways to explore the collection including a timeline feature, by geographic location, by browsing a virtual bookshelf, or using a traditional search bar. Additionally, the DPLA has an open API and has encouraged developer involvement and the hacking of the millions of records in the DPLA. Some have criticized the DPLA as overlapping existing projects and expressed concern about copyright and the possibility of funding being taken away from traditional libraries. These criticisms aside the DPLA holds a tremendous amount of information has the potential to be a huge boon to researchers and the general public. Continue reading →

International Women’s Day (IWD) and Human Rights 2014

March 7, 2014 34 Comments

By Veronica Strong-Boag

Author’s note: This post was commissioned as an IWD blog by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. It was initially approved and posted by the Museum on 4 March 2014. It was, however, almost immediately withdrawn as ‘Communications’ at the Museum deemed the one line comment on the current federal Conservative government unacceptable as written. The offer of a substantive footnote and illustrative example from the author brought no reply. ActiveHistory.ca has reposted this time-sensitive contribution here, to which examples of anti-women policies and a footnote have been added.

International Women’s Day on 8^th March should be a key date in the human rights calendar. Its place is hard-won. When Charlotte Bunch, a leading figure in the creation of UN Women (2010), insisted in 1990 that women’s rights are human rights in the Human Rights Quarterly and Edward Broadbent, from the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, served in 1993 as a judge in the Vienna Tribunal on Women’s Human Rights, one half of humanity’s entitlement to fair dealing remained globally contested. That struggle continues.

Although recognition that women’s rights are human rights pre-dates even writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) in the western tradition, IWD emerged in 1908 with a mass women suffrage meeting organized by American socialists. By 1911 the idea had reached Europe, where again it persisted as a special interest of the left. Unlike ‘Mother’s Day,’ also first observed in 1908, which celebrated women as maternal and peace-loving, IWD initially concentrated on waged and industrial labour. Early champions such as the German socialist Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) intended to highlight tragedies such as the 1911 New York Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and economic oppression generally. When IWD became an official holiday in Russia after 1917 and in the new People’s Republic of China in 1949, even as both countries failed to offer equality, liberal democracies, not to mention dictatorships, shied away.

Champions of equality, however, persisted. Continue reading →

“Remembering the past is a useful step toward moving forward together”: Observing Civic Commemorations in Toronto

March 6, 2014 1 Comment

Invitation to Toronto’s semi-centennial in 1884. Toronto Reference Library, Baldwin Room, “1884. Reception. VS”.

By Kaitlin Wainwright

Today marks 180 years since the former Town of York was incorporated as the City of Toronto. It was given a new name, distinguished from New York and a dozen or so other places in the province. The city’s earliest neighbourhoods were the five wards named for the patron saints of the British Isles: St. George, St. Andrew, St. Patrick, and St. David, and for St. Lawrence, a patron saint of Canada. Subway stations and public spaces remind us of these past neighbourhoods, building layer upon layer of commemoration.

Toronto recently celebrated its 175^th anniversary as a city in 2009 with gatherings, parades, and a video designed to inspire pride in the city. Five years later, public events geared towards celebrating the establishment of the City of Toronto are calling upon us to gather where others stood before us. With a civic election looming in the fall, the media is again providing the advice that “[r]emembering the past is a useful step toward moving forward together.” But what pasts are being remembered?

I am a closeted patriot: I find points of pride in my identities and their symbols, but I also believe there is value in understanding these symbols from a critical perspective. As we often must be reminded, commemoration tells us as much about our present as it does about our past. When I consider acts of commemoration, I often wonder if the reason we wrap ourselves up in them like a security blanket is not because we see the past through a present lens, but because commemorations are about shared history and the stories that we tell about ourselves.

David Lowenthal suggests that “in celebrating symbols of their histories, societies in fact worship themselves.” When discussing commemoration, personal pronouns are used: My heritage, our past. Memory — not history — is the guiding force behind acts of commemoration. So, on Toronto’s 180th birthday, I want to ask: What symbols of Toronto’s past are we celebrating? How does Toronto’s collective memory impact its present? Continue reading →

Toronto’s Rob Ford Phenomenon and Diversity within Canada’s Evolving Suburbs

March 3, 2014 1 Comment

Image from Wikipedia Commons.

By Jay Young

An earlier version of this post originally appeared on the History News Network in late January.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford sure is in the news a lot these days. In late December, the US liberal-leaning Talking Points Memo website announced it had awarded him their annual scandal-of-the-year trophy, marking the first time this infamous recognition went to a politician outside the United States. And in January another video appeared of a seemingly drunken, incoherent Ford ranting in a fake (and, many have argued, offensive) Jamaican patois at a local fast food restaurant. Like the previous videos, Ford’s antics were once again broadcast and mocked on American late night television for a global audience. Ford, who had previously told the media that he had sworn off alcohol, admitted that he’d been drinking “a little bit” that evening.

Despite Ford’s seeming non-stop substance abuse sideshow, polling numbers show Ford’s continued support from a core of Torontonians. The city’s residents will go to the polls later this year, so we’re bound to hear much more about Ford throughout his re-election campaign.

So how did Toronto get here? Continue reading →

Introducing the ActiveHistory.ca YouTube Channel

February 28, 2014 2 Comments

Is there anything more fun/dangerous/time consuming than unintentionally falling into a YouTube rabbit hole? You start out looking for Stephen Colbert’s Daft Punk video and two hours later have somehow landed on bloopers from Seinfeld. One of my personal favourites is mid-to-late 90s professional wrestling videos, with their over the top characters and the nostalgia of being a kid and wondering if it was real. Plus, all the Royal Rumbles from that era are readily available – what a great time to be alive.

In addition to these, I’ve also fell on some pretty terrific history videos during my trips to YouTube, which made me think that perhaps we here at Active History should put together some videos. So we did and we’re pleased to announce the ActiveHistory.ca YouTube channel.
Continue reading →

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