Active History

Canada’s Historical Newspaper Digitization Problem, Part 2

February 13, 2014 69 Comments

Man reading “The Standard” newspaper, 1940s. Source: City of Vancouver Archives

By Sean Kheraj

Nearly three years ago, I wrote a post called “Canada’s Historical Newspaper Digitization Problem” in which I agreed with the findings of a Higher Education Academy study that found that Canada lagged behind the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand in the digitization of historical newspapers. I found that Canada’s online historical newspaper archive is very limited, fragmented, and difficult to access. One of the reasons this became one of the most popular posts on my website was that I included an index of online sources for digitized Canadian newspapers. It turns out that there are a lot of people out there in search of historical Canadian newspapers on the Web and there doesn’t seem to be an adequate national index.

Over the past fifteen years, the limited and fragmented character of Canada’s online historical newspaper archive has had an impact on Canadian history scholarship. As Ian Milligan wrote in Canadian Historical Review last year, “It all seems so orderly and comprehensive.” Yet the incomplete record of digital newspapers in Canada creates an illusion of comprehensive research. With a few keystrokes, we can search any word in any newspaper. Right? As Milligan revealed, not only is the archive limited to a handful of newspapers, the Object Character Recognition software used to make the newspapers text searchable has numerous flaws and limitations. Milligan wrote this article, in part, to call upon historians to think critically about their methodologies when it comes to digital historical scholarship. But his article also raises the important matter of the sorry state of Canada’s digital newspaper archive.

So, how far have we come since I wrote that first post in 2011? I wanted to write this sequel post as a follow-up on the state of the Canadian digital newspaper archive. What follows is an updated list of online historical Canadian newspapers: Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Thirty-Three: The Wind is Not a River by Brian Payton

February 12, 2014 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

Brian Payton, The Wind is Not a River: A Novel (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2014), 308 pp.

In 1942 Japanese forces took control of the islands of Attu and Kiska, which are part of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. For a year American and Canadian forces fought the Japanese for the islands, with the toughest fighting coming in May 1943 on Attu. Proportional to the number of men engaged, only Iwo Jima proved as costly to the Americans. Despite this, the story of the only battle of the Second World War fought on American soil does not resonate when most people think back on the war. The Alaskan campaign tends to get lost to the stories of D-Day and Hiroshima.

From that lost history comes a story of love and survival from author Brian Payton. The Wind is Not a River follows reporter John Easley’s struggle for survival in the Aleutians during the Japanese occupation. After his plane is shot down by anti-aircraft fire, Easley is left to live on the inhospitable island. Occasionally noble, occasionally heinous, Easley’s efforts to survive the island take readers on a journey through the extremes to which human beings can be taken.

Continue reading →

Showing the human face of the humanities – the Humanities Matter Web Series and Bus Tour

February 11, 2014 1 Comment

Things aren’t looking very bright for the arts and humanities at the moment. In our current age of austerity, arts and humanities budgets are easy targets for spending reductions. In both the United States and Canada, politicians seem focused on cuts. During his 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney identified the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts as programs that should be “eliminated.” Even after softening his tone regarding the arts and humanities, Romney continued to advocate for harsh cuts that legislators are still trying to pass.

Things are not better in Canada. In 2012 the Government of Canada cut the budget of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council by 14 million dollars. In efforts to make the most with their budgets, some Canadian universities are also restricting admission to arts and humanities program, like the University of Alberta that suspended admission to 20 humanities programs in 2013.

While the arts and humanities aren’t likely to disappear any time soon, there is an increasing narrative forming that the arts and humanities don’t matter. Some of us want to change the tone of this discussion, showing the human value of the humanities and making it clear that the humanities matter. Continue reading →

Hi-Ho Mistahey!, Shannen’s Dream, Youth Activism, and the Struggle for Indigenous Schooling

February 11, 2014 2 Comments

Scene from Hi-Ho Mistahey!

By Sean Carleton

Indigenous filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin has created yet another gripping and sober documentary about Indigenous issues in Canada. With 2013’s Hi-Ho Mistahey! (which roughly translates as “I love you forever” in Cree), Obomsawin showcases her filmmaking prowess as she examines the educational experiences and frustrations of the Attawapiskat First Nation in northern Ontario.

I recently had the opportunity to see Obomsawin’s newest release at the Re-Frame International Film Festival in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough), Ontario. As with Obomsawin’s previous films such as Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance and Our Nationhood, Hi-Ho Mistahey! blends history, politics, and storytelling. The result is a powerful film that brings much needed attention to the inspiring youth activism and struggle for Indigenous schooling in the North. Continue reading →

Did the Steam Engine or Spinning Mule lead to the Industrial Revolution?

February 10, 2014 2 Comments

From Wikipedia “The introduction of the Spinning Mule into cotton production processes helped to drastically increase industry consumption of cotton. This example is the only one in existence made by the inventor Samuel Crompton. It can be found in the collection of Bolton Museum and Archive Service.” Image by Pezzab.

By Jim Clifford

I recently introduced a group of students to this question by asking them to listen to an episode of In Our Time from BBC Radio 4. After about ten minutes of background conversation the episode devolves into an ongoing argument between the host, Melvyn Bragg and Pat Hudson, one of the leading historians of this time period. The dispute begins when Hudson refuses to focus on the role of innovative Britons in developing new technology that triggered industrialization. Instead, she insists on discussing the underlying environmental and global economic factors that made it possible for Britain to sustain long-term economic growth. This was not the explanation Bragg wanted to focus on and he begins to debate Hudson, demanding that she give British culture its due:

Bragg: … Oh it’s all to do with the broad sweep of history. Listen people invented things that hadn’t been there before which enabled things to happen that had not happened before.

Hudson stood her ground and tried in an increasingly tense conversation to explain why historians moved away from this traditional interpretation of the history of the industrial revolution. In doing so, she comes close to calling the host a racist:

Hudson: Can I say that that really does characterise nationalistic accounts of the period with a peculiar sort of emphasis on British genius or…

Bragg: I didn’t say that!

Hudson: Or the superiority of the British as a race, this characterises some really almost racist accounts of the Industrial Revolution…

Bragg: OH NO! COME ON—THAT’S RUBBISH!![1] Continue reading →

Nature’s Past Episode on the Closing of Federal Libraries

February 7, 2014 2 Comments

Nature’s Past is a regular audio podcast series produced by Sean Kheraj on the environmental history research community in Canada. It is published by the Network in Canadian History and Environment. The show features interviews, round table discussions, and lectures on a wide range of topics in environmental history, including climate change, urbanization, natural resource development, conservation, and food production. This is the latest episode, first published on the NiCHE website on February 3.

Episode 41: Closing Federal Libraries, 3 February 2014 [45:45]
Download Audio

A dumpster at the Fisheries and Oceans Canada library in Mont-Joli, Quebec in an image sent by a federal union official.

Continue reading →

Death or Deliverance: Canadian Courts Martial in the Great War

February 6, 2014 No Comments

Reviewed by M. Wayne Cunningham

On 27 March 1917, a cold wind blew, and showers of sleet rained down on the small village of Mont St. Eloi, located in northern France. On this bleak day, a young Canadian soldier, twenty-one year-old Arthur Lemay, stood before a field general court martial, the army’s highest wartime court. He had been there before. (p.1)

So begins the Introduction to Teresa Iacobelli’s fascinating study, Death or Deliverance: Canadian Courts Martial in the Great War. Lemay’s case is only one of the many Iacobelli draws on to challenge the conventional understanding that the Great War courts martial discipline was harsh and unrelenting.

Lemay’s record of poor performance and desertion earned him a suspended death sentence. Now, he was being charged with two more counts of desertion. Nothing good was said about Lemay at his trial, and all of his commanding officers recommended that he face a firing squad at dawn. Nevertheless, when Commander-in-Chief Sir Douglas Haig deliberated on whether to sentence him to death or deliverance, he chose (for undeclared reasons) to sentence Lemay to five years of incarceration. In less than six months, Lemay was back with his 22^nd Battalion comrades. Iacobelli cites Lemay’s case as an example of how deliverance, instead of death, was more often the ultimate sentence. Continue reading →

Spring 2014 History Matters lecture series line-up announced

February 5, 2014 2 Comments

ActiveHistory.ca and the Toronto Public Library are pleased to announce the Spring 2014 History Matters lecture series.

This season’s series focuses on the theme of “Aboriginal Peoples in Canada: Past and Present.” The lectures are part of the TPL’s Thought Exchange programming.

“What Sir John A. Macdonald Thought About ‘Indians’ and Other Courtroom Tales”
William Wicken
Wicken discusses the January 2013 federal court decision regarding non-status and Metis people in which he was an expert witness, and how historical research has shaped current legal and constitutional understanding of Aboriginal peoples’ place in Confederation.
Thursday March 20, 2014
7pm
Dufferin/St. Clair Branch

“Before Ontario: Archaeology and the Province’s First Peoples”
Marit Munson, Susan Jamieson, Anne Keenleyside, Ron Williamson, Kris Nahrgang, Neal Ferris, and Andrew Stewart
Heritage Toronto presents an exploration of the latest archaeological insights into the lives of Indigenous people in Southern Ontario prior to contact with Europeans. Join the editors and some of the contributors to Before Ontario: The Archaeology of a Province (2013) for a panel discussion.
Wednesday April 2, 2014
6:30pm
Toronto Reference Library Atrium

“Hunger, Human Experimentation and the Legacy of Residential Schools”
Ian Mosby
In the 1940s and 1950s Aboriginal people, including children, were the involuntary subjects of biomedical “experiments” conducted by government researchers. Historian Ian Mosby talks about his groundbreaking research into this grim episode in Canada’s past.
Tuesday April 29, 2014
6:30pm
Annette Street Branch

“Remembering Toronto’s Indigenous and Colonial Pasts”
Victoria Freeman
What is the Indigenous and colonial history of the Toronto area and why don’t Torontonians know more about it?
~~Thursday February 27, 2014~~
~~7pm~~ POSTPONED, NEW DATE TBA
Spadina Road Branch

History Matters started in 2010 as a venue for professional historians and graduate students to present their research to a broader audience outside the university and interact directly with their local communities. Successful series of lectures followed in 2011 and 2013. These lectures are also accessible to the general public as podcasts featured here on ActiveHistory.ca.

We hope to see you there!

The Birth of Black History Month

February 4, 2014 No Comments

In the lead up to Opening the Academy: New Strategies for Exploring & Sharing African Nova Scotian History on 28 February 2014 and at the start of Black History Month, ActiveHistory.ca is republishing Karolyn Smardz Frost‘s “The Birth of Black History Month.” This short essay originally appeared in the Ontario Heritage Trust’s magazine Heritage Matters in 2006. For more information about the event on 28 February see the schedule below or contact the event’s organizer Claudine Bonner.

Ontario’s Black History Month began in the United States as “Negro History Week.” This American celebration of black history and culture was initiated in 1926 at a time when black Americans lived with the daily insult of segregation and the danger posed by the widespread lynchings inspired by the Ku Klux Klan. Continue reading →

Why Canada’s Open Data Initiative Matters to Historians

February 3, 2014 2 Comments

By Ian Milligan

This post originally appeared on ianmilligan.ca.

OK, you’re all forgiven: when you hear ‘open data,’ the first thing that springs to mind probably isn’t a historian (to some historians, it’s the first episode of the BBC show ‘Yes, Minister’). In general, you’d be right: most open data releases tend to do with scientific, technical, statistical, or other applications (releasing bus route information, for example, or the location of geese at the UW campus). Increasingly, however, we’re beginning to see a trickle of historical open data.

Open government is, in a nutshell, the idea that the people of a country should be able to access, read, and even manipulate the data that a country generates. It is not new to Canada: Statistics Canada has been running the Data Liberation Program since at least late 1996, and there have been predecessors before that, but the current government has been pushing an action plan which has materialized in data.gc.ca.

While I am not a fan of the current government’s approach to knowledge more generally, I am happy with the encouraging moves in this realm. Criticism of the government is often very deserved, but we should celebrate good moves when they do happen, however slowly this may occur. Indeed, if the government is opening up their data, maybe it should inspire more publicly-funded scholars to do the same (hat tip to the Canadians and Their Pasts project – profiled here recently – who let me know via Twitter that they are committed to releasing their data).

In this post, I want to show some of the potential that is there for learning about the past through Canadian open data, in the hopes that this will spur interest in maybe getting more released. I even have a little bit for everybody: There’s data here from which political, military and social historians can draw. Let me show you how. Continue reading →

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