Active History

Podcast: Lyle Dick’s CHA Presidential Address

July 11, 2013 2 Comments

Lyle Dick addresses the audience at the 2014 CHA Annual Meeting. Photo: Sean Kheraj

On June 4^th 2013 Lyle Dick delivered his Canadian Historical Association (CHA) presidential address, titled “On Local History and Local Historical Knowledge.” Dick spoke at the CHA Annual Meeting in Victoria, BC. A long time employee with Parks Canada, he is also the author of numerous books and articles on the history of Canada.

Dick’s address is part of a tradition in which outgoing presidents of the CHA reflect on the practice of history and the historical profession in Canada. Dominique Marshall, a professor at Carleton University, replaces Dick as CHA president and introduces him here.

ActiveHistory.ca is happy to present a recording of the address and thanks Lyle for his hard work as CHA president.

History Slam Episode Twenty-Four: Mary-Ellen Kelm and Rodeo in Western Canada

July 10, 2013 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

After the devastation of the floods in Calgary, it has been nice to see the positive reports coming out of the first weekend of the Stampede. While there is still a lot of work to be done, the city’s signature event provides an escape from the hardship and an opportunity to celebrate. In its 101^st edition, the Calgary Stampede may be Canada’s biggest rodeo, but it certainly isn’t the only one.

In this episode of the History Slam podcast, I talk with Simon Fraser University’s Mary-Ellen Kelm about her A Wilder West: Rodeo in Western Canada, one of my favourite books of the past couple years. We chat about the rise and professionalization of rodeo, its role in western Canadian development, and the treatment of animals. We also discuss the creation of contact zones in local rodeos and the inclusion aboriginal and women athletes. Continue reading →

The Politics of Motherhood: How Far Have We Come?

July 8, 2013 3 Comments

By Christine McLaughlin and Councillor Amy England

We’ve come a long way from the days when women were denied the vote and barred from public office. Because of the efforts of a few willing to challenge the status quo, women won the right to vote and serve as political representatives in twentieth-century Canada. But many barriers remain for women in politics in 2013; this is evidenced by the low number of women elected relative to their representation in the general population. In Canada, 16 per cent of mayors and 25 per cent of councillors are women; the United Nations recommends 30 per cent women in order to have government reflect the concerns of women. No provincial legislature in Canada has ever achieved gender parity, with current numbers ranging between 10 and 35 per cent of representative who are women. The numbers are just as bad or worse federally: even though a record number of women were elected in the most recent 2011 contest, only 25 per cent of sitting MPs are women.

Sometimes these barriers to women’s political participation in politics are cultural rather than systemic. For example, the image of a man with a young family and pregnant wife triggers perceptions of an ideal political candidate. Reverse that image by placing a young pregnant woman in the position of political candidate, and perceptions can shift. While few question the ability of a young father to be a good political representative, the idea that a young woman can be a good mother and politician remains contentious for some. Oshawa Regional Councillor Amy England’s recent announcement that she is pregnant illustrates some of the major institutional and informal barriers to young women’s participation in politics. Elected officials are not entitled to Employment Insurance, which covers maternity leave. Municipal politics are governed by the Municipal Act, which is silent on maternity. According to the Act, any municipal representative who misses three consecutive meetings must vacate their seat unless a vote from Council approves this absence.

I sat down with my good friend and Regional Councillor Amy England recently to discuss some of the challenges facing women and mothers in politics: Continue reading →

“Your revolution is over”: A Review of Stuart Henderson’s Making the Scene

July 3, 2013 1 Comment

By Kaitlin Wainwright

Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s
Stuart Henderson
University of Toronto Press, 2011
394 pages, Paperback and ebook $29.95, Cloth $70.00

Stuart Henderson’s Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s is an adventure back in time to Yorkville at what many would consider the pinnacle of its cultural history. Fifty years ago, the Yorkville Coffee Mill opened, among the first of many to become a hub for youth exploring counterculture through music and mysticism. Henderson’s book, which stemmed from his doctoral dissertation at Queen’s University, is rich with oral histories and underground press coverage of the day.

Personal experience drew me to Henderson’s work. I grew up in London (Ontario) in the 1990s. My father worked in Toronto for a time and stayed in an apartment on Bay Street near Bloor. Visiting on weekends, my mother and I would wander the “Mink Mile”. By then, Yorkville was a hub of elite consumerism, with couture boutiques and flagship stories. It was cultured, rather than counterculture. Continue reading →

The Role of Place and Local Knowledge in Ontario’s Spring Bear Hunt Debate: Fifteen Years Later

June 26, 2013 13 Comments

A marauding black bear near the author’s home in Sudbury, Ontario. Photograph courtesy of Marthe Brown.

by Mike Commito

Ontario had its last spring black bear hunt fifteen years ago. Dating back to 1937, the province’s spring hunt was primarily for non-resident hunters. But spring hunting picked up in 1961 after the Department of Lands and Forests declared the black bear a game animal. By the mid-1990s, spring bear hunting had been well established as a significant revenue generator for northern Ontario communities and an important management tool.

Around this time, however, opposition flared up over the spring hunting season, largely over the ethics of bear baiting and the fate of orphaned cubs after the accidental shooting of mother bears. Consequently, an amalgam of animal welfare, animal rights, and conservationist groups – colloquially known as the “Bear Alliance” – organized a campaign to have the hunt repealed. By 1999, following aggressive marketing and political lobbying, the Bear Alliance succeeded in convincing Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government to abruptly cancel the hunt.

In the immediate aftermath of the decision, hunters, outfitters, and residents in northern Ontario charged that emotion and politics had trumped science and conservation. They called supporters of the decision, “bleeding heart liberals” and denounced their opponents’ authority on the matter because of their overwhelmingly non-rural residency. Throughout the debate and afterwards, critics referenced “urban southern Ontario” and even “Toronto” in a derisive manner. The idea that people living in areas far removed from bears had influenced government policy was viewed as unacceptable; even more so because it was done using emotionally charged arguments about orphaned cubs. As a result, the idea of local knowledge and place forms an interesting part of the debate that still persists today. Continue reading →

A Part of Our Heritage Minutes: The Value of Nostalgia

June 25, 2013 2 Comments

By Kaitlin Wainwright

Recently, James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage, announced “a series of new programs to support Canada’s history.” While the federal government continues to lay off staff at Parks Canada, national museums and galleries, and Library and Archives Canada, the Canadian public are being told that we need to rebrand our history and that new measures are needed to help make history come alive. John G. McAvity, Executive Director of the Canadian Museums Association emphasized that “this includes not just formal or academic history, but more importantly the stories of Canada, pleasant and unpleasant as they are, of everyday Canadians.”

Although the announcement included the formation of a “Canada History Week” (July 1-7) and funding support for existing Canadian Heritage programs – such as the Celebrate Canada program – the highlight, according to most media outlets, is a new series of Heritage Minutes produced by the Historica-Dominion Institute.

The Heritage Minutes, for those who weren’t near a TV set or in a movie theatre in the 1990s, were a collection of minute-long historical microdramas that captured the essence of an element of Canadian history. High production values and government support made them widely successful and tremendously quotable.

Twenty years later, those of us who first became enamoured with Canadian history through them no doubt feel a certain amount of nostalgia. Continue reading →

The Giant Cost of Past Pollution

June 24, 2013 No Comments

Giant Mine

Some historical artifacts pose a dangerous and costly challenge to those of us living today and to future generations. Unlike stone ruins, carefully preserved books or dusty archival papers, the toxic waste produced by past industrial activities contaminate environments around the world, threatening our health and our economic future. Here in Canada, a review board just released a report on how to clean up the “237,000 tonnes of highly toxic arsenic trioxide dust stored in 15 underground chambers” that remained after the closing of Giant Mine in Yellowknife (CBC). The outlook is grim. The clean up will costs up to one billion dollars, but will not provide a permanent solution to freeze the toxic waste in place. Because current technologies can not safely remove the arsenic, the report requires further research and a reassessment every twenty years until a permanent solution is found. Giant Mine was an economic success story, which extracted 220,000 kg of gold in a little more than half a century of mining , but also left behind a costly and dangerous toxic legacy. Continue reading →

Tap Dancing and Murder – in a Grade Seven Classroom

June 20, 2013 1 Comment

By Merle Massie

“My tap dancing just isn’t good enough,” she wrote. She: my daughter’s high school English teacher. Tap dancing: teaching (to pubescent, smartmouth, intelligent, tired kids at the end of June in rural Saskatchewan). “I remember a staff meeting conversation from some point where you were willing to come in and talk with students.” What’s the topic, Mrs. J? Reconstructing Past Lives.

Excellent. That is EXACTLY what historians do, right? So I set off to find out if I could tap dance for teenagers. Just for a couple of hours. After all, I tap dance for University students on a regular basis. How hard can it be?

Amid recent media controversy about the conservative federal government looking to choreograph the tap dancing of Canadian history (see here and here), I was curious to find out just what a typical Canadian grade seven student already knew. Continue reading →

The Wider World in the Peripheral Vision of Historians in Canada

June 19, 2013 6 Comments

By Luke Clossey

Fool’s Mad Cap of the World, c. 1580

Being a world historian in Canada can be an odd thing. Two of the founders of the “new” world history – William McNeill and L. S. Stavrianos – had roots in British Columbia. Toronto and Vancouver have more immigrants per capita than almost every other city in North America. Canada is a gloriously multicultural state, relatively innocent of the hyperbolic nationalism that sees in its own history a unique recipe for excellence (one popular textbook is subtitled “A Country Nourished on Self-Doubt“). At the same time, that self-effacement makes Canadians no less interested in Canada. Canadian history looms large in our departmental curricula, and the histories of other places, especially non-western places, are typically shuffled off into a corner. Despite the efforts and vision of some of its members, the Canadian Historical Association is far more for historians of Canada than historians in Canada (see Tom Peace’s analysis on this website of topics presented at the CHA’s annual meetings). My last SSHRC application, for a world-history project, was classified (probably with some odd bedfellows) as “history (other)”–right beneath “history (nursing),” a worthy field, but not quite the history of humanity.

An awareness of the marginalization of the history of the wider, non-western world in a country that today is so profoundly influenced by and connected to that same wider-world motivated more serious study. Over the last three years Nicholas Guyatt (University of York), a half dozen long-suffering research assistants, and I worked through the professional websites of some twenty-five hundred historians at some of the “top” universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The results (found on our website) confirmed a great deal of our suspicions, and most of the surprises came from giving us a better sense of the magnitude of Western dominance over our history departments. Some 85% of our historians are working on the history of the West, a nebulous place which today contains only some 15% of the global population. Continue reading →

In a Rush to Modernize, MySpace Destroyed More History

June 17, 2013 18 Comments

The destruction of Myspace blogs is akin to destroying Penn Station in 1963 – making way for the new by destroying the old. Both were abhorrent.

By Ian Milligan

In 1963, despite community opposition, New York City’s Pennsylvania Station was torn down. It was an age of modernism, old being wiped away for new. Afterwards, some of the sails went out of that movement: there was renewed interest in architectural preservation, added hesitation when it came to the wholesale destruction of our past.

Last week, a similar event happened. MySpace, in a rush to relaunch and rebrand itself, made inaccessible the blogs of all of its users. There could be no movement to preserve this record of the past, as it happened so suddenly. Millions of contributions, critical records of events of a decade or so ago, lost in the blink of an eye. It’s similar to the destruction of something like Penn station: a website that was run by user-generated content, that was a central hub of Internet traffic, and that meant something to multiple millions of people.

Remember MySpace? Before Facebook, there was MySpace: the world’s most visited social media site between 2005 and 2008. Users created heavily customized pages – wags enjoyed making fun of the garishness of many of them, as opposed to the sterile and standardized world of Facebook – and it was a popular blogging platform. For many young people, only a few years ago, MySpace was the centre of their social world.

So it was a shock when, without warning (even Yahoo! (no fan of history) gives warnings when they shut down their websites), MySpace decided to modernize their website and destroy those blogs along the way. MySpace is all about the new now: launching with a new cool, funky commercial by a cult photographer; focusing on streaming music and mobile applications; and blanketing television networks who have young audiences, from Comedy Central to MTV to ESPN.

Let me say this again: MySpace destroyed history.

Continue reading →

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