Active History

Active History at the National Council on Public History Conference

April 22, 2013 1 Comment

By Jim Clifford

Four ActiveHistory.ca editors and a larger number of past and present contributors attended a major public history conference in Ottawa last week. It was a great opportunity to share our website with the North American public history community and to learn about new projects here in Canada and in the United States. Many of the presentations focused on the growing connections between digital history and public history, as websites like this one try to reach a broad audience and museums, historic sites and archives develop a virtual presence.

I took part in a round table of environmental historians involved in digital public history projects. My short presentation focused on the major contribution environmental historians made throughout the first few years of blogging at ActiveHistory.ca. My fellow presenter Sean Kheraj talked about his Nature’s Past podcast series, while Josh MacFadyen and Daniel Macfarlane covered a number of other Network in Canada & Environment online projects.

Will Knight and Jim Opp then discussed their Rideau Timescape iPhone app, which includes hundreds of historical photos of the locks throughout the Rideau Canal. I highly recommend it for anyone visiting the Ottawa region and the time-slider function is great even if your thousands of kilometers away. Finally, Ronald Rudin presented the Returning the Voices to Kouchibouguac National Park website on the expulsion of residents during the creation of a national park in New Brunswick.

Ronald found the expropriation maps and used them to build a website that includes interviews of former residents filmed on location. The site is also set up to work on smart phones, so visitors in the park can watch the videos while exploring the expropriated lands. Continue reading →

Podcast and Reflection – Black Power with a Northern Touch: Black Radicalism in Toronto, 1950s-1970s

April 18, 2013 2 Comments

Funké Aladejebi speaking during her History Matters talk

By Funké Aladejebi

On March 27^th Funké Aladejebi, a PhD candidate at York University, told the compelling story of how black organizations in Toronto used education to combat racism by making connections to “Africa” and adapting the language of Black Power to a Canadian experience. Her talk was part of the 2013 History Matters series.

You can click here to listen to a podcast of the talk.

In what follows, Funké reflects on what inspired her dissertation topic on African Canadian Women Educators in Ontario, 1940s–1980s, which investigates the ways in which African Canadian women confronted and navigated socially constructed boundaries of racial alienation and inequality.

The last talk of the series takes place at the Lillian H. Smith Branch of the Toronto Public Library on April 25th from 6:30-8pm. Historical sociologist Dr. Pamela Sugiman (Ryerson University) will present a lecture titled “And Life Goes On: Japanese Canadians, Memory, and Life after Internment.” Click here for more information on this and other talks in the series. Note: Pamela Sugiman’s talk has been postponed until further notice.

As a young woman attending university in Canada, I knew very little about African Canadian history outside of the mainstream discourses about the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman’s perilous journey to Canada, better known as ‘Canaan Land’. As a result of this narrow focus of black history in Canada, I knew even less about the ways in which blacks negotiated ideas of identity across varied regions of the country. Thus, when I read the works of famous black writers such as James Baldwin, Amari Barkara, and Maya Angelou, I understood them to be distinct Black American writers because, after all, that is where racial discontent and the black presence mattered most, right?

I could not be more wrong about this misconception; in fact, it was not until I entered graduate school that I became aware of the richness and depth of African Canadian history. When I began my dissertation research on African Canadian female educators in twentieth-century Canada, I became fascinated by the complex, contradictory and multiple ways in which African descended peoples negotiated blackness in Canada. So when I read that black militant leader Rocky Jones declared to Toronto Daily Star reporters in 1971 that Canada’s black revolution was underway, I had never considered that black militant rhetoric was a feature in Canadian history or that it had a distinctly Canadian perspective. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Seventeen: The Rise of American Restaurants, and Northern History Week

April 17, 2013 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

“Remember when you first went out to eat with your parents? Remember, it was such a treat to go and they serve you this different food that you never saw before, and they put it in front of you, and it was such a delicious and exciting adventure?” Despite the negativity that followed this question, Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes nicely sums up the romance and novelty of going to a restaurant as a kid. For many adult North Americans, however, this romance has been replaced by routine as restaurants now provide a nearly indispensable service.

In the first part of this two-part episode of the History Slam I talk with Kelly Erby of Washburn University about the rise of the American restaurant industry in the middle of the 19th century. Largely a product of the industrial revolution, restaurants fundamentally changed patterns of consumption and led to the construction of the meal as a significant part of familial relationships. We chat about the race and class factors that influenced restaurants, the concerns from social reformers, and the socializing nature of food in American life.

In part two, we discuss Northern History Week here at activehistory.ca with Heather Moore of the National Arts Centre. Heather is the Producer of Northern Scene, a ten-day celebration of northern artists and performers at the NAC. She talks about what people can expect from the festival and how her perception of the North has changed in putting together the line-up.

Activehistory.ca’s Northern History Week will begin on Monday April 29, coinciding with Northern Scene. Over the course of the week, we will feature pieces by some of the top historians of the North. These articles will examine various topics from life in the North, from artistic representations of the region, to the political significance of maintaining arctic sovereignty. In addition, a new episode of the History Slam podcast will accompany each of these articles. The episodes will feature conversations with people involved in Northern Scene and will highlight the artistry of the North while examining how art reflects the region’s heritage.

Sean Graham is a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa where he is currently working on a project that examines the early years of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He has previously studied at Nipissing University, the University of the West Indies, and the University of Regina and like any red-blooded Canadian his ultimate dream is to be a curling champion while living on a diet of beer and poutine.

Discover Montreal’s Lost Neighborhood of Griffintown

April 16, 2013 1 Comment

The corner of William and Murray, where Mary Gallagher supposedly appears

By Mireille Mayrand-Fiset

The evening of June 26th, 2012. A group is standing solemnly at the corner of William and Murray Streets, in what remains of Griffintown, one of Montreal’s most notorious working class neighborhoods. Some are chatting and laughing, others, more serious, are eagerly pointing their cameras, seemingly waiting for something to happen on this warm summer night.

This is the famous Griffintown Ghostwatch, a gathering of ghost enthusiasts and former Griffintown residents who meet every seven years to witness the apparition of the headless ghost of Mary Gallagher.

Mary Gallagher, a prostitute, was the victim of a gruesome murder. On the evening of June 27th, 1879, Susan Kennedy decapitated Gallagher with an ax. She had been driven to rage by jealousy after Gallagher received more attention from a client than her. As legend has it, the ghost of Mary Gallagher now comes back every seven years to look for her head, haunting the streets of Griffintown.

The story doesn’t tell if the group truly encountered the headless ghost. But a question is worth asking: If Mary Gallagher were to appear that evening in 2012, 133 years after she was murdered, would she have recognized the Griffintown where she once lived? Continue reading →

Yahoo! Commits Crimes against History – A Call to Wake Up!

April 15, 2013 4 Comments

By Ian Milligan
(previously posted in two parts on ianmilligan.ca)

Yahoo! succeeded in destroying the most amount of history in the shortest amount of time, certainly on purpose, in known memory. Millions of files, user accounts, all gone.
– Archive.Org (click through for the GeoCities archive)

As if it was a bad April Fools joke, April 1st 2013 saw the end of Yahoo! Messages. It was a pretty sudden end to a long-running, fifteen-year-old site and collection of threads and discussions. Notice arrived a month earlier, on March 1st, when they announced that the website would shut down in a month. The reason: “to help focus our efforts on core Yahoo! product experiences.”

Fifteen years of history, destroyed. Fifteen years of largely non-commercialized voices of everyday people, discussing issues as varied as business, the Internet, government, hobbies, science, education, and so forth.

Again: the possible loss of fifteen years of history. Primary sources. Deleted. Why? Storage costs are falling. Digital preservation is a recognized field. Just removed from the web, without consideration for the future legacy of products, of our conversations, of our archives.

One day, I think historians will be pretty damn grateful for the Archive Team.

Well, it was saved. Archive Team, as they have many times before, stepped up to the plate and helped to preserve Yahoo! Messages. It was a tough-fought battle: Yahoo! limited the rate by which things could be downloaded, there was little time. Thanks to virtual machines, hundreds of people loaned bandwidth and time to the project, saving this piece of history. Thanks, also, to the engaged board editor over at the History of Science and Technology, who helped post a call for action when it looked like Yahoo! messages wasn’t going to be preserved.

Wake up, historians. Continue reading →

James Marsh Retires from The Canadian Encyclopedia

April 12, 2013 1 Comment

This post originally appeared March 29 2013 on the TCE Blog by the Canadian Encyclopedia

By James Marsh

Speaking at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto at the launch of the Junior Encyclopedia of Canada in September 1990.

I really had the best job in the country, as editor of Canada’s national encyclopedia.

It was kismet for a boy whose irritated mother sarcastically called him “know it all!” As a kid in West End Toronto, I was obsessed with the only two books in our house, a one-volume encyclopedia and a small pocket dictionary my father carried with him in the war. I memorized maps and capitals and painters’ names from the encyclopedia—30 years out of date as it turned out. My father, who claimed to have memorized the whole dictionary, would rouse me from sleep in the middle of the night and make me query him on definitions (I had to be diplomatic about wrong answers as he was an agitated man when drunk and accused of error).

Another happenstance struck when a misguided teacher in high school determined to punish me by sentencing me to the school library to hand copy articles from Encyclopedia Britannica. Bliss. Continue reading →

Time for a Change: Historical Perspective on the Washington Redskins Name and Logo Controversy

April 10, 2013 14 Comments

Washington Redskins logo. Source: Wikipedia.

By Mike Commito

Baseball season has just begun and NHL hockey is entering its final push before the playoffs begin at the end of the month. However, in recent months the attention has remained on the NFL’s Washington Redskins. Not because of their valiant post-season effort that ended with a horrific knee injury to their talented and budding young quarterback, but because of the team’s name and logo. The controversy over the team’s racist name and emblem is not new and is part of a much longer narrative of how professional sports teams have appropriated Aboriginal imagery and how First Nations have been depicted in derogatory or racist ways.

The National Congress of American Indians estimates that fewer than 1,000 schools (secondary and collegiate) still use derogatory Aboriginal imagery and logos in their sports programs. While this figure represents an overall decrease of about two-thirds in the past fifty years, this number is still far too high. Moreover, many of these relics that still exist are most visibly seen at the professional level where they continue to perpetuate the misrepresentation of Aboriginal peoples. Continue reading →

Lount and Matthews Commemoration Salon

April 9, 2013 No Comments

A 19th-century artist’s rendering of the public hangings of Lount and Matthews, Toronto, April 12, 1838 (public domain).

by Ashok Charles and Randall White

This coming Friday, April 12, 2013 will mark the 175th anniversary of the hanging of Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews in what is now downtown Toronto, for their roles in the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837.

The rebellion was a reaction to the unresponsiveness of the colonial oligarchy of the day to demands for democratic reform (or what the appointed lieutenant governor called “soiling the empire by the introduction of democracy”). The events in Upper Canada or present-day Ontario paralleled a more aggressive rising in predominantly French-speaking Lower Canada, or present-day Quebec.

Government forces were able to suppress the Upper Canada Rebellion. But popular objections to the autocratic rule of the “Family Compact” oligarchy remained. The authorities saw the public execution of Lount and Matthews as a warning and a deterrent to further acts of dissent. The large crowd which assembled on the morning of the hanging was testament to the public stature of Lount and Matthews. One report claimed that a petition seeking clemency for the men bore 30,000 signatures. Continue reading →

Historical Maps of Toronto – a collection of maps to amuse, delight and inform

April 8, 2013 8 Comments

By Nathan Ng

I recently launched Historical Maps of Toronto, featuring simple and free access to a selection of notable maps of my fair city.

If you’ve ever wondered what ‘Muddy York’ looked like 200 years ago, and then wanted to trace the city’s development over the following century, this collection ought to pique your interest.

Jim Clifford from ActiveHistory.ca asked me to take a step back and explain why I invested the time and effort to put it all together. What made it so important to share these dusty old maps?

The Simple Answer

The maps deserve our attention. They allow us to imagine the past in vivid detail — and they also provide us with valuable insight into the mind-set of the map-makers themselves. My hope is that, particularly for those of us who aren’t historians or academics, the site will provide a useful and convenient entry point for discovery and further investigation into our city’s humble beginnings and subsequent evolution.

Continue reading →

Concert tonight: “What is Toronto?”

April 5, 2013 No Comments

How might historical themes be translated into musical composition? A group of musicians will engage with this question tonight as part of “What is Toronto?” This concert will explore the iconic events, places, and unique qualities that define perceptions of Canada’s largest city, both past and present.

The event is organized by Spectrum, a group of Canadian composers who create and present a contemporary hybrid of jazz and classical music. They strive to create innovative, genre-defying themed concerts which explore intersections between subcultures in Canada.

The performance will feature a pre-concert chat with Artistic Associate and composer Matt Roberts, who conceived the concert, Artistic Director and composer Ben Dietschi, and Jay Young, a historian of Toronto and co-editor of ActiveHistory.ca. Before each piece, Jay will discuss the inspiration of each piece with its composer and how they went about turning fragments and myths of the past into sound.

The concert will be held tonight at The Al Green Theatre, starting at 7:30pm. For more information on the concert, click here.

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