Active History

Chemical Weapons and Conventional Bombs

September 16, 2013 3 Comments

Guernica by Pablo Picasso. 1937. Oil on canvas.

By Jim Clifford

Over the past few weeks that world has watched as the United States threatened to bomb Syria to punish the Assad Regime for using chemical weapons against his population. I, like many other people have wondered why chemical weapons are a “Red Line”, but deadly and efficient conventional weapons remain a widely used and legitimate. Conventional attacks can kill large number of people. Aerial bombing or shelling with high explosive chemicals or incendiary chemicals inevitably lead to civilian deaths. The Syrian civil war has killed more than a hundred thousand people, but the Obama administration only reacted when chemical weapons killed 1300 (CNN). I expect the ratio of deaths between conventional bombs and chemical weapons in the 20th century were equally disproportionate. Does history provide any insight into why chemical gases are taboo and chemical high explosives conventional? Continue reading →

Vancouver lecture series: “Heroes and Villains: Rethinking Good and Evil in History”

September 13, 2013 1 Comment

Heroes and Villains: Rethinking Good and Evil in History
2013-2014 Lecture Series
Presented by the Department of History at SFU

It can be tempting to look at historical figures as either wholly good or wholly evil; as heroes or as villains. Mahatma Gandhi: high-minded hero. Rodrigo Borgia: scheming villain.

This perspective contains elements of truth, but also ignores the more complicated and compelling reality that both good and evil reside within us all. In its 2013-2014 lecture series, “Heroes and Villains: Rethinking Good and Evil in History,” the SFU History Department hopes to break down the good-evil binary by revisiting and re-evaluating the lives of some notorious heroes and villains of history.

All lectures will be held in the Fletcher Challenge Theatre at the Harbour Centre, 515 W. Hastings St., Vancouver, BC.

September 19, 2013 | 5:30 p.m.
Rebel Life: The Life and Times of Robert Gosden, Revolutionary, Mystic, Labour Spy
Book launch and talk
Mark Leier

October 24, 2013 | 5:30 p.m.
Great Soul or Great Schemer? Exploring the Myth of Mahatma Gandhi
Bidisha Ray

November 28, 2013 | 5:30 p.m.
Trudeau 2.0: Pierre’s Legacy and Justin’s Future
A panel discussion with Elise Chenier, Nicolas Kenny, and Allen Seager.
Hosted by Roxanne Panchasi

January 23, 2014 | 5:30 p.m.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Reflections on the Renaissance Papacy
Emily O’Brien

February 26, 2014 | 5:30 p.m.
The Yin-Yang of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Karen Ferguson

March 27, 2014 | 6:30 p.m.
Ottoman Hero or Frontier Villain? Ahmed Feyzi Pasha (1839-1915)
Thomas Kuehn

Website: https://sfu.ca/history/events/heroesandvillains.html
Contact: Allison McMahon, (778) 319-3853, histcomm@sfu.ca

Tone Up, Tone Out, Tone Deaf: Author attitude and writing history

September 12, 2013 No Comments

By Merle Massie

I’m working on a new manuscript set during the Great Depression in Canada. The exploratory process of writing (for me, the weft) is threaded through the warp of reading – be that primary documents, oral history, my family history, or secondary sources. Sometimes I’ll catch myself. My writing style can change in response to whatever I’m reading. A chiding interdepartmental memo from 1936 on ‘sub-marginal lands’ elicits austerity and submissiveness; a bleak personal history will leave my words equally bereft; a newspaper article extolling the virtues of ‘poor man’s land’ might have me cheering and piling on the adjectives.

I’ve come to realize that it is not the words or the subject matter that I’m responding to. In all of these examples, the subject matter is more or less the same. I am responding, quite simply, to the tone of the work. Tone, as noted here in the blog Daily Writing Tips, is “what the author feels about the subject.” (This is different from voice, which is the author’s personality.) The authorial attitude toward subject of the penned work – do they like it? Support it? Hate it? Abhor it? Embrace it? Fear it? Look down on it? Love it? – infuses the word choice, the pace, the arc of its narrative, its tone. Continue reading →

Heavy Metal: The History of the Coin

September 11, 2013 No Comments

By Amanda Walters

It’s something we seemingly can’t live without, and something most of us know very little about. Coins, and all forms of money for that matter, are an important part of our lives, allowing us to buy food, drinks and other products as well as to pay for parking and for services. Yet we don’t tend to stop and think about how far they’ve come since they were first brought into circulation.

Over the past few month, news hit that the look of British currency will change. Author Jane Austen will appear on the £10 note in place of Charles Darwin, following criticism that the Bank of England had ignored important women in British history with its announcement that Winston Churchill will replace prison reformer Elizabeth Fry on the £5 note. Back in 1998, the bank introduced the £2 coin into circulation, the most recent addition to British currency. And across the ocean, the Royal Canadian Mint ended production of its one-cent penny coin in February. These recent news items illustrate that money changes over time and has quite a history. Continue reading →

Lessons from the past: “So What is Government for Anyway?”

September 10, 2013 1 Comment

By Greg Kennedy

I have recently made a habit of asking this question at opportune moments in classes and public lectures. Hilarious bewilderment usually ensues. Younger people shrug, while older people often get angry because of corrupt senators.

I am increasingly convinced that this has become an esoteric question in our modern society. Political scientists for example, would probably answer with some notion of the social contract – the idea that we accept certain limitations on our freedom (to obey laws, to pay taxes) in return for protection and services that only a centralized sovereign government can provide. When I ask the follow-up question “why do you pay taxes?” people generally respond along these lines, with reference to education and healthcare.

As a historian of the early modern period (we call it the colonial period in Canada), I have the annoying habit of comparing the present with the past. If you ever want to be rid of the notion of human evolution, just become a historian. Here are a couple of examples involving government where the present sounds a lot like the past: Continue reading →

The Internet Archive Rocks, or, Two Million Plus Free Sources to Explore

September 9, 2013 2 Comments

Checking out a 1857 book from the Internet Archive, no big deal.

By Ian Milligan

For many students, it’s back to school season. For me, that means it is time to think about some of the resources and tools that are out there. If you want to research a topic, it’s worth keeping in mind some great repositories online. The big one online is the Internet Archive – which is not just old websites.

I’ve written about the Internet Archive before, and it’s actually the main source base for my current major research project. But today I want to give a brief sense of what else you can find there in terms of digitized primary sources, amongst this massive newfangled Library of Alexandria that should be so central to many of our workflows. If you’re a historian, or are interested in history, I guarantee you’ll find something useful in the Internet Archive. Heck, if you use Mozilla Firefox, install a search plug-in right now for it. We’ll be here when you get back.

The inspiration for this post is the accomplishment of yet another major milestone: two million books, all freely downloadable, generated by a large network of some 33 scanning centres around the world. And that’s just books – there are additionally millions of texts. Continue reading →

Announcement: 2nd Annual ACO Nextgen Design Charette

September 6, 2013 1 Comment

The assigned project site is located along Mill St. between Parliament and Trinity Streets in the historic Distillery District of Toronto. The site contains a designated heritage building at the corner of Mill and Trinity Streets. 18-20 Trinity St is a masonry warehouse building, built in 1906 by David Roberts Jr. for the Gooderman and Worts company. It has evolved through
various alterations and additions (between 1916 – 1929) to its present form.

Project Objectives:

Develop an innovative proposal for the site
Propose an appropriate use/program for 18-20 Trinity and project site
Consider thoughtful connections to the Distillery District to the South, and the First
Parliament Site to the West, and the West Don Lands Development to the East
Respond to existing, approved, and in progress developments adjacent to the site
Reflect the history of the site through architectural, landscape, and interpretation
strategies
Develop five key statements/strategies for the success of this site

Depending on the backgrounds of group members, the participants will be encouraged (but
not limited) to:

Review and respond to the West Don Lands Master Plan
Review and respond to the current King-Parliament Secondary Plan Review and respond to the current King-Parliament Urban Design Guidelines
Illustrate their scheme through 3D and 2D graphics, hand sketches etc.
Suggest possible conservation/restoration strategies
Justify the proposed use of the site using planning policies and a proposed public
engagement strategy
Suggest possible visions for directly adjacent sites

Participants will be provided with the following documents:

DWG files and printed drawings of 18-20 Trinity St. and Project Site Plan
A 3D Sketchup model of the site and context (existing and proposed)
Digital copies of any relevant planning documents

Participants will be organized in teams of 5-6, and will be given one day to develop their
scheme. At the end of the day, the groups will present a 5-minute digital presentation
(PowerPoint or PDF) explaining their approach. The digital presentations must contain a title
page with the first and last names of each group member.
The event venue is located very close to the site. As such, participants will be encouraged to
visit the site over the course of the day. Participants are strongly encouraged to bring
laptops, as many of the provided resources will be digital.

History Slam Episode Twenty-Eight: Sabine Wieber and Death Masks

September 5, 2013 No Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

As the summer comes to an end, my reading list has recently included Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie and Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club while this PBS Frontline episode on facing death has found its way into my viewing schedule (all of which I would highly recommend). I’ve always found death and the end-of-life process rather interesting and while I understand that some would find such an interest morbid, I’m fascinated with the way in which we ignore death – or at least treat it as an abstract concept – in modern society. Despite the fact that we will all reach the end of our lives, we have a tendency to avoid discussion on the subject and, in my experience, treat is as an unspoken reality of life.

I’ve often thought that one of the reasons I’m interested in history is my fascination with death. As I’ve written before, a vast majority of historical figures suffer from the unfortunate medical condition of being deceased. The ramification for historians is that we are left to examine anything they left behind for glimpses into their lives. In doing so, we are essentially carrying on conversations (albeit one-sided conversations) with the dead. While physically these people may be gone, the work of the historian keeps their voices alive.
Continue reading →

Into the Secret Archive: An Interview with the Authors of Secret Service

September 3, 2013 1 Comment

By Daniel Ross

Discussed in this post: Reg Whitaker, Gregory S. Kealey and Andrew Parnaby, Secret Service: Political Policing in Canada from the Fenians to Fortress America (University of Toronto Press, 2012).

Beginning before Confederation—but especially since the mid-twentieth century—political policing has been something of a growth industry in Canada. As a landmark new book on the subject makes clear, over the past century the federal state has devoted considerable resources to spying on its populace in an effort to find and contain “the enemy within”. Its targets have been a varied, but mostly left-leaning, bunch, ranging from Fenians to Quebec nationalists, labour organizers to gays and lesbians. By the late 1970s, the RCMP security service had files on 800,000 individuals, among a population of just over 23 million. An enormous secret archive, and a potential treasure trove for historians.

In a previous post I discussed how security services on both sides of the Canada-US border spied on countercultural communes like Tennessee’s The Farm in the 1960s and 1970s. Some interesting information about the Canadian side of that story came to light through a series of access to information requests I made for files about “hippies”. That experience got me thinking: why aren’t more historians—and especially graduate students—working with the files of CSIS and the RCMP? I asked the authors of Secret Service: Political Policing in Canada from the Fenians to Fortress America about the researching and writing of their book. Their answers highlight both the possibilities and problems of digging into the secret archive. Continue reading →

Ten Books to Contextualize Idle No More

August 29, 2013 1 Comment

ActiveHistory.ca is on a two-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in early September. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our favourite and most popular blog posts from this site over the past year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers!

The following post was originally featured on January 4 2013.

By Andrew Watson and Thomas Peace

After reading comment after uninformed comment, both online and in the media, ActiveHistory.ca decided to compile a short list of books written by historians that address the issues being discussed by the Idle No More movement. Click on a link below to read a brief summary of the book.

Peggy Blair, Lament for a First Nation
Jarvis Browlie, A Fatherly Eye
Shelagh Grant, Arctic Justice
Cole Harris, Making Native Space
Douglas Harris, Fish, Law and Colonialism
J.R. Miller, Compact, Contract, Covenant
Jocelyn Thorpe, Temagami’s Tangled Wild
Treaty Seven Elders and Tribal Council, The True Spirit and Original Intent of Treaty 7
William C. Wicken, Mi’kmaq Treaties on Trial
Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations

In addition to these books, we would also like to direct your attention to the Canada in the Making‘s section on “Aboriginals: Treaties & Relations.” This website provides an overview of the relationship between European empires, the Canadian state and First Nation peoples from the late-fifteenth century to the present. It includes links to online copies of many foundational – and constitutional – documents underpinning Canada’s relationship with First Nation peoples. Continue reading →

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