Active History

History Slam Podcast Episode Thirty-One: Don Cummer, Brothers At War, and Historical Fiction

November 20, 2013 No Comments

By Sean Graham

Front cover of Don Cummer’s Brothers At War

I can understand if there are people who scoff at the thought of another book on the War of 1812. Given the onslaught of commemoration of the war over the past two years, I’ve definitely sensed some fatigue on the part of some historians. From the television commercials to museum exhibitions to two episodes of the History Slam podcast, the War of 1812 has been almost inescapable lately. As a result, some people might view Brothers At War by Don Cummer as yet another work of commemoration. Those people would be greatly mistaken, however, and missing out on a terrific book.

Brothers At War is not a history of the War of 1812, but rather a historical fiction set in Upper Canada during the months leading to war. The story follows adolescent best friends Jacob and Eli as they deal with bullies and bad teachers, but under the surface something greater is brewing. With the story being set against the coming of war, the fact that Eli is an American immigrant and his father has refused to take the oath of allegiance to the King adds tension to the story. It is not a book about the War, but rather a book whose characters are affected by the War.
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Indigenous History in the Classroom: Four Principles, Four Questions

November 18, 2013 2 Comments

By Carolyn Podruchny

Is teaching Indigenous history any different than teaching other histories? This question was posed to organizers of a day-long Teaching History Symposium on history, heritage, and education for Toronto area public school teachers, heritage experts, graduate students, and faculty members in the History Department at York University.[1] Rather than providing an answer, I suggest more questions to consider, and principles to guide decisions about teaching Indigenous history. I suspect that methods employed in teaching Indigenous histories can serve as a model for teaching about the histories of all peoples in the past.

I am a historian of Indigenous peoples and French colonists on the land that came to be known as Canada, and I specialize widely in histories of Anishinaabe, Cree, and Metis. I teach courses that are specific to Indigenous histories and general early Canadian or early North American histories that happen to include a majority of material that concerns Indigenous peoples. I do not have any Indigenous heritage myself, and I recognize my past as a descendent of Ukrainian immigrants on the Canadian prairies. I have benefitted from the system of colonialism implemented by the Canadian government, which dispossessed Indigenous peoples. My grandparents farmed on Cree, Anishinaabe, and Metis lands in western Manitoba (outside of Ethelbert and Ozerna); I grew up in Selkirk, Manitoba on the site of a former Anishinaabe community, the Peguis Band, which was relocated 160 km north in 1907.[2] Today I live on Mississauga land (in the town of Oakville), and I want to recognize that York University occupies lands that were once home to Mississaugas, other Anishinaabeg, Wendats, and Eries.[3]

Why am I acknowledging my ethnic heritage and history, and why do I remark on the past owners of the lands on which I live and work? I do so for three reasons. Continue reading →

History Feature in Newest Issue of Atlantic Books Today

November 16, 2013 No Comments

By Angela Mombourquette, Editor, Atlantic Books Today

Three times a year, the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association publishes a 48-page magazine dedicated to exploring the latest in Atlantic Canadian books. Today, we’re pleased to tell you that we’ve done something extra special with the newest issue of Atlantic Books Today.

Thanks to support from the Canada Book Fund, we’ve added a 16-page section devoted entirely to history—and to showcasing the vigorous catalogue of new history titles from Atlantic Canada and beyond. We’ve also broadened many of our existing departments in this issue to touch on history, and we’ve brought in the big guns, including several celebrated authors—like John Boileau, AJB Johnston, and Frank Macdonald—whose expertise in historical subjects extends deep—to explore how writers are approaching history from fresh, exciting perspectives.

Join us as author Jon Tattrie looks at three new works of lively, funny history, and as Nova Scotia writer Sandra Phinney brings us a profile of Mike Parker—author, outdoorsman and historian—and explores the secrets to his success. John Boileau, a retired army officer, and currently the Honorary Lieutenant-Colonel of The Halifax Rifles (RCAC) brings us “War and Peace,” a look at new works touching on military history. Multitalented Cape Breton author Frank Macdonald compares some recent works of historical fiction, and finds historical truths revealed through themes and characters, while Young Readers’ Editor Lisa Doucet explores the benefits of reading historical books for kids. We also have reviews and excerpts to entice and entertain and many more articles that explore history-themed subjects.

We invite you to read and enjoy. To go directly to the digital edition, please click here.

Video: Bidisha Ray – “Great Soul or Great Schemer? Exploring the Myth of Mahatma Gandhi”

November 15, 2013 No Comments

Mahatma Gandhi’s name is synonymous with peace and saintliness almost everywhere on the planet. Yet in parts of postcolonial South Asia, Gandhi’s life, politics, ideologies, and legacy have been the subject of considerable controversy and even violent denigration. How, then, should we remember Gandhi? Misogynist tyrant or freethinking radical? Self-absorbed kingmaker or farsighted statesman? Economic genius or utopian fantasist? By exploring some of the most popular myths surrounding the man and his work, Dr. Bidisha Ray offers in this video a fresh perspective on what Gandhi and Gandhi-isms may stand for.

Next up in SFU’s History Department’s Heroes and Villains series is “Trudeau 2.0: Pierre’s Legacy and Justin’s Future,” a roundtable discussion with Elise Chenier, Allen Seager, and Nicolas Kenny, hosted by Roxanne Panchasi. It will be held 28 November 2013, 7:00 PM. Further details here: http://www.sfu.ca/history/events/heroesandvillains/trudeau.html

The Value of Historical Maps: Solving At Least Part of the Mystery of the Origins of the Acadians

November 14, 2013 No Comments

By Gregory Kennedy

One of the principal challenges of Acadian history is that we do not have conclusive proof of the origins of the first permanent colonists. The passenger lists, parish registers, tax records, or censuses that genealogists use for other groups and regions have not been found and may not exist. There are a few exceptions, and as early as 1959, some experts suggested that the Loudunais, a region of western France between Poitou and Touraine, was the likely origin of the twenty or so families recruited by Charles de Menou during the 1640s. This hypothesis was hotly contested at the time and remains the subject of debate. I have summarized this debate elsewhere[1], but I am personally convinced that the Loudunais was the most probable place of origin of this founding group (though certainly not all of the Acadians) for a variety of reasons. Historical maps played a crucial role in convincing me of this. Continue reading →

A Big Fracking Deal

November 13, 2013 1 Comment

By Daniel Macfarlane

$The fracking process. Wikimedia Commons$

The fracking process. Wikimedia Commons

The recent showdown between Native protestors and police over “fracking” in New Brunswick brought together several contentious issues that have simmering, and periodically boiling over, in Canadian society as of late (an interactive map of New Brunswick fracking can be found here). Obviously one of them, and probably the most prominent, is the Canadian state’s past and present treatment of First Nations.

But another is the use of fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing (the oil and gas industry tends to spell it without the “k” – so “fracing” or “frac’ing”). Though I don’t want to downplay the many vital Native rights issues at stake, I do want to concentrate here on the fracking aspect. In Canada, this method of energy recovery has intensified and increased in the past decade, especially the last few years. For example, Apache Corp claimed in 2011 that it had performed in northern British Columbia the largest hydraulic fracturing operation ever – and then topped it a few months later.

Fracking typically involves the pumping of massive volumes of water at high pressure in order to fracture rock, often shale, where natural gas is trapped several kilometers underground in rock formations. Chemicals are included in the mix, as is a “proppant” such as sand, which is used to keep the fracture open and allow the gas to flow to a well where it can be recovered. Fracking became a particularly effective means of accessing unconventional and previously inaccessible sources when combined with horizontal drilling – if it helps, think of The Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns used slant-drilling to steal the oil under Springfield Elementary. Continue reading →

Food for Thought

November 12, 2013 No Comments

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

November 11, 2013 2 Comments

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

November 7, 2013 8 Comments

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

November 6, 2013 1 Comment

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 →

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