Active History

Judging the Past

January 16, 2014 3 Comments

By Andrew Nurse

One of the basic rules of historical scholarship is to avoid “anachronistic judgments.” In simple terms, this means the following: the people who lived in the past, lived different lives with different values and different obligations then do we in the present. Therefore, it would be wrong to judge them by standards that are outside the context of their lives, about which they might have known nothing, and which fails to grapple with the dynamics of the culture in which they actually lived. No less an authority than E.P Thompson warns precisely against quick and easy judgements ranged against the past in opening pages of The Making of the English Working Class.

“I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. But they lived through times of social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experiences; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain condemned in their own lives, as casualties.”

Yet, as Thompson recognized, historical writing is replete with judgement. Continue reading →

Reconstructing the Future: Understanding Toronto’s Wild Weather of 2013

January 15, 2014 1 Comment

A picture of a fallen tree blocking a road in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood.

Destruction in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, December 23rd, 2013. Photo credit: Dagomar Degroot.

By Dagomar Degroot

In Toronto, 2013 was a year of storms. The media storm kindled by the mayor’s chicanery was twice interrupted by meteorological storms that threatened lives and property on an unprecedented scale. On July 8^th more than 100 mm of rain inundated the city in a matter of hours, triggering flash floods that caused more than $1 billion in property damage. Three days before Christmas, winter storm Gemini unleashed more freezing rain than was ever recorded in Toronto. Some 300,000 customers – representing perhaps one million people – lost power as temperatures plummeted below -10° C. This time the city’s infrastructure succumbed to the force of frozen water, and those desperate for heat too often turned to candles, generators, and other sources of deadly carbon monoxide. I am climate historian living in Toronto. Experiencing these storms helped me better understand how climate change, weather and society influence each other in the past, present, and future.

Climate historians or “historical climatologists” reconstruct past weather and climate using some combination of computer simulations, evidence from the natural world, and documentary sources. The field is interdisciplinary, and many of its scientists stop at these climate reconstructions. However, most of its historians also explore relationships between climate change, weather, and human history. As I have described in previous Active History articles, I am one of those historians. My research explores the social influence of the “Little Ice Age,” a roughly 1° C cooling of global temperatures between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. I hope that such research will give us insight into relationships between climate change and society in a warmer future. Continue reading →

Video: Trudeau 2.0: Pierre’s Legacy and Justin’s Future

January 14, 2014 No Comments

Many Canadians view Pierre Elliott Trudeau as a Canadian hero, perhaps the most charismatic Prime Minister the nation has ever seen. Yet others are far more critical of Trudeau’s leadership and legacies. This ambivalence has led to popular opinion polls naming Pierre one of the greatest and worst Canadian of all time. Justin, Pierre’s 41-year-old son and current leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, is no less of a polarizing figure than his father. A media darling, Justin’s youthful energy and charm have worked both for and against him in assessments of his political capital and potential.

This panel of Canadian historians explores the past, present, and future of the Trudeau dynasty. It was hosted by Roxanne Panchasi.

Panelists
Elise Chenier is a specialist in the history of sexuality and gender in twentieth century Canada and the United States. She recently launched the Trudeaumania Project, a social media campaign which aims to collect memorabilia related to Pierre Trudeau’s time in power.

Nicolas Kenny is a Canadian historian whose research focuses on the cultural history of cities. He is a regular commentator on federal and provincial politics for ICI Radio-Canada, the CBC’s French-language radio and television services in British Columbia.

Allen Seager studies Canadian Labour history, with a special interest in the history of the coal industry, mining communities in Western Canada, and the Canadian railway.

This roundtable is part of the SFU History Department’s “Heroes and Villains: Rethinking Good and Evil in History” series. The next talk will take place January 23, 2014, when Emily O’Brien will explore the good, the bad and the ugly of the Renaissance era of papal history and how this era represented a turning point for the Western Church.

Going Local: ‘Stronger than Steel’ and Progressive Locality

January 13, 2014 No Comments

Sydney, Nova Scotia. Wikimedia Commons. Photographer: Abebenjoe

By Lachlan MacKinnon

On Labour Day Weekend, Sydney, Nova Scotia celebrated the opening of the Open Hearth Park on the remediated site of the former steel plant with a series of musical performances, a gourmet street fair, and a procession of former steelworkers through the park. The celebration, titled “Stronger than Steel,” revealed some of the ways that the experiences of deindustrialization have been reflected in Sydney and how the industrial past has been commemorated. Some of the language surrounding the event, however, indicated a re-branding effort was underway; Keith MacDonald, CEO of the Cape Breton Partnership for economic development, promised that “the . . . event will showcase Sydney as a great and green place to live, work, and do business.” The name itself, “Stronger than Steel,” indicates a community that has survived the loss of its major industry – albeit with significant hardship in the form of lost jobs and outmigration. Promotional material describing the event did an excellent job of showcasing the new park, reflecting upon the role of the steel plant on local culture, and looking ahead to a brighter future. While much of this material focuses on “turning brown into green,” it is also important to remember that the economic and political ramifications of industrial loss have not been similarly consigned to the past – they continue to influence daily life in the city, and are represented throughout local culture and commemorative activities. Continue reading →

Cold Comfort: Firewood, Ice Storms, and Hypothermia in Canada

January 9, 2014 3 Comments

By Josh MacFadyen

The following piece was recently originally posted on The Otter ~ La Loutre

Many Canadians had a brush with homelessness, or at least heat-lessness, over the holidays. Over half a million customers across Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick spent Christmas in the cold and dark, and ten days after the 2013 ice storm homes were still coming online. With the region currently experiencing snow storms and extreme cold temperature warnings, Canadians may be thinking about the fragility of urban energy systems and our level of preparedness for extreme weather events. (At least we seem to be intrigued by travel delays, frost quakes, ice mayors, historic frozen negatives, boiling squirt gun experiments, and of course Frozen, as well as more serious local relief efforts such as Coldest night of the year and “In from the Cold” campaigns.)

The ice storm was deemed the largest in Toronto history, but since it follows only fifteen years after a similar ice storm in Quebec and Eastern Ontario these may not be isolated 100-year events. Extreme weather events appear to be on the increase, and 2013 was a banner year. Debates over the Toronto’s preparedness and resilience are ongoing. Anthony Haines, CEO of Toronto Hydro, promised there will be discussions regarding future improvements and “there is no doubt, learning is to be had.” Winter storms can be especially risky when cold weather and power outages overlap, and historically, extreme cold has been far more lethal than floods and heat waves.

I suggest that the kind of learning “to be had” includes a broad understanding of our historical relationships with extreme weather and urban energy supplies, including food and heat. Climatologists will be working to identify the frequency of these weather events, but historical climate data also allow historians to create detailed risk-maps of extreme cold weather events in Canada over time. Historical research in energy, transportation, and urban planning may then show us how Canadians adapted to these challenges over time. Continue reading →

January 11th is Sir John A. Day

January 8, 2014 1 Comment

Design by Emma Jenkin

By Kaitlin Wainwright

In 2001, the federal government officially declared January 11th to be Sir John A. Macdonald Day, in honour of Canada’s first prime minister and a Father of Confederation. While it’s not an official holiday (shame, we could all use one of those in the cold winter months), it is a “heritage day” along with National Flag of Canada Day (February 15) and the Anniversary of the Statute of Westminster (December 11). Sir John A. Macdonald is seen by many as the man who built this country from east to west, using the railway as the tie that binds. He rightly deserves the attention he has received within the Canadian historical narrative and this will no doubt be paid a mari usque ad mare (from sea to sea) during the bicentennial of his birth in 2015.

Some, myself included, are jumping on the bandwagon a bit early. In Toronto, a period costume event is being held on January 10, and a Canadian history pub trivia night is on at the Duke of York on January 11. I am co-organizing the latter event, and am quite excited to see organizations such as Canada’s History, Historica Canada, and Penguin support the effort to shed some light on our shared and inherited past. Although Sir John A. Macdonald’s birthday has been an official day in Canada for 12 years, there seems to be not much done about it – or, really, any other important days in Canada’s history. The pub trivia night will be a chance to do what Sir John A. loved to do – drink – and to revel in some of the peculiar pieces of Canada’s past.

As a public historian, I have a complicated relationship with commemoration. On the one hand, anniversaries can often distill complex histories into dichotomies and brief moments with little context. On the other hand, if we can’t remember the past on the day in which it happened, when can we? Continue reading →

Ten Books to Contextualize the Environmental Movement in Canada

January 7, 2014 3 Comments

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

Mi’kmaq solidarity protest in Montreal, October 2013. Source: Robert Smith, McGill Daily Photo Editor

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.

Our third and fourth episodes in the series we examined the history of the environmental movement in Canada. We began by taking the long view of Canadian ideas about and attitudes toward the natural environment by speaking Neil Forkey about his book Canadians and the Natural Environment to the Twenty-First Century. We then held a round-table discussion with a group of scholars whose work examines different aspects of the history of environmentalism in Canada.

Part 1

Part 2

Continue reading →

Archival Digitization and the Struggle to Create Useful Digital Reproductions

January 6, 2014 3 Comments

By Krista McCracken

Reverse of a photographic postcard, Benna Fuller Collection, Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre, 2011-8/001 (006)

The past decade has fundamentally changed how archives provide access to historical records. Many archives now provide digital access to collections, have digitization on demand services, and have started to prioritize collections for digitization. Much of this digitization has been driven by funding bodies and a desire to increase accessibility to collections. But how has the digitization of archival records been received by historians, genealogists, and other patrons?

One of the initial challenges presented by the digital representation of archival sources is the need to preserve context. Original order and provenance are fundamental archival arrangement principals which help maintain context within collections. Original order allows for connections between records to be illuminated and provenance describes the origins of archival records. However, many archives have struggled to replicate the physical experience of browsing through an archival box in a digital environment. At times this challenge has resulted in the loss of context or inability to determine original order online.

Some researchers are weary of the digital record being a true representation of the physical record. For example, an institution might make the decision to only scan the front of photographs for online consumption. Any notations on the rear of the photograph are then inputted into a notes field. The notation is still preserved but it’s not displayed in its original form. The transcription process used to enter the notation as metadata may include interpretations of handwriting, short forms, etc. The very process of transcription is subject to interpretation and human error. Continue reading →

First Annual(?) Year in Review (100 Years Later) Bracket

December 20, 2013 4 Comments

By Aaron Boyes and Sean Graham

We offer our two cents about 1913. Do you agree/disagree with our rankings?

We offer our two cents about 1913. Let us know what you think of our rankings.

Each year, websites and magazines come out with year in review articles that attempt to summarize the year and highlight the major events of the previous 12 months. While these can be entertaining, they are fraught with peril as it is difficult to determine what, moving forward, will prove to be influential. If you look back at some of these articles, things that were thought to be significant fade into oblivion while lesser known events or people end up being the most memorable.

With the perspective of 100 years, however, determining the significant events of a given year becomes a little easier. That is why we are inaugurating our First (Annual?) Year in Review (100 Years Later) Bracket. We compiled the major events of 1913, ranked them, and put them into a ‘March Madness’ style bracket. The four ‘regions’ are the Humanist Region, the International Region, the Innovation Region, and the Potpourri Region.

The results of the first two rounds can be seen in the bracket here with the primary factor being the long-term significance of the event. For the final sixteen, we decided to engage in a back and forth debate to determine the biggest event of 1913.
Continue reading →