Food for Thought

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Figure 1: Canadian Pacific Railway commemorative fruitcake, 1936. Courtesy of the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta.

Figure 1: Canadian Pacific Railway commemorative fruitcake, 1936. Courtesy of the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta.

By Caroline Lieffers

Last week a colleague showed me something that I found extraordinary: a round medallion, about the size of a milk cap, hanging from a long necklace chain. Set under the medallion’s plastic cover was a fragile square of loose-weave cotton, once white but now more of a cream colour, printed with a bright blue and yellow flower. To my surprise, it was a piece of a flour sack. “During the Depression,” he explained, “women would choose which flour to buy based on which brand had the prettiest sack. Then they would reuse the material for dishtowels, curtains, dresses, or whatever else they needed.” My colleague’s friend collects these vintage items and uses bits of the fabric to make jewellery.

I had heard about this resourceful apparel, of course. I knew an elderly woman who once sewed her family’s underwear from such material, and I even inherited a flour sack dress from the 1960s, when they made a kind of hippie-chic comeback. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately not about fashion history but food history, and how what we eat intersects with other aspects of our societies and our lives. This necklace was a material reminder that food is not just about biological sustenance. It is about the environmental, political, economic, ethical, social, religious, and other processes that push and pull a substance from field to table, as well as the flour sack dresses it makes along the way. In consuming food, we consume culture—and often vice-versa, too.

This is the overarching theme of two complementary exhibits set to launch on 24 October 2013 at the University of Alberta’s Bruce Peel Special Collections Library. Continue reading →

Telling Interview Stories: Understanding Oral History from the Perspective of Practice

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Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki

Oral historians often state that, at its core, interviewing is about relationships. This generally refers to the relationships that interviewers and interviewees build and nurture over the course of their encounters, so as to create open, safe, and respectful spaces where one side can share intimate stories, and the other can listen deeply and meaningfully to them. However, there are more relationships involved in the oral history process than just this archetypical one. Others in the room—co-interviewers, a videographer, family members that come in and out of the space—interact with and complicate the dynamic. And, there are also the imagined and real audiences, for whom the stories are being told. All of these people, and the varied relationships that result, have a profound effect on what happens within an interview. Reflecting on our experiences, as these relationships both thrive and flounder, can therefore only help us better understand the stories that they produce and the ways we interpret them later. Continue reading →

Tracking Canada’s History of Oil Pipeline Spills

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Crowds gather to watch cranes joining two ends of an oil pipeline before the official ceremony commemorating the joining of the pipeline of an oil tanker terminal, Portland, Maine, with refineries in Montreal, Quebec, 1941. Source: Library and Archives Canada, WRM 1054.

By Sean Kheraj

Last week, CBC News published a series of articles about energy pipeline safety on Canada’s federally-regulated system of oil and gas pipelines, revealing that between 2000 and 2011 Canada suffered 1,047 separate pipeline incidents. Its findings confirm my own earlier research on the history of oil pipeline spills on the network of interprovincial and international oil pipelines that fall under the jurisdiction of the National Energy Board.

Under an access-to-information request, CBC reporters obtained a data set of pipeline incidents covering a period from 2000 to 2011. It showed that the number of incidents swelled from 45 in 2000 to 142 in 2011. This roughly corresponds with what I found for the period from 2000-2009.

These new reports demonstrate the great difficulty and challenge of documenting the history of oil pipeline spills in Canada. Upon receiving a CD with 405 pages of incident reports, CBC reporters quickly realized that they needed to recompile this data to make it machine-readable for analysis. Furthermore, the data sets were inconsistent and, in some instances, incomplete. For the most part, the information on pipeline incidents on the federally-regulated system is provided by the pipeline operators and not by NEB staff. As such, the information arrives in an unpredictable format from incident to incident. This left CBC with no choice but to sift through all of the 1,047 incidents and fill in the blanks with other NEB documents and reports from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (the regulator responsible for reporting on major pipeline incidents). Continue reading →

Reuben Gold Thwaites and The Jesuit Relations: 100 Years

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By Kathryn Magee Labelle

Reuben Gold Thwaites died in 1913, the same year of the final publication of his seventy-two volume The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791. One hundred years later they are still a valuable and widely circulated edited collection.

These transcribed reports and letters from French Jesuit missionaries living among North America’s Aboriginal communities of the seventeenth and eighteenth century serve as windows into European exploration, settlement, colonization, and Christian conversion. They also describe detailed accounts of First Nations’ people, language, culture, government, spirituality and events.

It was Thwaites’ intention to create a collection of previously spread out and “buried” materials that could be made easily accessible to undergraduate history students. Continue reading →

The Purpose of Higher Education: Three National Studies

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By Roberta Lexier

In recent months (years, really) universities in Canada have come under sustained attack. Provincial governments, especially in Alberta and Ontario, have dramatically reduced financial support for higher education and have publicly demanded that universities solely contribute to economic growth and development through their utilitarian functions. These demands are based on a particularly narrow view of the role of universities.

Conflicts over the purpose of higher education are not new. My research into Sixties student movements in Canada, for instance, demonstrated how developments in the post-World War II period, including increasing funding from federal and provincial governments, a more utilitarian focus, and the perception of universities as, in historian Philip Massolin’s words, “the focal points for the continued material and technological advancement of society,” led to significant discussions regarding their role in the post-World War II Canadian context. Continue reading →

Yonge Love: Crowd-Sourcing the History of Toronto’s Main Drag

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0By Daniel Ross

Every Torontonian has a story about Yonge Street. For nearly a century it was the city’s unquestioned commercial and entertainment hub, the place to go for everything from window-shopping and people-watching to a Saturday night out on the town. Even in today’s diverse, dispersed Toronto it remains our most iconic street. Love it or hate it, like Montreal’s rue Sainte-Catherine or Manhattan’s Broadway, it is hard to imagine the city without it.

It makes sense, then, that there has always been public interest in celebrating (and sometimes criticizing) Yonge Street. In this post I introduce an exciting new public history project organized by the Toronto Public Library, called youryongestreet. Dedicated to bringing together Torontonians to tell their stories about Yonge, the project includes four public talks this fall about Yonge’s history, as well as the creation of a website where people can share their own memories. Continue reading →

Podcast: Lost Ottawa: Facebook, Community, and History in the 21st Century. What Does it all Mean?

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On September 17, the Ottawa Historical Association held its first lecture of the 2013-2014 season. Kicking things off was David McGee of the Canadian Science and Technology Museum and Founder of the popular Facebook group Lost Ottawa. McGee’s talk was entitled “Lost Ottawa: Facebook, Community, and History in the 21st Century. What Does it all Mean?”

Lost OttawaLost Ottawa is a group which features photographs of the nation’s capital up to 2000 – although primarily from the second half of the twentieth century. The photos highlight how the city has changed and members recall, discuss, and debate the city’s evolution. From restaurants that no longer exist, to changing uses of public places, to old NAC concert tickets, the group has become a popular destination for those interested in Ottawa’s history. But the group also raises questions about the study and marketing of history in 2013. In his talk, McGee discusses the Lost Ottawa’s growth and how historians can reach a wider audience.

ActiveHistory.ca is happy to present a recording of the address. Many thanks to David McGee and Andrew Burtch, President of the Ottawa Historical Association for their assistance.

Another Vision for the Canadian Senate

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Pierre Trudeau with Paul and Mary Yuzyk, 1971. Image from http://yuzyk.com/contrib-can-e.shtml

Pierre Trudeau with Paul and Mary Yuzyk, 1971. Image from http://yuzyk.com/contrib-can-e.shtml

By Jonathan McQuarrie

Lately, the Senate has dominated political headlines in Canada. This must mean that it did something wrong, since the only time that the Senate attracts headlines is when things go wrong. And indeed, Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin, and Patrick Brazeau have all disrupted the tightly controlled messaging of the Conservative Prime Minister’s Office emphasis on fiscal responsibility and electoral accountability. To a lesser degree, reports of the now retired Mac Harb’s expense account unsettled the Liberal party. The NDP, sensing political gain and voter anger, has made abolishing the Senate one of its core messages, launching a ‘Roll up the Red Carpet’ campaign. Once again, the place of the august Red Chamber, populated by patronage appointments and part-time legislators, finds itself at the forefront of public discussion.

In a recent editorial, National Post columnist Jonathan Kay provided an interesting counterpoint to the recent discussion of the Senate, citing the work of the former Liberal Senator Yoine Goldstein. For Kay, Goldstein was a model Senator, writing a number of reports on technical yet important topics such as insolvency and patent law. A 2008 Toronto Star article credited Goldstein for advancing a bill against spamming—a law welcomed by many a person with an overburdened inbox. The general point is that, despite the multiple and pressing problems with the Senate, some Senators can indeed rise above the partisan fray to work in a broadly defined public interest.

In this spirit, it is worthwhile to recall the career of Senator Paul Yuzyk. Continue reading →

Dreaming of What Might Be: Introducing the Graphic History Project as a New Initiative for Radical History and Comics

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By Sean Carleton

Illustrate! Educate! Organize! The Graphic History Collective (GHC) is pleased to announce the launch of their new comic book about the Knights of Labor in Canada called Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Canada 1880-1900. The comic book is now available for free on the GHC Website.

Dreaming of What Might Be examines the contentious but significant history of the labour organization known as the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. The comic book shows how the organization took root in Canada and “encouraged people to ‘dream of what might be’ and take action on the job rather than give into the poor conditions and lack of control others said were natural and unchangeable.” Dreaming of What Might Be does not shy away from some of the Knights’ discriminatory practices; however, in the end, the comic book suggests: “Though not without its faults, the Knights of Labor can still be drawn upon for inspiration. Today, as we work to develop new cultures and movements of opposition, the Knights’ call to ‘dream of what might be’ reminds us that an alternative society is always possible.”  Continue reading →

Modernity’s Terrible Beauty: Reflections on Marshall Berman

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all-thatBy Jon Weier

When I learned that Marshall Berman, the great American theorist of modernity, died last month, it seemed appropriate to go back and reread his masterpiece, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. First published in 1982 and then reissued with a new introduction in 1988, this book represented Berman’s attempt to reinvigorate discussions of modernity. In it he sought to reconcile the long-sundered ideas of modernism and modernization, to examine the modern condition and discuss how we could live in the world in the face of constantly accelerating change, to reject the advent of separate post-modernist theories and reintegrate them into larger discussions of modernity, and to return to the intellectual and literary history of modernity in order to find answers that would be useful in understanding its present and future.

All that is Solid Melts into Air was recommended to me by one of my undergraduate history professors and an early mentor at the University of Winnipeg, Dr. David Burley. I read it just after graduating with my BA and realize now that there’s much of it that I didn’t understand at the time. Though I may have missed some of its nuance and complexity at the time, I’ve always remembered it as an important and defining influence on my intellectual development and my continuing fascination with the modern and all that it implies.

Considering its impact on my development, I’ve always been surprised that more historians haven’t read or engaged with Berman and his ideas. Continue reading →